Jeremy Gerard

But the company struck me as hellbent on selling a Broadway show that needs no salesmanship. Burstein is the key examplar of this. A treasure, he was terrific in Sher's ravishing productions of South Pacific and Golden Boy for Lincoln Center Theatre... But his Tevye is too nebbishy, too ingratiating to charm us into becoming his allies as he struggled to deal with the cruel forces of change from the outside world and within his own family. He's too nice.

Propelled by a pair of knockout performances from Jennifer Hudson and Cynthia Erivo, both making their Broadway debuts, this transfer from London's Menier Chocolate Factory takes a minimalist visual approach to a story that sprawls across decades and continents, training the focus firmly on the twists and turns of Alice Walker's highly populated, Brontë-worthy tale...Marsha Norman's book cunningly trims the story to essentials, and the songs by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray get the job done...What sets the production so strikingly apart from the original is director John Doyle's spartan approach to the physical setting, which he also designed...I'm not always a fan of Doyle's approach but here...he shows a mastery of character revealed. And so in the best show-biz sense, The Color Purple is more than the sum of its considerable parts. It's a fine old-fashioned celebration of endurance, grace and goodness, given a powerful African-American depth.

School of Rock won't be leaving any time soon, of that I'm pretty certain. Exuberantly loud, high-spirited and upbeat, it's a feel-good show for Boomers and, god-help-us, our grandchildren. While none of the songs (with lyrics by Glenn Slater) is equal to Lord Lloyd Webber's best ('Memory,' from Cats, say, or 'As If We Never Said Goodbye,' from Sunset Boulevard), they're more than good enough and several add depth to the admittedly shallow pool that was Richard Linklater's 2003 Paramount film starring Jack Black. For that, credit also must go to the genius of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, who wrote the book for the show.

...China Doll is virtually a monologue, possibly with more lines than Richard III, a favorite role of Pacino's...Plays depending on phone conversations with unseen participants are almost always a bad idea, and China Doll is no exception. However, bad as it is (and worse still after the intermission), China Doll has one major asset, and that is the star's unrequited commitment. It may be a dopey play that keeps tripping over its MEGO-inducing minutiae, but Pacino delivers every line with relish, with mustard, onions, the works: The hand raised, thumb against forehead, while absorbing bad news. The flash of anger in a raised voice that inspired genuine fear. The hangdog gaze of eyes that have seen it all and more and can respond only with weariness.

Annie, get your gun! How much more do you want to know about Misery, which hobbled to its opening Sunday night on Broadway? William Goldman wrote the script, as he did the screenplay for Rob Reiner's 1990 Castle Rock film based on Stephen King's novel. Bruce Willis is meh as super successful schlock writer Paul Sheldon... If you can put aside the fact that the show offers about five seconds of actual, thriller-type suspense during its 90 intermissionless minutes, you can see glimpses of a younger and extremely likable Willis in Misery.

I have to admit I'm of two minds about Van Hove's A View From the Bridge. My 30-year-old critic self probably would have thrilled to the ballsiness of turning a naturalistic melodrama into a Greek tragedy. Doing so adds a layer of meaning the way the cover of Abbey Road added a layer of meaning to the Beatles mythology. But my older-critic self says, 'Leave the damned play alone.' Leave us to draw the connection from Eddie Carbone to Willie Loman (Death Of A Salesman) and Joe Keller (All My Sons) - men whose sense of their own manhood cannot survive the emasculating pressures of making it in America. In the end, Eddie impotently demands his 'respect' - even though he's committed the ultimate crime of ratting out his countrymen to Immigration. Even sexual congress with Catherine would have been more forgivable than that. Eddie's tragedy, like Willy's and Joe's, is that he is no hero at all, but a victim not only of his own tortured desire (perhaps it's Rodolpho he really wants?) but of his inability to gain entree to that American Dream he's been sold on.

The score by Marc Acito, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione (book) and Kuo (music) struck me on first hearing as more imitation than original. Case in point, Kei's late Act I 'Higher,' which gives Salonga a showcase for her still-rich pipes but is so generic it lacks any emotional punch. Validation is hardly the worst crime a show can commit, and I think that's one reason the audience was cheering at the very moving end of the show. It's a triumph of a rare sort, shedding light in a dark corner of our history with uncommon generosity of spirit.

As story-telling, On Your Feet! can be as clunkily generic as the title. But there's a deep well of life in the music that comes across powerfully in the staging - especially in that central supernova performance by a young actress I hope we'll be seeing a lot more of.

The Shakespeare comparisons are appropriate for several reasons: Not only does Bartlett (and his skillful director Rupert Goold) imagine a tale of serious shenanigans within Buckingham Palace; he does so with an ear finely tuned to a theme of the moment. And while King Charles III brims with timeliness, the play unfolds in iambic pentameter, the blank verse that Shakespeare employed to addTafline Steen and Richard Goulding in King Charles III weight and beauty to the narrative.

Keira Knightley...is making her Broadway debut in Thérèse Raquin, and not since Donna Reed donned spectacles and pulled her hair back in a tight bun as a spinster librarian in It's A Wonderful Life has so much effort gone into draining all the sex from a sexy star. It worked: Helen Edmundson's new adaptation of the 1867 Émile Zola novel (and, six years later, play) of illicit passion and its consequences is DOA, victim of its own literal dark-mindedness...there might have been some fun if there were a smidgen of electricity between Knightley and Ryan. That would have offset the pervading gloom of Beowulf Boritt's uncharacteristically dispiriting sets (there's momentary comic relief when lovers and husband set out in a rowboat on an upstage river) and the fussiness of Edmundson's script...There's a detachment between the stars I can only describe as fatal, no pun intended.

Think too hard and the whole thing falls apart, or into a kind creepiness as Greg's affections turn obsessive and just this side of sexual (I hope). But in truth, Sylvia might easily have been a red Ferrari or a hot secretary, and Gurney slaps on a happy ending that's pat but at least sympathetic. In 1995, I wrote, 'Sylvia becomes the route through which Greg divorces everything meaningless in his life; it's significant that that does not include Kate.' Robert Sella plays three increasingly annoying characters - Bowser's male owner, a society doyenne and an ambisexual shrink - whose comic relief is vulgar, unnecessary and overdrawn. So leave the deep-thinking cap at home, and settle in for some pleasurable laughs. A lot of them.

The revival of Dames At Sea that opened on Broadway Thursday night is a lot of fun and a tribute to the city's inexhaustible pool of inexhaustible talent, if not actual stars. In the District's smallest house, recently acquired by the Second Stage nonprofit company but not yet rehabbed, the fit is just right for Anna Louizos' humorous sets and the company of six, which includes a dazzling tapper named Eloise Kropp as Ruby, the ingenue. She's nicely partnered by Cary Tedder as the sailor who falls for Ruby. Randy Skinner is the director and choreographer, and by the end of the show you'll be praying that these hoofers have shock absorbers for joints, because the pounding is relentless (and for a tapdance lover like me, exhilarating)

Douglas Hodge, an actor (Cyrano De Bergerac, La Cage Aux Folles) and experienced Pinter hand, has a fine trio to work with. Owen is particularly strong as Keely, his suavity just short of convincing: perfect. Eve Best, a phenomenal stage actress (A Moon For The Misbegotten, Hedda Gabler) is cunning as Anna, and Reilly strikes exactly the right balance between unaffected blankness and someone who knows in her bones that she, ultimately, is the prize Keely and Anna are battling over. Hodge and company play the humor over the menace, which mostly works in this brief drama...Detracting from the whole is that set, which is framed by an abstract swirl of circles, and some introductory music by Thom Yorke that nearly had me bolting from the theater before the proceedings got under way. Once they did however, I was hooked.

Lin-Manuel Miranda's electrifying adaptation of Ron Chernow's celebrated biography of the least-known U.S. Founding Father is not, to use that cliché, a game-changer. It is, in truth, the quintessence of a Broadway musical destined for the record books: Of-the-moment in its rolling, roiling waves of rap used to tell its tale yet timeless in its unembarrassed detours into the sentimental ballads and roof-levitating choral numbers that are Broadway's stock-in-trade...Hamilton is accessible without pandering and inspirational in sneaky ways that permeate a skeptic's shell. Miranda has used well the interregnum between downtown and up, sharpening lyrics, shifting some of the relationships to achieve greater balance and, happily, ignoring suggestions that he trim the show (it clocks in at about two-and-three-quarters hours yet never feels long)...The casting could not be better and the company now wears a multiplicity of roles like second skins. The standout besides Miranda as his own leading man, is Odom, every bit his match as the complex Burr.

Surefire stories don't write themselves. That's the take-away from Amazing Grace, the epically bad show that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theatre...If you're going to make a musical about one of the best-known and most-loved songs of all time, you'd better be equal to the task. That, fundamentally, is not the case with the this earnest but cringe-inducing freshman effort by composer-lyricist Christopher Smith...All the principal actors, and particularly Mackey and Cooper, have gorgeous voices...The closing scene is as powerful as it is predictable, as the hymn builds to its climax, sung by the entire company (and many in the audience). Everything that has come before is instantly forgotten.

You may as well call this 'The Motel New Orleans,' so clearly does it emulate -- in theme if not execution -- Lanford Wilson's Hotel Baltimore...I don't know how the great Wilson play would hold up today; it was so firmly rooted in the culture of another time and place. But D'Amour, while clearly sympathetic to her characters, conjures a world too neatly balanced, too eccentric, too oddly wholesome. They're types, not people. Under Joe Mantello's expert direction (no one is better at ensemble staging), Airline Highway never reaches the status of powerful Katrina post-mortem it seems to be striving for.

...the show has deepened greatly since that first preview, resulting in a genuinely disturbing show that also will satisfy fans of Rivera, who at 82 can still belt it out to the far reaches of the balcony...Rivera is an incomparable trouper but I must admit her vocal charms are lost on me. The greater disappointment, however, is Rees, whose singing is simply painful to endure. His Anton is a small, broken man...Kander's music has never stopped evolving in its beauty, complexity and breadth, and the melodies here get under your skin even if the lyrics are not up to Ebb's best. McNally's compressed book does the job elegantly.

Something Rotten! revels in its silliness while delivering such a nonstop blitzkrieg of production numbers, each out-doing the one before, that you hardly notice how much you've fallen in love with the Bottom bros...It's entirely possible that I would have had a different reaction had not the show given us the exuberant D'Arcy James in his best role ever...Ditto Borle....The book is jam-packed with outrageous puns, bad jokes and inside references to Shakespeare and Broadway, and in that the show is like the much-missed series Forbidden Broadway, but on steroids...One surefire combination in the art of producing for Broadway is the ability to make audiences feel smart -- but not outsmarted -- and giddy at the same time...Anyone who can pull off jabs at Cats and Les Miz at this late hour has tapped into something, you know, not rotten -- and the best tonic I can imagine for this endless winter season.

Simon, who can write lush ballads, here tends to the overwrought, with deafening accents provided by the intermittent firing of guns and cannons, of which McAnuff seems wildly enamored (possibly to encourage us to stay awake). Flag-waving, barricade-mounting protesters and a bizarre thematic set-element of chairs stuck together nod frequently, perhaps incessantly, to LES MISERABLES. Doctor Zhivago has all of that show's bombast -- minus the expert story-telling and skillful pop-music hooks that make the damned thing work. The tunes are unmemorable, the lyrics are generic and why is everyone speaking with British accents? Against all this, it seems unfair to assess the stars' performances.

Can we please get this straight, Broadway? Sprawling European novels do not make great musicals...Unfortunately, this lesson...has fallen on deaf ears at the Broadway Theatre -- and I don't just mean those forced to endure the overamplified mess that is Doctor Zhivago. I also mean its authors and director, who together have turned Boris Pasternak's 700-page novel into a musical so aggressively awful it is almost sadistic...It's not just the constant noise and gore he hurls about...It's also that he has called forth the same concussive aesthetic from Weller and even the songwriters. Lucy Simon...once again provides well-crafted Romantic Lite tunes, but they are too often whipped into bombast by relentless overproduction...The English actor Tam Mutu...is clearly expert at the romantic bellow; he makes what can only be called an impressive Broadway debut as Zhivago. He pretty much blows everyone else away...The rest of the cast seem like afterthoughts, bits of fluff and color mainly useful for moving around the stage.

Sometimes, what happens in Williamstown really oughtta stay in Williamstown...Vito is played by Douglas Sills with everything you'd expect of a comic Italian stereotype: malaprops galore, a leering gaze, peripatetic hands, flaring nostrils, animated hair, etc...DiPietro's script is so inside in its opera references and jokes, sonic and visual, that you may find yourself gasping for air, though probably not from the laughs that director Kathleen Marshall works overtime extracting. The great Fleming is a trouper but she's slumming here. It's possible to imagine this as the perfect diversion for a summer evening on sabbatical from Tanglewood. But on Broadway, it's piffle, forgotten by the time you reach the corner to hail a cab.

A memory musical, as haunted and haunting as The Glass Menagerie, thanks to Kron's quicksilver script and lyrics and the music by Tesori (Violet, Shrek, Caroline, Or Change), whose work merges the experimentalism and euphony that suffuse the best of Sondheim; the only other contemporary composer in this vein was the late Jonathan Larson (Rent).

Now comes The King And I, in one of the most elegantly beautiful and beautifully sung productions I've ever seen, and the Beaumont looks like a living treasure chest for a director with the right vision and a company that can command a vast space and make it feel like your living room...Sher and his collaborator in dance Christopher Gattelli honor the originators of these shows while breathing fresh life into them...O'Hara is supremely comfortable in these R&H roles of independent-minded women in extraordinary predicaments, whether Ensign Nellie Forbush or Anna Leonowens. Her singing seems effortless and her Anna is determined yet tender...Watanabe...is strong, sexy and bewildered in a role forever owned by Yul Brynner. It takes a long time for this King and Anna to generate real electricity, but when it comes, in 'Shall We Dance?' it's shiver-inducing.

Finding Neverland flies. Occasionally it even soars. The miracle is that the darned thing not only got off the ground, but that this musical prequel to the Peter Pan story arrives on Broadway much improved after a storied, bumpy tour of the hinterlands, with its intermittent charms intact, many of its missteps gone or at least minimized...the script, by James Graham, has been sharpened so as not to treat the audience too much like idiots...Perhaps Weinstein and Paulus were correct in replacing Jordan with the better-known Morrison, who has the look and voice of a Broadway star but is something of a stiff. The role wants a mood transplant, a child-like quality to which Jordan was more suited. Grammer, on the other hand, is an indisputable improvement...As Hook, he's just a ton of fun...sashaying around the stage, brandishing his hook and bullying J.M...As to the score by pop writers Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy, well it doesn't offend, but I was still impervious to its desperate attempts to win me over...Finding Neverland is still too treacly...and the tear-wringing ending just goes on forever...But there's an audience for this show, which is visually cunning and something of a warm bath without being too insulting.

It's terrible. And it shoulda been left in turnaround after years of kicking around agency offices, instead of being offered up for sacrifice in this $7 million vanity production. Oh, the things we do for love...Perhaps I'm wrong about that. Maybe the exceedingly talented David Hyde Pierce...decided that this cellophane-thin story about the wedding day that would unite a crisply sniping Jewish family (hers) with a boozily bigoted Gentile one (his) was the brilliant choice for his debut as a Broadway director...The lyrics' rhymes are not only inane but you can predict them beats, if not whole measures, before they land, and Barbara Anselmi's melodies made me miss Frank Wildhorn. No, seriously...Nevertheless, Hargrove, Hyde Pierce and Anselmi are blessed with a superior roster of actors...So much talent, so little show.