Jeremy Gerard — Theater Critic

Fans of Martin's wide-ranging gifts as comedian, author, movie star, art collector, playwright (count me in) have seen his avocation as expert picker blossom with the singer-songwriter Brickell. Their work is suffused with an irresistible chemistry of longing and optimism and even a kind of countrified mysticism that divines hope in sorrowful corners of the soul. So my advice is to spend an evening with Love Has Come For You and the new album, So Familiar, and skip Bright Star, the unfortunate musical they have brought to the Cort Theatre...If you can recall the take-no-prisoners lunacy of Martin's play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, you may be doubly disappointed by this earnest but soggy mess.

She Loves Me is probably the best Broadway musical you've never heard of (unless you're a Broadway nerd). It's an unassuming, Old World charmer, testament to craft, witchcraft and romance that echoes the operettas of Romberg and Friml...and I'm thrilled to say that while I have aged, She Loves Me has not, not one bit. The score remains enchanting...This time the unlikely lovers are played by the infinitely appealing Laura Benanti (ABC's Nashville and a Tony winner for Gypsy) and Zachary Levi (NBC's Chuck), delightful as irritated co-workers in Maraczek's Parfumerie by day, swoony epistolary confidants by night...The team of Scott Ellis (director) and Warren Carlyle (choreography) let the show breathe.

Broadway loves a fine romance and nowhere are the sparks showering down more heat and crackle than the ones being thrown off by Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in Blackbird...Their rapture is murderous. They want to annihilate each other. This is the electrifying production that this season's revival of Sam Shepard's Fool For Love aspired to be...Daniels and Williams are so devastatingly into David Harrower's stem-winding tale of an illicit conjugation, that by the time the lights came up I felt as spent as the actors themselves appeared to be.

Disaster! is the Nick The Lounge Singer of Broadway musicals. A cast of extraordinarily gifted stars appears to have been tricked into stretching a three-minute parody of movies that were parodies to begin with into a two-hour show. The result is so painfully witless it's hard to tell where the sea-spray ends and the flop sweat begins. Spoof disaster flicks - now there's an original idea. Meta, even. So take pity on Adam Pascal, Max Crum, Seth Rudetsky, Roger Bart, Kerry Butler, Jennifer Simard, Faith Prince, Kevin Chamberlin, Lucretia Nicole, Rachel York and youngster Baylee Littrell. Don't embarrass them with your presence.

Disaster! is the Nick The Lounge Singer of Broadway musicals. A cast of extraordinarily gifted stars appears to have been tricked into stretching a three-minute parody of movies that were parodies to begin with into a two-hour show. The result is so painfully witless it's hard to tell where the sea-spray ends and the flop sweat begins. Spoof disaster flicks - now there's an original idea. Meta, even. So take pity on Adam Pascal, Max Crum, Seth Rudetsky, Roger Bart, Kerry Butler, Jennifer Simard, Faith Prince, Kevin Chamberlin, Lucretia Nicole, Rachel York and youngster Baylee Littrell. Don't embarrass them with your presence.

Most important, Eclipsed is a major achievement - a scorching work about women and war whose humor burnishes rather than undermines its seriousness of purpose. And it features a ferociously committed ensemble performances staged with power and finesse by Leisl Tommy. It's the kind of work no sane commercial producer would look at and immediately think Broadway - even with two highly recognizable names on the marquee.

Forest Whitaker plays Erie, whose ensuing near-monologue takes up most of Eugene O'Neill's brief one-act drama of a man whose fragile delusions crack and turn to dust under the stolid gaze of an indifferent stranger. It's a brave, if odd, choice for a Broadway debut, this meager work that reads better than it plays...The biggest miscue of Michael Grandage's production (whether the choice is the director's or the star's, it's impossible to know) is that Erie seems to believe his bullshit. He lacks the sense of desperation that O'Neill says will overcome Erie during the course of this dark hour...There is no sense of the growing panic that will lead to Erie's final revelation about his loss of confidence after Hughie's death...The result is a failure to lift this small work into the tragic realm to which it aspires. It remains stubbornly small. That's surely as much O'Neill's fault as Whitaker's. But it's Whitaker we've come to see.

A smart decision was made to hold on to the exquisitely matched acting ensemble and also the play's, well, human scale by re-mounting it in the Helen Hayes, the smallest Tony-eligible house. As a result, the play retains its remarkable power as a tale of sorrows veined with silver threads of humor...As the evening moves like nature from light into darkness, Karam and his incomparable director Joe Mantello...take this first-class ensemble and us interlopers along a journey that's part family drama and thriller...Although the cast couldn't be bettered (and the standout remains the wildly gifted Steele), I thought they were still settling into the rhythms of a larger performance at the critics' preview I attended...I can only reiterate what I wrote earlier, that The Humans is tremendously exciting theater, and I remain convinced that you won't see a better play this season.

This is Noises Off, the Roundabout Theatre Company's happy antidote to all things January, a percussive dose of slamming doors, wince-inducing pratfalls and enough suggestive tomfoolery to fill the bill at Minsky's...Jeremy Herrin, the masterly director of Wolf Hall, lets Noises Off wind up a bit slowly, but once all the gears are in synch, the show is a dazzlement of set-pieces fit together with jigsaw perfection. Martin...returns to her roots as a mistress of the comic gesture, doing more with a plate of fish or an old newspaper than you may have imagined possible. Hilty...does physical comedy as though to the manner born.

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.