Jeremy Gerard

There are many reasons to celebrate the arrival on Broadway of Hand To God. It wraps its seriousness in a veneer of XXX-rated irreverence. I don't know which I want to do more: Sing Hallelujah - or wash its dirty little mouth out with soap...Smaller in scale, song-free and purposely looking as though it was produced on a Cookie Monster-sale budget, Hand To God is a Book Of Revelations about what should be possible on Broadway, that one-time cultural bazaar that has come more and more to resemble a high-priced mausoleum...the best reason to make your way to the Booth Theatre is to see the most astonishing pair of performances by a single actor since Nina Arianda's Broadway debut in Venus In Fur...Praise Ensemble Studio Theater for the development production, MCC Theater for pushing Hand To God to the next level and a pack of producers led by Kevin McCollum for believing there's a place on Broadway for transgressive humor.

...Nighy and co-star Carey Mulligan have a brilliant vehicle worthy of their complementary talents. Piloted with exceptional sensitivity by Stephen Daldry and beautifully designed by Bob Crowley and Natasha Katz, this revival is as fine as the original -- while being utterly different in texture, tone and impact...Hare...refuses to stack the deck, giving us full rein to fall under the spell of both Tom and Kyra as they inevitably succumb to the forces that both brought them together and tore them apart...Nighy...exudes a to-the-manor-born elegance that's heightened by the nervous tics of a febrile personality used to getting his way...Mulligan casts a hypnotic spell, playing combativeness and vulnerability in perfect balance. The result is riveting, as absorbing a drama as can be seen anywhere this season, played at the highest level...Skylight is a keeper and this revival is one for the ages.

I think Elisabeth Moss was born to play Heidi Holland on Broadway. She couldn't possibly have had better preparation than her role as Peggy Olson...Pam MacKinnon (just off the revival of A Delicate Balance) has staged the play with a light touch, a very good thing, and she is well served by the three stars. Moss wears vulnerability and determination with equal appeal; Biggs tops his terrific performance on Orange Is The New Black in subtlety and humor; and Pinkham has catching warmth as the caring doc. Jessica Pabst's costumes are perfect and Japhy Weideman's lighting provides much of the atmosphere otherwise absent from John Lee Beatty's uncharacteristically sterile sets.

The result is positively schizoid, a show that desperately wants to crack the shell of archaic convention and emerge as the madcap musical it longs to be. It has patches of memorable high style, slapstick amusement and wry songs, but also longueurs that stretch the 90-minute movie into tedium... Gallagher has the suave good looks to play Oscar but not the slightly demented charisma called for, and vocals have never been his strong point. Chenoweth certainly has what it takes in the singing department and the crowd adores her. I just wish she wasn't so charmlessly vulgar with her oversexed physical shtick.

Very funny. Occasionally very, very funny. Four-stars funny. If that's all you need to know about Larry David's Fish In The Dark...then read no more...Or maybe not. I'm not usually one to put a price on art but you may want to know a little more before shelling out...for a show that's as good as some episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld. (If that seems like praising with a damned feint, you've caught my drift.) Of course in this case you're getting the added thrill of seeing Larry David shrug, blink, holler, wince, pace and blurt, up close and personal. As a fan of both TV series, I can understand the attraction. I'm with you. On the other hand, to sample an image from the show itself -- a dining table laden with curated paninis, baby micro-greens, artisanal bagels, organic crudités and Diet Coke -- the show is too much of a muchness...Through it all, and under the fleet direction of Anna D. Shapiro, Larry David pays Larry David, also very convincingly...Of course, this is the age of binge-watching, so two hours of shtick can be satisfying. Or give you heartburn.

You think they just don't make 'em like they used to? To find out how wrong you are, head to Broadway's Nederlander Theatre for a couple of hours of finger-snapping, tap-dancing, hip-swiveling, Elvis-impersonating, night-club crooning fun. That's what the musical adaptation of Honeymoon In Vegas promises and what it delivers, courtesy of an ingratiating performance by Tony Danza...Jason Robert Brown is terrifically talented but he's no Frank Loesser, and...Honeymoon In Vegas is no Guys & Dolls...the show has been struggling through weeks of poorly-attended previews that began before Thanksgiving, when it ought to have opened right away...The biggest toll was taken on Danza...He has a Sinatra-like stage presence, but in truth he's Sinatra's opposite: Warm, not cool; needy, not diffident. Those aren't necessarily bad things, but at the critic's preview his voice was pretty well shot and his dancing was unsteady...The balance of the show has gone much more in McClure's favor...

Gyllenhaal proved himself an irresistible stage actor a few years ago in another Nick Payne play, If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, playing the rude, crude but immensely sympathetic uncle of a fat girl with uncomprehending parents. Wilson won her Golden Globe for The Affair and she has an off-kilter comic sensibility that works beautifully with her grounded co-star. They have great chemistry and charm here, even when saying and doing preposterous things, frequently at the same time. I was rooting for them all the way. Under Michael Longhurst's timing-is-everything direction, they work very hard at this repeated-scene business, which can't be easy. As an exercise in physical comedy, Constellations is a neat trick. But call it a trick or call it an exercise, it's never much more than either, and a challenge to take seriously.

Cooper is the best Merrick yet, in a production sensitively staged by Scott Ellis first seen a couple of seasons back at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Cooper and Ellis have their cake and eat it too: Although the star suggests Merrick's deformity with no more than a bent arm, a contorted mouth, twisted fingers and a hip-challenging limp, he is aided in the opening scene with blown-up slides of Merrick actually taken by Treves that leave no doubt about what both the man and his acquaintances actually had to contend with.

A storm rages at the center of the Broadway revival of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance. Though camouflaged in the elegant, comfortable mufti of the affluent upper classes, it's leveling everyone in its wake while leaving the building intact, like a neutron bomb. Its name is John Lithgow...surveying it all, tolerating it all, the affable Tobias of John Lithgow smolders, bursts into flame and slowly grows cold. It's as rich a performance as I've ever seen, the achievement of a lifetime spent commuting brilliantly between New York stages and Hollywood screens of every size...Nothing in Pam MacKinnon's finely calibrated but emotionally uneven and infrequently unnerving staging measures up to the sheer power of either Albee's dramaturgy or Lithgow's inhabitance of Tobias. There is no better interpreter of Albee today; her revival of Virginia Woolf was nothing less than a revelation, in part because its ensemble was perfectly knit. Such unity is absent here in a stellar cast that nevertheless seems mismatched.

Hugh Jackman is electrifying in The River, a concentrated, mysterious fish tale of a play. Seeing him onstage in one of Broadway's most intimate theaters confers a sense of privilege upon the audience something akin to having Mick Jagger show up at your cocktail party just to shoot the breeze. You may not believe your luck. Forget the fact that he is too old by a decade or more to be playing a bachelor whose secluded cabin in the woods above a riverbank appears to be date bait for attractive younger women. That fact merely adds another layer of meaning (or confusion, depending on your receptiveness to such matters) to Jez Butterworth's new play, a hairpin turn away from his last Broadway outing, the sensationally funny, wildly overpopulated, anti-capitalist Jerusalem.

Tom Stoppard's 1984 dazzler gets the matinee-comedy treatment from director-of-the-moment Sam Gold in a revival that leaves its attractive stars, both in their Broadway bows, deeply in the lurch. Glib and weirdly chilly for a literate comedy-drama about love, commitment, the sanctity of words and the enduring perfection of 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling,' the Roundabout Theatre Company production is as full of ideas as the play itself -- all of them wrong.

Timely dramas on Broadway are in very short supply, and that alone makes the bow of Disgraced an event worth applauding...The play has lost its essential velocity in the move from Lincoln Center Theater, where Amir was played with a thousand volts of electricity by Aasif Mandvi...On the stage of the tiny Claire Tow Theater, Mandvi seemed ready to explode at any second. Dhillon is clearly a skilled actor, but his Amir doesn't fibrillate with the pent-up anger the character needs if he is to be credible. This may have something to do, as well, with the ciphered performance by Mol, who seems to be sleepwalking through the show. She's out of her league on the Broadway stage, and you can sense from the other actors that she's giving them nothing to work with. The dazzler in this production, staged again by Kimberly Senior, is Pittman, taut and almost serenely tough...It still raises deeply discomfiting questions. But this little off-Broadway potboiler has reduced to a simmer in the move to Times Square.

Too realistic to be a fable and too incredible not to be jangled by the plot holes (How do the men get into the guarded, fenced shipyard every day? How are the materials for the ship brought in? Where the heck are they all sailing off to?) The Last Ship is soul-nourishing as a concert piece but only fitfully convincing as a total work of theater.

Some playwrights (they know who they are) have a middlebrow gift for making audiences feel smart by throwing in just the right dash of intellectual-seeming palaver. McNally has a gift for making the audience feel like Broadway insiders, unleashing an absolute cataract of inside-baseball jokes about shows currently running a few doors down, about theater producers and landlords whose names no-one outside a 10-block radius has ever heard of, and personal competitors like playwright and book-writer Harvey Fierstein...Lane indeed carries the show on his capable shoulders, doling out the cutting lines and abashed double-takes as expertly as a Las Vegas croupier at a gaming table...O'Brien's unimpeachable pacing and the engaged performances may be enough to satisfy even those not in the know. But It's Only A Play is wildly overlong and wears out its welcome a full half-hour before the final curtain. It is, after all, only a play.

What Stephens, Elliott and Christies (who also designed the tone-perfect costumes) - along with blazingly expressive lighting by Paule Constable, projections by Finn Ross and music by Adrian Sutton - is bring us inside the head of an exceptional outsider who is also unyieldingly one of us. Don't think for a second this is an after-school special, though special The Curious Incidentcertainly is. It may in the end be too sentimental to qualify as highbrow - but it's brilliant nonetheless.

The production is the latest transfer by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, and as staged by Anna D. Shapiro, it's typical of that celebrated troupe in its physicality combined with thoughtfulness...The play, which launched the careers of both Lonergan and Mark Ruffalo (the original Warren), now feels like a period piece; a shell of amber surrounds it. This may have to do with fine performances that nonetheless fail to connect. Culkin exudes energy but not the menace that makes Warren interesting; Cera raises blankness of expression almost to the level of art and Gevinson is simply out of her league on the Broadway stage.

Visually sumptuous and musically rapturous - and really, what more could you ask for? - the show has so many charms. And yet, like that earlier Tharp production, An American In Paris is fabulous looking but vacant. It's a dance show that features some wonderful dancing yet never takes flight.

A stylish music-hall mystery in which we know whodunit from beginning to end, 'A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder' has lively songs, a congenial villain and a physically and morally flexible mistress...Most important, it has the fine actor Jefferson Mays playing all eight heirs to Highhurst Castle as they're dispatched one after another in comically gruesome ways. What he lacks in finesse as a quick-change artist, he more than makes up for in force of personality.

As Olivia, he glides across the stage like a hovercraft, first veiled in mourning weeds then transformed by her affection for Cesario, who is in fact the disguised Viola (and thus, in this case, a man playing a woman playing a man).

His Richard crows with glee at every lethal lie, venomous kiss, broken promise. Rylance has mastered each of Richard’s 1,171 lines and adds guffaws, asides, stutters and winces.

Craig is suave and collegial as Robert, a London book publisher. Spall is hungry and rough-edged in a sexually magnetic way as his best friend Jerry, a writers' agent. Rachel Weisz is extraordinary as Robert's wife and Jerry's lover, her face registering with exquisite exactitude every conflicted emotion Emma feels over the course of the seven-year affair well. Mike Nichols's devastating production is above all a showcase for this terrific actress...Nichols has calibrated each of those 100 minutes to strike a nerve. You quickly forget you're watching capital-S Stars. The show has more urgency than the Broadway original or the very good 1983 film. I wish the tickets didn't require a second mortgage and the audience weren't restricted to the very wealthy or the very lucky. But this production will stay with me as few others.

A thriller of the sort rarely seen on Broadway these days, John Grisham's 'A Time to Kill' brings a satisfying, if unsettling, courtroom drama to the Golden Theatre with an engaging cast playing juicy dramatic characters in a lurid tale spiked with a mild frisson of sex...They're all appealing, in comic-strip-thin roles. Holmes ('The Mystery of Edwin Drood') has streamlined the narrative almost to the point of flash cards. Ethan McSweeny's staging, in contrast, is oddly stilted, with drawn-out scene changes (the sets are by James Noone) and portentous music (by Lindsay Jones) that drag the story-telling for no apparent reason. Still, the twists and surprises of Grisham's efficient revenge-tragedy come through and the actors are good company for a couple of hours; I never was bored.

Lindsay Posner's elegant staging heightens the spring-wound tension Rattigan skillfully builds. The supporting cast is uniformly first rate, especially Michael Cumpsty as the Winslow's hangdog retainer and Charlotte Parry as the object of his unrequited affection.

This exuberant, phenomenally well-executed 'concert' avoids the lurid vortex-of-darkness that similar biographical shows (most recently, 'Lady Day') revel in. The heroin-addicted, Southern Comfort-swilling, sexually ambiguous Joplin arrives on Broadway essentially stripped of her rough edges.

I doubt Broadway has ever seen a prettier, more sensuously kinetic musical than Susan Stroman's adaptation of 'Big Fish' set to music by Andrew Lippa ('The Addams Family.') It's enchanting, especially once it slows down a bit to catch its breath. That doesn't happen until the second act, but it won't matter much, even to fans of the Tim Burton movie (or the Daniel Wallace novel that started it all). When the brooding trees begin their laconic dance before morphing into swamp witches, you know you're watching a Stroman show. By then, we've already fallen under the spell of Edward Bloom, Alabama homeboy, teller of tall tales and creaky jokes, absentee husband and father.