Jeremy Gerard

Cherry Jones also defies expectations, playing Amanda not as a badgering witch but as a cauldron of disappointment overwhelmed with love and fear for her children's futures. Warm and touchingly humane, she anchors the near perfect quartet completed by Celia Keenan-Bolger, who makes Laura more than just a wind-tossed leaf, and Brian J. Smith's effusively amiable Gentleman Caller, whose kiss embodies all the dashed hope that is Laura's fate. The play has been sensitively staged by the 'Once' team of John Tiffany and movement director Steven Hoggett. You will probably forgive them, as I did, the digressions into mimed business that occasionally stop the play in its tracks.

There's fire aplenty in Jesse Poleshuck's visually striking design, but none ignited by the lovers, more ill-matched than star crossed...Bloom, 36, seems a bit old to be hanging out with the gang, let alone to be this callow. I was watching a good actor laboring against a director's two-dimensional construct: Bloom couldn't possibly have chosen to be so flat and uninflected...Yet Leveaux seems intent on underscoring the difference not only in their ages but in their levels of maturity. Condola Rashad, 26, an actress who has been nothing less than hypnotic in other roles (most recently in 'The Trip to Bountiful') is sentenced to wide-eyed innocence...

As in Simon and Marvin Hamlisch's 'They're Playing Our Song,' Aaron's and Casey's friends keep popping out of the furniture to give them foolish advice, which they mostly ignore. Casey's best friend (gay, of course) keeps phoning for an update, and boy is he frustrated when she doesn't pick up. 'First Date' is harmless and instantly forgettable.

The opening moments of 'Pippin' are the most thrilling since the humans and beasts of 'TheLion King' spilled down the aisles to the onstage savannah more than 15 years ago... Paulus's 'Pippin' is G-rated, frisky rather than sexy, the slick sweat of lust replaced by dazzling but vague innocence. That makes it a visual treat, but eye candy takes you only so far...Thomas has boyish charm, but Pippin hasn't changed by the time he chooses to settle down at the closing...Gorgeous Patina Miller...seems robotic here, another victim of the leeching of sex from the show. There's little here of what we need to feel in the gut from a musical. Only Andrea Martin's open-hearted turn resonates long enough to transport us, however briefly, way beyond the razzle-dazzle.

But even as gifted a director as Joe Mantello can't make us care much about this character who figured so powerfully in a small circle of wildly self-important 'friends.' Those who come knowing Midler but not Mengers (who died in 2011) will be disappointed by this weightless valedictory, for there's no swan, and no song.

Nothing and everything happens on Carrie’s trip to Bountiful. Tyson, 79, suffuses every scene in Michael Wilson’s meticulous production with feeling yet little sentimentalism, a deft achievement that keeps the show from going gooey.

Astonishment may have become a debased word in the exclamation-pointy world of theater reviews. So electrifying is Fiona Shaw, however, that the performance left me, along with the rest of the audience, struck silent after the final wrenching words were spoken...Long-limbed, dark and hollow-cheeked, Shaw is an actress of fathomless expressiveness and dancerly motion. These well suit Colm Toibin's lamentation, a text that calls for subtle flashes of anger, irony, eulogy, horror and regret over its 90-minute course.

The Scottish actor, now best known as the cunning political operative Eli Gold on TV's 'The Good Wife,' brings an authentic burr to the role along with several terabytes of memory. The production, which opened last summer's Lincoln Center Festival (where it wasn't eligible for Tony Award nominations) struck me as even more gimmicky on second viewing. It reveals more about the actor than the would-be king.

Without a menacing atmosphere, 'Orphans' -- with its hermetically sealed environment and elliptical story-telling -- now plays like cut-rate Pinter.

Ownership and changing fortunes are at the heart of this mystery play. It's the most engrossing to date from a writer whose work ('Take Me Out' is the best known) I usually find too self-consciously clever to be taken seriously...Nothing and everything happens in this Manhattan Theatre Club production. The strength of 'The Assembled Parties,' staged by artistic director Lynne Meadow with a fluidly involving intimacy, is the way family secrets insinuate themselves into the fabric even of lives lived independently. They penetrate the walls and overlap, and they always have unforeseen consequences.

Cursed with the moral fire of Arthur Miller but not Miller's poetry, Odets's morality tales are pretty lumpish and heavy-handed. Keen ears will hear in the 1949 'Big Knife' the voices and themes that will find sharper and even more acrid form in 'Sweet Smell of Success,' his ferocious indictment of Hollywood that would set the bar for an industry's self- contempt. Director Doug Hughes and his fine cast haven't been able to unstack the cards Odets sets against Charlie. They include Charlie's involvement in a violent death for which one of the toadies took the rap; the threat of retribution from Richard Kind's brutal, vulgar studio chief; infidelity and abortion...None of this realism seems, well, real.

There are moments when 'The Nance' feels too contemporary, though the play resists the snide humor afflicting Beane's adaptation of 'Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella,' which opened earlier this season. But it's also a sympathetic love story about one damaged man's inability to feel deserving of more than anonymous sex...Lane, in his best performance since 'The Producers,' brings considerable heart to Chauncey's ambiguities...Jack O'Brien has directed with his usual sensitivity, never allowing the play to devolve into a camp fest.

Over the course of this juicy soul jukebox show, we'll watch irresistible performances of the Detroit-born classics that brought 'race music' into the mainstream, from Jackie Wilson's 'Reet Petite' to the Supremes's 'Stop In The Name Of Love' and the Jackson Five's 'The Love You Save.' ... The story behind the hits, as written by Berry Gordy and narrated in the show by his avatar, Brandon Victor Dixon, is a more depressing matter. The wince- and titter-inducing words between the songs and the ravishingly charged dance numbers are hagiography.

Based on the genial 2005 film of the same name, 'Kinky Boots' is feel-good theater, a cut above similar recent shows like 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' and 'Sister Act.' Lauper's songs are smart and funny, if not always memorable, though Porter kills in 'Sex is in the Heel,' a number that pretty much sums up the show.

By the end of 'Lucky Guy,' you're going to like Tom Hanks a lot more than Mike McAlary, the tabloid byline he plays with magnetic appeal in his Broadway debut. That's exactly as it's meant to be. Hanks: Good-guy hero. McAlary: Hero, maybe. Good guy? Well, that's the more complicated issue that Nora Ephron was getting at when she wrote this valentine to the New York tabloid wars of the 1980s and '90s along with the reporter who best exemplified them.

There's nothing unlikable about 'Hands on a Hardbody,' but little to love, either.

Greenberg's -- and Clarke's -- Holly comes off as a cold-eyed construct of a country girl on the lam from suffocating rural life. She's determined to pass as an urbane sophisticate no matter how much she's trembling underneath her chic dresses and silk robes. In this she's kin to Scarlett Johansson's unorthodox, tough Catherine a few blocks away in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' But Clarke lacks Johansson's feral stage charisma, let alone the dangerous chemistry between Holly and pretty much anyone who spins into her orbit that should make 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' more than a sentimental coming-of-age tale.

When Christopher Durang's 'Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike' opened off-Broadway in November, I called this seriously silly play the funniest show in town, yet one with an emotional kick that lifted it to a more rarefied plane. Happily, the show has re-opened on Broadway with its cast (the headliners are Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce), its bucolic Pocono Mountains setting (David Korins) and its laughs intact. It's even better on second viewing, a rare thing for a comedy.

“Ann” does honor Richards’s achievements as governor and, later, as advocate of liberal causes. The warm sparring with Clinton and especially their shared reverence for Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is moving. But this meandering hagiography unbecomes the swaggering doyenne who, for a time, outgunned the sharpshooters around her.

You can see light beaming from Laura Osnes at the Broadway Theatre, where she's playing the Cinderella of any girl's fantasy....Osnes has doe-eyed charm, a lovely soprano and whatever it is that separates a star from the chorus without trumpeting the fact. And in this first-ever Broadway production of 'Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella' she shimmers -- even when just about everything around her is flying off the rails.

Unsurprisingly for Ashford, a musical comedy specialist, the show unfolds like a jagged waltz gone haywire. Maggie's not the only one recoiling from the heat of the sun on that hot tin roof.

The voltage is more palpable in Joshua Logan's 1955 film starring a smoldering Kim Novak and a feral William Holden than it is in this earnestly detailed but sexless revival. Sebastian and Grace look the parts, but an essential element of palpable desire is missing...Still, if there's any justice in the world, a special Tony Award for most intense duet would go to Reed Birney and Elizabeth Marvel, who play Howard and Rosemary, the owner of a dry-goods store and a school teacher.

Laurie Metcalf's performance as Juliana in 'The Other Place' has both sharpened and deepened since Sharr White's drama ran off-Broadway nearly two years ago. Given a second outing, now on Broadway under the wing of the Manhattan Theatre Club, the one-act drama still packs a formidable punch...but 'The Other Place' has lost some power in the interregnum. The most easily identified reason is a significant casting change: Where Dennis Boutsikaris was sharp, even severe as Ian, Daniel Stern is warm-and-fuzzier, less of a foil to Juliana...Like 'The Great God Pan' earlier this season, 'The Other Place' is yet another ambitious play that's maddeningly unfinished.

But enough about me. This revival of David Mamet's 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about Chicago real estate salesmen makes for a pretty enervating hour and forty-five minutes. That will surprise fans of Mamet's blistering excoriation of business in what was hailed as the successor to Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman.'

More than the scenery is creaky in Bartlett Sher’s good- looking but oddly cast and unengaging production.