Jeremy Gerard — Theater Critic

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.

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.

LuPone and Winger are restrained to the point of somnambulance. Even at just 70 intermissionless minutes, “The Anarchist” is a challenge to sentience.

“Dead Accounts,” on the other hand, seems phoned in, the kind of TV sitcom Rebeck herself can tear into with delicious spleen.

The songs are nearly all ear drum-shattering anthems as Aimee turns sinners into believers across the Roaring Twenties. There is no discernible point of view in evidence about any of this. For a show about an evangelical, “Scandalous” is oddly devoid of the words Jesus Christ -- an indication, perhaps, that the authors didn’t want to rub the Broadway audience’s collective face in too much of that, you know, religious stuff. “Scandalous” is as ecumenically innocuous as it is pointless.

In the extraordinarily entertaining revival of “Annie” that has now opened on Broadway, Daddy Warbucks (the gruffly charming Australian star Anthony Warlow) has met his match.

A mostly inspired cast and design team have been assembled for a melodrama that doesn’t fall completely within the comfort zone of this adventurous director (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” “I Am My Own Wife”).

“Virginia Woolf” is that rarity, a three-act, two- intermission drama that grabs you and never lets go. George and Martha will remain together, but hardly on a note of hope. Credit MacKinnon and her perfectly synchronized quartet for executing the play not as an allegory but as a real- time excursion into lives made unbearably common by compromise and self-delusion. It’s unforgiving, and it’s also unforgettable.

“Virginia Woolf” is that rarity, a three-act, two- intermission drama that grabs you and never lets go. George and Martha will remain together, but hardly on a note of hope. Credit MacKinnon and her perfectly synchronized quartet for executing the play not as an allegory but as a real- time excursion into lives made unbearably common by compromise and self-delusion. It’s unforgiving, and it’s also unforgettable.

With his blank expression framed by a stringy wig and an unflattering black ensemble that makes him appear slightly paunchy and derelict, Douglas Hodge brings to Broadway an unprecedented interpretation of the courtly Cyrano de Bergerac as frat boy, in a production that could be an episode of TV’s “Arrested Development.”

Asner nearly steals the show despite an accent from someplace no GPS could locate, at least on this planet. I wish Karl wasn’t saddled with a monologue that reeks of Holocaust porn involving rape and redemption.