Jeremy Gerard — Theater Critic

Richard Thomas does everything but twirl his mustache as the bogeyman in the Broadway revival of “An Enemy of the People.” That’s because he doesn’t have a mustache to twirl. The other accouterments of villainy -- black top hat and bowtie framing a lip-curling sneer, cape and cane wielded with menacing flourishes -- are all accounted for in Doug Hughes’s clipped vaudeville of a production.

There’s a nice scene early on, after Charlie has arrived in Hollywood to become a member of Mack Sennett’s “Keystone” company. It’s the moment when inspiration strikes as the scared young immigrant assembles the elements that will transform him into the Little Tramp. Sennett (Michael McCormick) barks, “Do that walk again!” But “Chaplin” -- whose derivative songs are by Christopher Curtis, the inert book by Curtis and Broadway veteran Thomas Meehan -- has little else to recommend it. Curtis’s talents do not include pastiche; you’d never know the period here extends from pre-WWI to the 1970s. Nor would you get any understanding of the crucial role that silence plays in silent movies.

“Bring It On” is an unself-consciously dopey, feel-good show, based on the 2000 movie about cheerleaders, a sanitized pep rally that provides the audience with eye-candy and an unassailable feel-good message, while paying union wages to a mixed company of Broadway hoofers and seasoned athletes.

“Bring It On” is an unself-consciously dopey, feel-good show, based on the 2000 movie about cheerleaders, a sanitized pep rally that provides the audience with eye-candy and an unassailable feel-good message, while paying union wages to a mixed company of Broadway hoofers and seasoned athletes.

Here we go again with oversize black singers belting their numbers to the rafters. (It’s particularly unfortunate that this character in “Leap” is named Ida Mae, while that character in “Ghost” is called Oda Mae). Ida, Oda, let’s call the whole thing off. [...] Christopher Ashley’s staging is serviceable, as are Sergio Trujillo’s dances. But there’s not a moment’s surprise in the show. Certainly not in the ending, which didn’t make a believer of me and won’t, I reckon, make one of you.

The show, drawing hither and yon from the Gershwin songbook, demonstrates how hard it is to create the illusion of effortless whimsy. A new book by Joe DiPietro pays heavy-handed tribute to the flimsy plots that Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse once devised for George and Ira to showcase their sublime ditties. The result is mostly a flop-sweat inducing affair. However appealing Broderick and O’Hara are individually, as romantic leads, they’re weak sparks on damp leaves. Fortunately, a pair of first-rate second bananas -- Judy Kaye and Michael McGrath -- partly salvage this misguided enterprise.

If the comic-book ideal appeals to you as much as it apparently did to director Matthew Warchus -- and if you haven’t been to the movies in, say, a couple of decades -- “Ghost: The Musical” has plenty to offer. Palpitating with light-emitting diodes that blink, flicker, zip and flash, “Ghost” is like “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” without the depth.

But you want to know about Underwood, and why not? It’s not as though Brando himself didn’t distinguish Stanley as an icon of brute sexual charisma, and on that score Underwood certainly delivers the goods. Just listen to the gasps and sighs emanating from the audience when he strips to an undershirt or less.

Borle’s wink-wink performance is so over the top that I half expected him to applaud himself at the end. Celia Keenan- Bolger is delightful as Molly/Wendy, as is Adam Chanler-Berat as the Boy who would be Peter. But “Peter and the Starcatcher” just can’t stop crowing about how clever it is. I wanted to smack it.

Eschewing the character’s familiar military fatigues and stogy, Martin plays Che (who never had anything to do with Argentina) as a populist observer. He’s more the jaunty, glinty- eyed critic than the embodiment of dashed hopes. In an open shirt and suspendered slacks, his eyes crinkled and mustache a bushy wonder, Martin exudes bonhomie. That’s not enough to offset the comically shameless Perons, especially given Rice’s compressed libretto. We’re left to connect a lot of dots. In her Broadway debut, Roger has plenty of the star quality Evita sings about. I worry how long her voice, a little brittle at the top, will hold up, even on a limited performance schedule.

Tracie Bennett stars (if such a word can be applied to an impersonation bettered any night in any downtown drag bar) as Judy in late 1968. [...] See Judy pop pills. Watch Judy vomit. Avert your eyes as Judy services her young buck. Listen as Judy, jazzed on Ritalin, loudly unravels before an adoring audience.

Two powerful party elders dog the efforts of both would-be candidates. Sue-Ellen Gamadge, chairman of the “Women’s Division” is played with jolly antiquity by Angela Lansbury. Former President Arthur Hockstader, whose illness has not dampened his raffish charm, is played commandingly by James Earl Jones. That both of these great stars are somewhat miscast (and Jones was doing battle with some of his lines at a critics’ preview) mattered little to the demonstrative audience (or to me). Jefferson Mays makes a late appearance as a shadow from Cantwell’s past and just about steals the show.

The Newsies, led by Jeremy Jordan’s spunkily dese-dem-dose Jack Kelly, are inexhaustible. Like the happy, hungry pickpockets in “Oliver!” their tribulations fade in the hook of a catchy anthem, several of which have been provided by Menken (music) and Feldman (lyrics), augmenting their score for the film.

The Newsies, led by Jeremy Jordan’s spunkily dese-dem-dose Jack Kelly, are inexhaustible. Like the happy, hungry pickpockets in “Oliver!” their tribulations fade in the hook of a catchy anthem, several of which have been provided by Menken (music) and Feldman (lyrics), augmenting their score for the film.

Happily, Once remains a rare combination of intelligence, warmth and musicality.

It’s uncommonly rare to watch a revival and suddenly attune yourself to the sound of weeping around you, the shaking of your hand as you take notes and, most important, to recognize that what you’re feeling must be very much like what audiences must have felt at the opening of a great new drama. But that’s what I felt at the critics’ preview of Mike Nichols’s magnificent revival of Arthur Miller’s 1949 epilogue for the American Dream, 'Death of a Salesman.

Affability and comic timing go only so far in this 95-minute, inch-deep, survey of his nearly 81 adventure- filled years. Even the opening is anti-climactic, as a beam of light appears and we hear the sound of a “Star Trek” transporter as he announces offstage that he won’t be beaming in. He walks on instead.

Affability and comic timing go only so far in this 95-minute, inch-deep, survey of his nearly 81 adventure- filled years. Even the opening is anti-climactic, as a beam of light appears and we hear the sound of a “Star Trek” transporter as he announces offstage that he won’t be beaming in. He walks on instead.

We have a drama laced with humor, most of it acid and utterly devoted to the power of metaphor, simile, paradox -- and wit. Not the debased, bilious language the spills from most stages these day, but words that matter, that touch the soul. Nixon gives us a woman whose mind demands attention even as her body is inexorably failing. You hear urgency in the crackling tone of her voice and see it in the undimmed sparkle in her eyes. She never stops wrestling.

Gordon Edelstein has staged “Mecca,” which has slow-going moments, with keen sensitivity to its rhythms...Dale, too long absent from the stage, is a wonderful Marius, his eyebrows registering every emotional bump on this long evening. He also gets the accent better than his two colleagues, though Gugino is affecting as a young woman challenged by her own disappointments. Harris floats about Michael Yeargan’s cluttered desert-hued set, a winsome apparition. Like one of Miss Helen’s own creations, though, the lightness of being is crafted of much sterner stuff.

Arrogantly trimming, reshuffling and “clarifying” what George and Ira Gershwin and the barely credited DuBose and Dorothy Heyward created, Paulus has so truncated the show that it plays like a soap opera. There’s little room for breathing. Only Bess -- thanks to McDonald -- comes wholly to life. She and Lewis make “Porgy and Bess” a must-see, its flaws notwithstanding.

Arrogantly trimming, reshuffling and “clarifying” what George and Ira Gershwin and the barely credited DuBose and Dorothy Heyward created, Paulus has so truncated the show that it plays like a soap opera. There’s little room for breathing. Only Bess -- thanks to McDonald -- comes wholly to life. She and Lewis make “Porgy and Bess” a must-see, its flaws notwithstanding.

It ought to be good news that 'Porgy and Bess' is back on Broadway for the first time in 35 years. Sad to say, the new version, which is billed by express order of the Gershwin brothers' estates as 'The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,' is a sanitized, heavily cut rewrite that strips away the show's essence so as to render it suitable for consumption by 21st-century prigs. If you've never seen or heard 'Porgy,' you might well find this version blandly pleasing. Otherwise, you'll be appalled.

It ought to be good news that 'Porgy and Bess' is back on Broadway for the first time in 35 years. Sad to say, the new version, which is billed by express order of the Gershwin brothers' estates as 'The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,' is a sanitized, heavily cut rewrite that strips away the show's essence so as to render it suitable for consumption by 21st-century prigs. If you've never seen or heard 'Porgy,' you might well find this version blandly pleasing. Otherwise, you'll be appalled.

When the show opened downtown over the summer, much of its charm derived from the setting, a real gym that turned the audience into spectators...Junk food at Broadway prices is a tough sell. Pumping up the volume to ear-splitting levels only heightens the show’s irritation quotient. Don’t blame the game young cast. Producers, on the other hand, ought to know better.