Jesse Green

The musical is handsome and reasonably well performed, especially by Bobby Conte Thornton as Calogero and Nick Cordero as Sonny. And it still has, in précis, that timely and timeless set of concerns. In a corrupt society, is the working man 'a sucker,' as Sonny maintains? How do we make moral sense of the good qualities of bad people - and vice versa? That A Bronx Tale, as a musical, never answers these questions is fair enough; that it lacks the subtlety to raise them seriously is very nearly a crime.

I say all this with both awe and revulsion. There may in fact be value in distraction at this moment in our history, and rarely has distraction looked as lovely. The scenic designer Mimi Lien's nearly complete redesign of the aptly chosen Imperial Theatre begins as you enter its formerly pink-marble lobby, which is now a grubby underground bunker with fluorescent lights and post-Soviet punk-rock posters. By contrast the main auditorium has been reconfigured as a Czarist wonderland, with brass and candlelight and onstage seating and stairways and catwalks and acres of red velvet swathing everything in a cardiac glow. Continuing the thematic use of anachronism, Paloma Young's costumes combine Empire stylings and contemporary grunge to exquisite effect. The lighting by Bradley King is brilliant, colorful, alternating between tête-à-tête warmth and stadium-rock heroics. Even the expanded orchestrations, by Malloy, enhance the sensation of lushness and well-being; an oboe and a bass clarinet will do that. Russia under Alexander, even with Napoleon fast approaching, was a nice place to be rich.

Classically trained actors are naturally drawn to roles that show off their verbal fluency, but few contemporary plays give them the chance. No wonder Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, with its baroque dialogue bordering on camp, has proved so popular with upmarket stars. Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman headed the 1985 premiere; Glenn Close and John Malkovich the 1988 film; now Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber lead the gorgeous but tiresome revival that opens tonight on Broadway. The script is full of lines like 'I wonder if I'm beginning to guess what it is you're intending to propose,' which despite the heavy ironing required to make them lie flat reward the effort with only a vestigial feeling that something humorous has happened. Indeed, Les Liaisons is a trap: In portraying the moral decadence of the Ancien Régime, it aligns itself with that decadence. For Hampton and his collaborators, it's a case of let them eat cake, and have it too.

If this Lincoln Center Theater production, directed (like all the earlier New York incarnations) by Lapine, has any serious faults, they arise from that agenda. As written, Marvin is so nasty and erratic in the first act that the plot, which depends on so many people wanting his love, won't turn. Christian Borle can't resolve that contradiction and thus comes off a bit unsteady, at least until he regains his footing in the second act. The other principals, whose roles are more tightly written, are excellent throughout: Andrew Rannells delivering a super-high-gloss Whizzer without reducing him to a boytoy; Stephanie J. Block deftly coloring in Trina's insecurity (and stopping the show with 'I'm Breaking Down'); Brandon Uranowitz offering an unusually sexy Mendel; and Anthony Rosenthal making a crazy-confident Broadway debut as a sweet but not too-sweet Jason. (In the second half, Tracie Thoms and Betsy Wolfe are lovely as 'the lesbians from next door.') .

The Front Page is a classic not only for its playability but also for its timelessness: No one will ever need footnotes to understand the idea of journalists competing venally to expose venal politicians. What they may need, though, is internet access, because the presses that printed Atkinson's review, and the reviews of every Broadway revival since then until this one, are as obsolete as the typewriters and candlestick telephones and 'Get me rewrite!' commands depicted in the play. So may theater critics be. Therefore, let me use my end-times platform to contradict Atkinson, who advised 'squeamish folk' to stay home. On the contrary, squeamish folk will love it, and when it comes to politics and journalism, who isn't squeamish?

No one, of course, sets out to under-serve Chekhov. The problem, even with serious interpretive artists at the helm, is that everyone must be seeking to serve in the same way. Here that does not appear to be the case. The adaptation, by Stephen Karam, is clean and mostly neutral, with an occasional bit of contemporary vernacular ('Get out!' where fustier translations offer something like 'Think of that!') deliberately jarring the ear. I say deliberately because the staging by Simon Godwin, an associate director at London's National Theatre now making his New York debut, also underlines the modernity of Chekhov's themes, but does so rather more academically and urgently.

That changed dynamic is the other factor in the play's new spin. When I first saw it, the relative hush of the house seemed to favor Alex's arc, which was, at least superficially, more serious and perhaps more relatable: After resisting Georgie as a flake, and even after understanding that her motives in romancing him might be impure, he takes a flier with her in the hope that, sane or not, she can distract him from his profound loneliness. (His only confidant is a long-dead sister, who visits him in dreams.) But in that reading, Alex's influence on Georgie is imperceptible if not beside the point. Near the end, when she describes him as looking 'full of wonder,' you understand that his insistence on the primacy of observable fact over imputed concepts like mood or even personality have barely rubbed off on her. 'It's probably just my retinas,' he says. There is no such thing as 'wonder,' only dead cells floating in vitreous humor.

What they are actually satirizing through the medium of their hideously bewigged and age-spotted alter egos is sometimes a bit fuzzy; the characters are both in on the jokes and the butt of them. But either way the jokes are excellent, as they should be by now; the Broadway incarnation ofOh, Hello - sleekly directed by Alex Timbers - follows a sold-out 2015 Off Broadway run, a national tour, and almost a decade of development. (Kroll and Mulaney based the characters on two men they saw shopping at the Strand.) Along the way, the material has acquired a minimal plot, in which the rent on the 'measly five-bedroom with crown molding' apartment at 73rd and Columbus that Faizon and St. Geegland have shared for 40 years is set to rise from $75 a month to $2,500. In order to keep enjoying their 'god-given right' to this housing, the pair may have to compromise their artistic integrity by agreeing to take 'Too Much Tuna,' a radio show they used to host, big-time on local-access cable.

Among the 22 songs, many more relate to the wisp of a love-triangle plot than to the supposed theme, thus emphasizing the build-up instead of the payoff. And that build-up is tedious, as the former song-and-dance man, Jim Hardy, and his hoofer ex-partner, Ted Hanover, compete for the affections of Lila Dixon, a leggy bimbo, and then Linda Mason, a homey good girl. Indeed, the lumpy structure makes you wait until nearly the end of the first act for the 'inn' numbers to start, and thus for the show to get moving. At that point a terrific production number of 'Shaking the Blues Away,' led by Megan Lawrence as a butch 'fix-it man' - don't ask - briefly makes you forget how unsatisfying the show has been so far.

McBurney tries to connect these themes - well, not the anti-materialism; the sound equipment must be expensive - to the technology at hand, noting that most of what we call reality is a fiction constructed, like the show's soundscape, from bits of information and shared assumptions. For McIntyre, those assumptions collapsed in his months with the Mayouruna, as dissociated, primal thoughts crept out of the gaps formerly filled with guesses.

To be fair, Cats is not quite as bad as cultural elites liked to suggest; there were far worse shows during its 18-year run. But Cats was both pretentious and déclassé, dragging the musical form down from its recent supposed glory just as it dragged Eliot down from Prufrock to Pouncival. This was, after all, the megahit that opened the door for the invasion of European pop operas that all but smothered the native product for two decades. Seeing it 34 years later, in a Broadway environment that has recently produced the likes of Hamilton and Fun Home, is to experience something milder and less dangerous than it once seemed. It's not so much feline as bovine, as if Nunn and Lloyd Webber had spliced in some genetic material from another Eliot poem of the same period: 'Cows.'

Paramour's idea of the Broadway musical is particularly disturbing, evincing as it does only the skimpiest knowledge of the form. If we broadly describe a musical as an entertainment that offers a story about characters through song, we have already raised the bar too high. What Paramour offers is more of a series of clichés about humanoids accompanied by sounds. The main cliché is the one that glorifies Old Timey Hollywood as a land of tragic romance and glittering sophistication. ('Welcome to the Golden Age / Tux and tales [sic] it's all the rage,' the opening number helpfully explains.)

This review might have begun 'Audra Smiles!' -- so unusual and uplifting is it to see our leading vocal tragedienne in a part that (until Act Two) is essentially as light as a soubrette's. McDonald sings beautifully, of course; the role sits mostly in the thrilling upper part of her range. But you may not have remembered...what she can do with comic phrasing...As if that weren't enough, she taps (as everyone else does) with a nearly reckless vigor, despite the impossibly subdivided counts of Glover's syncopations. By the time she brings Act One to a rousing climax with the huge success of the show-within-a-show, you may feel that the outer show too is one of the best old-fashioned entertainments -- tunes, dances, comedy, costumes, the whole hotcha package -- to hit Broadway in years.

The age of a show's protagonist often provides a clue to the age of the audience the show is pitched to: Patrick in American Psycho is 27; Jenna in Waitress is 'in her thirties'; the character Frank Langella plays in The Father is 80 going on dead. So perhaps we should be grateful that Winnie, the heroine of the 1975 'young adult' fantasy novel Tuck Everlasting, has been bumped up from 10 to 11 for the musical adaptation that just opened on Broadway: She is that much more bearable. But whether the work of so many talented people in effecting the adaptation has added anything of value beyond that one year is another matter; this is, almost until the end, a ruthlessly by-the-book treatment of a high-concept, low-wattage fairy tale. Those nostalgic for their seventh-grade enthusiasms may love it; I found it to be a musical for the child in someone else.

I don't know if it qualifies as part of Broadway's ongoing diversity initiative, but in Fully Committed, the one-man comedy opening tonight at the Lyceum, that Ginger-American Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays, by my count, an astonishing 34 roles, together constituting a rainbow of assholes. Initially he's just Sam Callahan, a struggling actor sullenly working a pre-Christmas shift taking reservations at a superhot Manhattan restaurant. But as the outside lines, the in-house intercoms, and his own cellphone start ringing, Ferguson takes on the vocal and gestural lives of all the callers: would-be guests, terrified assistants; his agent, friends, frenemies, and family; the arrogant chef, the tantrum-y maître d', and various others, all exploding with ASAP demands. Needless to say, this being a restaurant, none of the demands is a true emergency, no matter how much the callers bully and scream - unless accommodating Gwyneth Paltrow with an all-vegan tasting menu for 15, with flattering light bulbs and no women servers, counts as an emergency.

Waitress can still be an uncomfortable genre mix: domestic-violence drama and workplace rom-com. That's in the source material, and the musicalization exaggerates it. What I certainly didn't expect, though, is that the musicalization could also help to justify the mismatch. As the story rushed toward its multiple conclusions - a typical Broadway problem the creative team was unable to solve - I began to understand that for these characters, life itself is an uncomfortable genre mix. Seeing that and sharing it is the start of their mastering it. Perhaps it really did take an all-female creative team to understand how such a story could be true, and how it could sing. If so, well, hand me a slice of that humble pie.

As it is, only the point of the show is invisible. Everything else, including lots of ripped hardbodies in underwear, is on vulgar display...the physical design, especially the interlocking sets and video by Es Devlin and Finn Ross, is as neat and tucked-in as aTurnbull & Asser poplin double-cuff contrast-collar shirt...But the structure and tone are a lazy mess...changes that may have worked on film are undermined by the musical format; what the camera registers sardonically feels silly and cartoonish when rendered onstage...Jean, played touchingly by Jennifer Damiano...The only numbers that consistently nail down the dramatic moment, the mood, and the period are the five interpolated from the '80s pop charts...Patrick Bateman, though played with unnerving verve by Benjamin Walker, is no Sweeney Todd; he's a cipher who never develops. He's thus a bore....

In 40 years of watching Langella onstage, from Seascape and Dracula in the 1970s through Frost/Nixon and Man and Boy just recently, I've never seen that need come as close to full exposure as in the just-opened Manhattan Theatre Club production of The Father...It's a must-see performance. The Father, though, is only a might-see play, more of a vehicle than a destination...Langella, who in some plays threatens to devour everyone else onstage, is here well matched by a cast of actors who perform their own seductions and know how to find their light. Especially effective are Kathryn Erbe...and Hannah Cabell...

And van Hove (working with the choreographer Stephen Hoggett) does wonderful things with his staging...If van Hove's directorial choices generally support and enliven the text, and force us to see it fresh, it's not because he has abandoned his avant-garde armamentarium. This Crucible features plenty of his signature flourishes, some more effective than others...Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo, as the Proctors, give wrenching performances, shorn of vanity, as if the play's message of communal guilt had infected them personally...Saoirse Ronan as Abigail suggests no real excuse for her cold manipulations: She just shines with maleficence.

..Bright Star now opens with an establishing song called 'If You Knew My Story.' It's super-catchy, and Carmen Cusack, whose role in the proceedings we do not yet comprehend, sings the hell out of it. But unfortunately it does its 'show the audience what to expect' job too well. With banal, self-cancelling, upbeat lyrics...it mostly shows us that we are going to have, in Bright Star, a banal, self-cancelling, upbeat musical, the kind that wants to demonstrate a lot of heart without actually having one. Which is not to say it has no smarts and no value. There's a lot to like in Bright Star and a lot to admire in the way it was made...How the stories intersect with the songs is the larger problem here. The mostly bluegrass score, with country, gospel, and a little swing thrown in, sounds great...but almost always does exactly the opposite of what a story-based musical requires.

When a production has enough outstanding elements working in its favor -- as the Roundabout's revival of She Loves Me starring Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi certainly does -- your mind can fill in the rest, and more. Benanti, with her thrilling voice and zany self-deprecation, is perfect casting for Amalia Balash...Their lyrics, by Sheldon Harnick, marry gentle wit to character development with the highest technical polish; his rhymes get laughs not because they're tricky but because they're so apt...These nearly prose observations miraculously sit on music, by Jerry Bock, that maintains their contours while flowering into arias of enormous beauty, especially for Amalia, who has a heavy stack of them to sell. This is where Benanti's gifts become crucial. She is, no surprise, a joy to listen to -- even when, as last night, recovering from bronchitis. But she brings to the job of making beautiful sounds the natural comic's instinct of opening herself to heartbreak.

Without in any way glamorizing the situation, Blackbird so complicates the questions of consent and trauma and recovery -- and even love -- that it would be difficult to look at any of these subjects the same way again...Una is a victim, yes...Still, she is not so clearly innocent. As played with devastating rawness by Williams, she is alternately viperish, vengeful, sarcastic, bizarre, and desperate to reconnect...Similarly, Ray is drawn as richly and provocatively as possible, getting as far from ambient stereotypes about the pedophile personality as can reasonably be achieved...Daniels goes so deep into the man's depravity that he seems to come out the other side, in a place of honesty...Daniels...has not merely redecorated his earlier performance but done a gut job on it, starting over on deeper foundations.

The front cover of the Playbill for the Broadway production of Eclipsed, which opened tonight, features the beautiful face of its star, Lupita Nyong'o, looking worried. The back cover, an ad for Lancôme, also features Nyong'o, smiling broadly. No doubt the back cover subsidized the front, because the chances of a play like Eclipsed getting to Broadway without a star of Nyongo's current cachet are nil. Eclipsed is about Liberian women forced into sex slavery during that country's mad civil war. And while it has moments of light-heartedness, and a wind-up that could conceivably be called hopeful (the war, after all, does end), most of the play, by Danai Gurira, is crushingly sad; what else could it be? So let us be grateful to 12 Years a Slave, the Academy Awards, and Advanced Génifique Youth Activating Serum for allowing a moving and must-see production to move and be seen.

Whitaker is a fine film actor who has brought method intensity and authenticity to a variety of highly dramatic characters, from Charlie Parker to Idi Amin. But the method technique isn't a good match for Hughie, even if Al Pacino made a success of Erie on Broadway in 1996. The role requires not just the deep dive into personality that the Method suggests but the huckster tricks and verbal animation of a true stage animal. (The original Broadway Erie, in 1964, was Jason Robards.) Whitaker is so interiorized he seems catatonic, with peculiar diction, a strange accent ('dolls' is rendered as 'dawls'), and a way of chopping up sentences that suggests he has only a tentative grip on the lines. He moves well, which is to say idiosyncratically, with a rolling gait and a charadeslike intensity of hand movement that might well make the characterization visible if it weren't so inaudible. Even so, you spend a lot of the time looking at Wood, a theatrical creature through and through, doing much more with much less.

Would The Humans be so effective if its 95 minutes of 100-proof family drama took place in a neat little doorman condo? I doubt it: Location is destiny. With its irrational layout and strange, sickening noises, the apartment, as the stage directions put it, is 'effortlessly uncanny,' as is the play itself....It is still the most, well, human play I've ever seen about fear and disappointment and the attachments that transcend them...Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about intimate plays, transferring The Humans has done nothing to diminish its effectiveness. In fact...it seems even tighter and sharper than it did...To me the performances, all already excellent, now seem both more natural and more detailed: New beats have been found within old ones, resulting in a fractal complexity of small behavior that more nearly approximates the smooth skin of reality.