Jesse Green

If the playwright Richard Greenberg didn't write the role for Linda Lavin, he might as well have, so perfectly does it suit and flatter her. It may in fact suit and flatter her too well; sometimes one would like to see Lavin clawing her way out of a role instead of slipping so smoothly into it. Here, she wears Anna as fetchingly as Anna wears the perfectly cut Burberry trench coat she imbues with talismanic powers of mysterious romance. It is just such a romance that forms the central (and really the only) plot of this entertaining but threadbare play...If I had to guess, I'd say that Greenberg got trapped (much as Anna does) by what must have felt like a daring idea.

For once, the word 'revival' is apt: Doyle's intervention amounts to a kind of theatrical CPR, restarting the heart of a show that, in its original production, seemed to die before your eyes...Of course it takes actors who have the subtlety to work at this level...The paradoxical result is a far greater range; the show is not constantly hitting the ceiling. Erivo...proves especially masterful at calibrating the gradations of Celie's emergence, from a kind of dull curiosity when she meets Shug Avery, to the suppressed rage of her nascent rebellion against Mister, to the exquisite shy smile that breaks across her face when she allows herself to believe she is beautiful, to the full sunburst of pleasure that success (as a seamstress) finally affords her. By the time she gets to her 11 o'clock number...you may feel you have seen as great and full a transformation as any previously put on the musical stage.

A disreputable charmer brings the joy of music to a staid community while stirring up romance with an uptight lady: If the plot of School of Rocksounds like a great musical, that's because it is. It's The Music Man. ButSchool of Rock, however much it borrows the shape of Meredith Willson's 1957 classic, has a different agenda, one that's arguably more timely and certainly less poetic. Its Harold Hill figure, called Dewey Finn, has real instead of imaginary instruments to offer, and the music he's evangelizing isn't Sousa but the Stones. Nonconformity replaces community as the theme; the key title in the score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Glenn Slater (with a few songs lifted from the hit 2003 movie) is called 'Stick It to the Man.' Trouble, we are told, isn't something music will prevent but something it will enhance: 'Wreck your room and rip your jeans / and show 'em what rebellion means.'

Al Pacino is not an actor of much breadth but he stakes a narrow territory deeply, and that can be brilliant to watch onstage. China Doll, his shaky new Broadway vehicle, by David Mamet, offers flashes of that brilliance between long mucky passages in which he appears to be hunting for the narrative, if not the next line...The construction of China Doll is most peculiar. Very little conflict unreels in our presence...It's hard to figure what Mamet is up to...But eventually you can't help facing the fact that Mamet has built what plot there is around the hypocrisy and venality of liberal politicians; the story is rigged to make Mickey, of all people, a victim...Anyway, China Doll doesn't provide convincing evidence even for its own case study, and Pacino's star quality prevents us from inferring any evidence on our own...This gives the play the air of a one-percenter paranoiac fantasy...Whatever one thinks of that sort of attitude as policy, as the basis of a drama it's disastrous.

That the play, borrowing heavily on the movie, is neatly plotted does not mean it is structurally satisfying. Basically it has only two actions, which keep alternating: Sheldon develops a plan, and Annie foils it. The movie, with its variety of shots and its focus on details, could disguise that endless tick-tock, but onstage the drama flattens out and separates.

What makes this slight misfit of play and production finally unimportant is that the actors are so devastatingly good. Their habit of fealty to character as defined by dialogue survives the director's effacements. Mark Strong may be styled to look like a neutral Everyman of the past or future, but, in his bearing and cadence and anguish and bafflement, he is only Red Hook's Eddie Carbone, in full tragic tilt. Phoebe Fox makes Catherine's transition from baby doll to furious womanhood thrillingly transparent, just as Nicola Walker, as Eddie's wife, Beatrice, shows how every hopeful choice she and Eddie have made now closes in on her like a trap. (For once, Beatrice and Catherine actually look like aunt and niece.) The Italian brothers, Marco (Michael Zegen) and Rodolpho (Russell Tovey), are both excellent in difficult roles, and Michael Gould makes of Alfieri the perfectly regretful guide. Some of the credit for the cast's superb work obviously belongs to van Hove; he knew he needed actors who could stand up to his powerful, showy interventions. It's a fair trade; those interventions probably made this revival viable. Still, one looks on them, and on van Hove's upcoming Broadway production of The ­Crucible with, as Alfieri says, 'a certain alarm.'

I'm no fan of jukebox musicals. If they're the type that tell an invented tale, like Mamma Mia! or Rock of Ages, the book is generally rendered idiotic by the effort to accommodate the songs. If they're instead pop biographies, like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the problem is even worse because the songs, too, are denatured, by the effort to accommodate a preexisting storyline. Furthermore, the structure of musicals in the second category can only lead to a bathetic climax: In the final scenes, the protagonists (Frankie Valli, Carole King) become exactly who we already knew them to be. That's more than ever the case with the new Gloria Estefan jukebox musical On Your Feet! because if you don't arrive at the Marquis Theatre knowing the billboard headlines of her story (Cuban immigrant becomes American pop star, gets hit by a truck, eventually returns in triumph) why are you there? The only real issues for me in approaching a show like this are the fun of the tunes and the ingenuity of the distraction. To say that On Your Feet! is better than most of its ilk is therefore faint praise; it means you might have almost as good a time as you would if it were merely a concert.

As the use of blank verse suggests, Bartlett aims to dress up the skeeviness of this speculative royal-watching in Shakespearean grandeur, and he mostly succeeds. The iambic pentameter is supple and amusing ('But here's my husband, he's been on the phone') even if it depends a bit too much on auxiliary verbs to fill out the lines. The scene-closing couplets, the elaborately extended metaphors, the near quotations ('Say more. For nothing comes of nothing said') all support in language the Shakespeare-sized themes and characters he has tossed into the blender.

...Knightley...makes a stark and somewhat counterintuitive Broadway debut. She is compelling and articulate, especially when silent, and brings to the morose tale the banked-fire quality that seems to illuminate such material from within...The drawn-out dénouement...is basically a slow return to the grimness of the reality in which Thérèse (and the others) were always trapped. That grimness is beautifully realized, at least; Beowulf Boritt's sets, lit exquisitely by Keith Parham, are all gesso and grisaille, suggesting a prepared canvas with no painting on it...Even a relatively short novel like this one offers too large a meal. The set-ups are lovely, and then comes the hasty glut. The director Evan Cabnet's unusually handsome staging, dominated by the sculptural deployment of the actors' bodies, often in silhouette, in a way highlights this failing, making the massive repression of the opening scenes powerfully eloquent but offering diminishing returns thereafter.

Unfortunately, this fantastic comic challenge is a dramaturgical disaster. To begin with, the rules of Sylvia's doghood are unclear and chaotically enforced. At first her English is presented as an approximation of what a human might think a dog is thinking: Barks are rendered as 'Hey! Hey! Hey!' and soulful stares as 'I want to sit near you.' Sometimes, wittily enough, Sylvia responds to Greg's philosophizing with deflections like, 'I wish I could contribute something here, but I just plain can't.' At other times, though, Sylvia speaks like a normal person, and the other characters talk to her in the expectation that she will understand them specifically and rationally. Is she becoming more human, as Ann Roth's witty canine-human crossbreed fashions, moving from a furry sweater and velour bodysuit to a black cocktail dress, seem to suggest? Then why does she switch back to the furry sweater later? I suppose this is all covered under a general talking-animal-comedy indemnification policy, but it does add to the ad hoc feeling of the play, as if it were built to stand for only the two hours it takes to perform and not a second longer. At the stroke of ten, no matter how many shout-outs to Shakespeare it has offered, and despite the lovely Cole Porter tune jammed in for no reason, it collapses instantaneously.

Rather than comment on the quirks or shortcomings of their models, [the songs] merely copy them, in presumably deliberate and definitely third-rate imitations...What once made this mediocre material work, if anything did, was the panicky contrast between the outsize ambition of the '30s originals and the downsized reality of the spit-and-cardboard tribute...The camp, in other words, was genuine. And while it's lovely to hear the score orchestrated (by Jonathan Tunick, no less) for eight instruments instead of two pianos and a drum set, the material's internal wiring gets tangled when mounted at the scale -- and with the bland polish -- of Randy Skinner's Broadway production...Not to pile on, but I was surprised to find most of the dancing, and for that matter the performances in general, so ineloquent...Camp, it turns out, can't be faked; without deprivation and desperation, there is no wit.

Beloved, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson certainly are. Whether their roles are meaty depends on whether you classify stamped patties of denatured cow parts as meat...Nothing happens to either of them in the course of the bleak action except that their foibles are revealed, over and over, in a series of hands of gin...the production is so lame and misguided (by the director Leonard Foglia) you would almost prefer that they suddenly started ad libbing selections from far better work each of them has done. As it is, they stick at least to the outlines of the script. In so doing, they successfully establish the general outlines of their characters, and it's undeniably a nostalgic pleasure, for about one shuffle, to hear Jones boom and bustle and see Tyson offer her aren't-I-cute moue as she lays out her winning hands. But mostly their game looks like solitaire, not gin...

The production, already excellent when presented at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2014, has only improved. Physically, it is just about perfect, especially the lighting design by Justin Townsend, which creates its poetic effects (as the play does) from the most concrete situations. Arianda's alternately spitfire and limpetlike fierceness has rarely been channeled as effectively, and Rockwell, a string bean in a cowboy hat, with a mean lasso and a mortifying chicken dance, brings tremendous vulnerability to a role often played as a brick.

Pinter means to keep the audience on its toes: There is detective work to be done, sorting out the relationships and alibis. The characters, both in their tastes and distastes, are perfectly etched...And, at a fleet 70 minutes with no intermission, the play smartly limits your exposure to the intense narcissism of people playing a game of erotic musical chairs. But for all its verbal brilliance and surgical precision in dissecting the characters' personalities, Old Times no longer feels quite real, if it ever did...if you see the play as a profound portrait of a permanent human condition, it's going to disappoint, which is exactly the trap Douglas Hodge's production falls into...He has encouraged an excellent cast...to play the subtext so broadly that it basically everts the drama, leaving very little sense that feasible humans are involved. Even so, the actors are good enough to make it fun: Owen a monkey on a hot tin roof, Best a Sicilian goddess, Reilly an impossibly sexy sphinx...But with neither the history nor the hostility very mysterious, the sum on this one-plus-one-plus-one plot is zero.

Occasionally - and Deaf West Theatre's production of Spring Awakening is a superb example - something latent in the material meets the mood of the time to make a revival not just a necessity but a great pleasure... This revival would have been unjustifiable were it not for the brilliant idea of placing the story in the context of deafness and using many deaf actors to tell it.

A second look...suggests that something even more significant is going on. The breakthrough isn't so much the incorporation of those contemporary genres; after all, Miranda already did that, throwing in Latin music to boot, in the charming In the Heights. But Hamilton not only incorporates newish-to-Broadway song forms; it requires and advances them, in the process opening up new territory for exploitation. It's the musical theater, not just American history, that gets refurbished. And perhaps popular music, too...I noticed only a few textual changes since it opened downtown, all smart. The role of the villain, Aaron Burr, has been carefully streamlined...The paradoxical result is that Leslie Odom Jr.'s already excellent performance is even more thrilling...I still wonder, too, if the manic staging by director Thomas Kail and choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, fun as it is, may sometimes get in the way of the action instead of enhancing it.

Amazing Grace, a new musical purporting to tell the story of the 18th-century British abolitionist John Newton, is the 'first work of professional writing' by Christopher Smith, a 45-year-old former police officer from suburban Philadelphia. (He wrote the music and lyrics himself and co-wrote the book with the more experienced playwright Arthur Giron.) What he has somehow gotten produced, and offered with good intentions to Broadway audiences and critics, is the equivalent of a child's drawing: naïve, sincere, glowing with an unimpeachable if hard-to-pin-down vision of what it wants to be. (I'd guess that it wants to be a Christian family entertainment with a bold message about the power of redemption.) It is also a confusing cartoon so lacking in craft that it ruins any chance of being taken seriously. Certainly it can't be recommended as history; it's riddled with falsehoods that alone would sink it. But it also fails as musical theater, on two counts: the music and the theater.

...Airline Highway, a beautiful and mesmerizing kaleidoscope of a play by Lisa D'Amour... is set in a post-Katrina New Orleans...In Airline Highway, she has evidently sought to split the difference between her devised high-concept work and the kind of traditional narrative that theater companies can actually stage. There are characters you get to know and care about; an event everything points toward; a perceptible conflict leading to a crisis; and at least a quasi-resolution. On the other hand, the play bleeds well beyond those ordinary dramaturgical boundaries...The crisis, too, is unusual: It is not a central overarching one but a series of related realizations, dispersed among the characters. The unusual resolution, bringing together a fantasy sermon from the spectral Miss Ruby with an excerpt from Zoe's finished sociology paper, is, for me, the play's only overindulgence.

...the version that has now arrived at the Lyceum represents not only a triumph of persistence but a distillation of many years' worth of theatrical savvy. It is as lean and as sere as a skeleton...Doyle is expert at stripping away the surface decoration and audience sops that can detract from the seriousness of the form...With The Visit, this creates a certain tension, though. You have, on one hand, the unimpeachably cold -- almost terrifying -- production design...On the other hand, you have Rivera, whom everyone adores and hopes to see succeed in a challenging role at age 82. This a tension that's useful, at least insofar as it puts the audience in sympathy with the devil...The songs, too, pull in two directions...The better the songs are, the weirder the show gets...Alienation and gregariousness make strange co-stars, but then so did Kander and Ebb. What a joy to have them back on Broadway and to think that, even half-dead, they're unkillable.

Anything you've ever liked in a musical comedy (and a few things you haven't) are here, just waiting to sing-and-dance you into submission...It's total silliness, of course; Nicholaw keeps the lights bright, the sound loud, and the plot moving at a furious boil...As light as the material may be, it's no easy achievement, and quite a surprise coming from a group of writers with no experience on Broadway...For every freshman infelicity...there are a dozen smart lyrical jokes, nicely set on tunes that do only as much as they need to in order to keep the momentum going...a more fundamental problem -- the only one, really -- is too deeply entwined in what makes the show work to have ever unwound it. I refer to its relentlessness, the will to conquer at any cost, like Mel Brooks on steroids.

Living on Love, as directed by Kathleen Marshall, is tacky and weirdly downmarket, as if divas and maestros could only be made palatable to contemporary audiences by turning them into frenetic buffoons...And while Sills has the craft and comic experience to scale up his performance to Broadway levels, I'm sorry to say he's the only one of the four leads who can convincingly project this weak material to the back of the house...It is certainly very strange to report that Fleming, one of the great operatic sopranos of the last three decades, cannot. She is lovely, she is game, and you always sense her niceness. But these qualities domesticate Raquel's monstrousness; she isn't fierce enough to make her middling antics funny...What's oddest is that, without music, Fleming can't seem to find a natural shape for her lines...This distinction becomes clear when, after teasing us with snippets of arias throughout the play, Fleming finally lets loose with a whole song: 'Always.' Now we realize what we've been missing.

I already thought that Fun Home was the best new musical of the year in 2013, when it opened at the Public Theater. It's hard to imagine that its Broadway transfer, and transformation, will not make it the best of this season as well. I say 'transformation' even though in most ways it's nearly a replica: The librettist Lisa Kron has perhaps cut or tightened a few lines of dialogue, and the composer Jeanine Tesori, apart from excising one charming but redundant little song ('Al for Short'), has made only the kind of changes a fanatic would notice. Fun Home is still basically what it was when I reviewed it in 2013: the story, based on Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic memoir, of a lesbian cartoonist trying in middle age to understand her father, who killed himself shortly after revealing to her that he, too, was gay. Back then I called it 'hilarious and crushing,' and it remains so now. Maybe less hilarious and more crushing.

...the revival that opened tonight...is too beautiful to miss...Sher's production is the frankest, and sexiest, I've ever seen. It is also the saddest...The degree to which you want the characters to acknowledge and act on their attraction is a bit of a shock, considering the personal and cultural implications...It takes extraordinary acting and singing to build and sustain such moments. No surprise that O'Hara handles the singing easily; she has perhaps the most naturally beautiful voice on Broadway. But Anna also gives her the opportunity to dispense with the niceness that has sometimes threatened to flatten her stage persona. She has a terrific sparring partner in Watanabe...Though he's occasionally unintelligible, I never failed to understand him, and his conception of the king as a complicated blend of spoiled teenager and spiritual striver made a more convincing case for him than I've previously experienced.

Finding Neverland purports to be historical: the true tale of how Barrie, inspired by his dealings with the family of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, created the boy who wouldn't grow up. It also purports to be a singing-dancing family entertainment. It winds up being neither...What's accurate -- perhaps the only thing -- is that Barrie acknowledged the Davies brood as his muses for Peter Pan...On this slender foundation Finding Neverland...builds an enormous superstructure of trite psychology...Finding Neverland demonstrates about as much insight into creativity borne of loss as a Facebook memorial candle. Even if everything in it were profound and true, it would still be a mess, suffering as it does from confusion (or willfulness) about what makes a musical a musical. In good ones, songs are not decorations applied interchangeably to the exterior of a story, like gift-wrap. They are the gift. Here, they seem to be recycled from a different package entirely...More attention has been lavished on the show's tricks than its logic.

A musical in that antique vein would seem to be a nonstarter now...But it's not that bad...It helps that its ambition is modest: It's trying to amuse, not overwhelm. Brian Hargrove's book...is cleverly constructed, laying out its wedding plot according to musical-theater best practices...it's worth pointing out that neither plot twist is very credible, and the big one, however contemporary it may be in fact, already feels stale. Still, it has been set up well enough to produce a roar of laughter, and to carry the story swiftly to its unexpectedly touching conclusion. This is in part the result of David Hyde Pierce's understated direction, with its emphasis on comic timing and full commitment to stock characters...it's a nice surprise to find that the real star of the show is Lisa Howard...Howard...has the unusual ability of making likability and warmth, so often boring onstage, theatrical. She also sings beautifully, and gets most of the evening's best songs, which isn't saying much.