Jesse Green

Indeed, aside from the Boleyn intrigue, which is handled fairly thoroughly, there's a little-bit-of-everything flavor to the proceedings. That makes sense, and I'm not sure you could find any other way to corral the material in Mantel's books unless you were willing to go for 60 hours instead of 6. Still, I found myself wondering whether newcomers to the period might guess from the play that anything else important happened while Cromwell was serving as Henry's marriage counselor. The dissolution of the monasteries, an event of huge significance, is mentioned briefly. The creation of the English Bible earns a line or two. But mostly what we have is an extremely elegant Tudor soap opera, the kind of 'event theater' that from time to time can fill a Winter Garden. It fits nicely with the three-course prix fixe 'English feast' dinner being offered to Wolf Hall patrons at the nearby Rock Center Café between plays. There you may choose among such menu offerings as Scotch egg, shepherd's pie, and bubble and squeak. Venison or pheasant would be more authentic, but who has the time?

The production's desperation to appeal to tweens instead of their parents results in a disastrous if not deliberate misreading of the tale. Perhaps that wouldn't matter if the show worked on its own terms, but it did not in 1973 when Lerner brought Loewe out of retirement to expand the movie into a stage property, and it certainly doesn't now. There is still, mercifully, the score, which even if all jumbled about still contains five truly great songs and several good ones too. (Most of the newly interpolated ones are distinctly third-drawer, however.) And visually there is much to admire. Derek McLaine's Art Nouveau settings are an elegant solution to the problem of a story in which one of the stars is Paris itself; Catherine Zuber's costumes are a marvel of shapeliness, accuracy, and detail. (That's a good thing in a show that often fails to hold the attention; you can always count buttons.) But most of the other decisions made by the creative team - the director is Eric Schaeffer - reduce rather than enhance the story.

...the dark comedy more nearly approaches its darkness in Act Two, with the consequences of human outrageousness brought to the foreground, the tale becomes more emotionally legible, and at times even heartbreaking. It's a credit to the director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel, and the performers, especially Geneva Carr as Margery and Marc Kudisch as Pastor Greg...Steven Boyer, whose role is almost too dimensional for its own good. Although he tosses off with admirable ease the daunting challenge of playing both Jason and Jason-as-Tyrone, often in furious conversation with one another, there is something unsatisfying in the role's construction that he cannot quite overcome. Usually an actor must integrate the various strands of information suggested by the play's conflicts in order to create a coherent character. Here, the character is created by segregation: All the showy, aggressive traits get put into Tyrone, all the sadness and delicacy into Jason. As a result, the more Boyer succeeds, the less either half of his success resonates...

And yet here they are in David Hare's Skylight, a monkey and a moonbeam, somehow bringing the same story to thrilling life. Nighy, as will be obvious to anyone who saw him in Love Actually or as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, is the monkey, or perhaps better to call him a Catherine wheel of tics and poses and stutters and quirks. 'Mannered' is not a strong enough word to describe the way he creates the illusion of character from a million incessant, if apparently spontaneous, affectations. (At several points, he struts across the stage sideways, his long legs pointing into the wings while his face stares down the audience.) Meanwhile, as she did in An Education and in the 2008 Broadway production The Seagull, Mulligan creates the illusion of character with no affectations at all. In fact, she hardly seems to be doing anything - and then suddenly tears will fling themselves from her eyes, or a smile will rise from some depth to the surface and recede again. She is as rivetingly, radically transparent as he is hilariously baroque, but in the end that's only fitting; the play, one of Hare's best, is about the gap between what's reconcilable and what's not.

This is Wasserstein at her most trenchant, offering the kind of observation that earned The Heidi Chronicles both the Tony award and the Pulitzer Prize. I can't think either was for the dramaturgy; even when Heidi relents, describing her emotional dependence on unavailable men, she somehow remains aloof and maddeningly resistant to change. Meanwhile, everyone else, whom we drop in on less frequently, seems to change like crazy, in scenes (I almost said sketches) written so broadly they now seem dated. At least two of them - the rap-group meeting as well as an inane panel discussion in 1982 - have the stock setups and bright satirical tone of early Saturday Night Live, only instead of Gilda Radner we have Tracee Chimo.

There are a million big reasons that On the Twentieth Century, the 1978 musical by Cy Coleman and Comden and Green, shouldn't work today: It's profoundly silly, tonally tricky, too big for the market, and a very hard sing. Indeed, the Roundabout's delicious revival at the American Airlines crashes intermittently into most of those problems. But there's nevertheless one small reason - about four-foot-eleven - it works anyway: Kristin Chenoweth. She is a comic genius in a role ideally suited to her gifts.

Seldom do costumes provide the bulk of a play's drama, but in Peter Morgan's The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, the greatest surprises and transformations are all in the clothes... Which is all to say that Daldry and his superb designers have worked more magic than has the playwright, if not as much as Mirren herself. In fact, it's difficult to justify calling The Audience a play at all: It is more like a pageant, not merely in the parade-of-costumes sense but in the theatrical sense.

It's well built, occasionally thoughtful, and consistently very funny if not transcendently so. In short: You'll laugh, you'll cry - well, you'll cry when the Visa bill comes...for a playwriting debut, if not a Broadway acting debut, Fish in the Dark is amazingly confident and delivers what it promises. But it's got neither the cerebral gloss of Clybourne Park and Stage Kiss (to name two recent laugh riots) nor the solid emotional underpinnings of much older comedies like The Odd Couple, which is, after all, about men's loneliness. It's going for something else, and almost gets there.'

So Honeymoon in Vegas turns out to depend on the one element that wasn't part of the original property: the score. (The movie's soundtrack is mostly covers of Elvis hits.) Brown was the perfect choice for the job, one of the vanishingly small breed of post-Sondheim theater composers who are more than just post-Sondheims. Like the master, he's a musical dramatist, but his song models are poppier and here sound great in arrangements and orchestrations (by several hands, including his own) that recall both mid-century MGM and Nelson Riddle's Capitol years. But the gift of superb pastiche cuts two ways, and the reason Brown has not had a financial hit in all of his worthy Broadway at-bats (Parade, 13, The Bridges of Madison County) may be related to the reason his score for Vegas can't completely rescue the icky raw material. We are still awaiting the fullest expression of his own voice, not the one he must force through other people's stories.

Would you like to see a two-hander in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a hunky but bashful British beekeeper, hemming and half-smiling, while Ruth Wilson, so recently embaubled with a Golden Globe for The Affair, plays a charmingly ditzy astrophysicist? Would you like to watch the pair meet cute at a barbecue, grope their way toward romance, survive infidelity, and face tragedy together? I would; it sounds like an engaging play. Unfortunately it's not the one now running at the Manhattan Theatre Club under the title Constellations, even though all those things do happen in it. But since Nick Payne, the author, is unwilling to give us that romantic trifle, this delightful, beautifully acted, and infuriating new drama is so much more, and less.

As Peter Pan is traditionally portrayed by a gamine actress, and Hairspray's Edna Turnblad by a chunky actor, theatrical tradition dictates that John Merrick, the grotesquely deformed title character of Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man, be embodied by an extremely handsome, seminude star eager to demonstrate his stage chops. (Among those who have played Merrick on Broadway since Philip Anglim created the role in 1979 are David Bowie, Mark Hamill, and Billy Crudup.) In the new revival, based on the 2012 Williamstown Theatre Festival production, Bradley Cooper more than qualifies: He is extremely handsome, he is seminude (at least part of the time), and not only demonstrates but proves those chops.

To begin with, A Delicate Balance is a masterpiece...Albee manages to keep the sadness, the mystery, and the ruthlessness in dynamic equilibrium, tipping this way and that but never crashing...Each fury, and there are many, is perfectly faceted and then rotated to capture different angles of the light...Luckily it is piercingly clear at the center. The question of what Agnes and Tobias should do about their best friends' need for succor grows quickly horrific after its hilarious introduction. This turn is partly the result of very fine work from Bob Balaban, and especially Clare Higgins, as Harry and Edna, who keep, yes, a delicate balance between the absurdity of their blandness and the primal terror of their plight. To watch Higgins flip from pitiful tears to snappish moralizing, both of them genuine, in a few lines of dialogue is to watch real character being built in real time. If neither Martha Plimpton as Julia nor Lindsay Duncan as Claire reaches quite the same extremes of inhabitation, they are both fine in difficult roles...It's enough to be in the presence of these words again. That they indict even as they tickle makes their pleasure more satisfying.

Despite what seemed like weeks of buzz about its radical transformations, the revival of Side Show that opened on Broadway tonight is not as meaningfully different from the 1997 original as its current creatives would like to think. Now as then, the cult musical about the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton is itself conjoined. (There's no avoiding the Siamese imagery; many of the songs, and even the title, play on the theme.) The story of the Hiltons' rise from circus freaks to vaudeville stars in the early 1930s, with all the requisite references to cultural voyeurism and its human costs, is fused to an intimate story of emotional accommodation between sisters as unalike as sisters can be. The problem with Side Show is that these stories can't be separated, and only one can thrive.

But nothing beats Jez Butterworth's new play The River for manliness: It's got Hugh Jackman, Wolverine himself, romancing some ladies and gutting a trout. Whether manliness is next to goodliness is a different question, one the play itself - riveting, troubling, thought-provoking, unsatisfying - struggles to embody and never really answers. Jackman, who alternates between camp and murk in his Broadway appearances, is nothing if not ambitious... So all credit to Jackman for making a difficult, highbrow work - the kind that namechecks Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and Yeats but does not name its characters - commercially viable.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, making a sensational Broadway debut as Annie, pulls off the especially difficult trick of wrangling all the messy contradictions of her character without losing her glowy sexiness for a minute...Likewise Ewan McGregor, another Broadway debutant, makes a passionate case for Henry the romantic without shortchanging his devastating verbal acuity...That the temperature of the characters is generally a few degrees warmer than in previous productions is surely the deliberate work of the director, Sam Gold, who has also made other choices to melt the ice...most significantly, he has the cast singing between every scene: lovely acoustic harmonizations of pop hits...This warmth has an odd effect though. It's pleasant but seems to undercut the cool brilliance of the writing.

This bigger, more glamorous Broadway version exposes more faults and infelicities, but also strips away one's liberal pieties more effectively. Perhaps Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize not so much for drama as for bravery...Akhbar's craft is such that, amid the rubble of his argument, the questions -- and they are important ones, worth asking on Broadway -- survive. Perhaps, after all, the argument was just a house for the questions, and not, as is more typical, vice versa...In general, though, the Broadway resizing and recasting does not work to the play's advantage. Kimberly Senior's direction grows stronger as the play proceeds, but nearly derails the story at the start, with confusing staging and flaccid pacing. And though Hari Dhillon is riveting in his unraveling, he does not make us understand, as the charming Aasif Mandvi did Off Broadway, what was so delightful about Amir before the trouble began.

On the Town is a heartbreakingly youthful work: both about youth and by youth. Watching its three sailors pursue a lifetime of adventure while on 24-hour shore leave in New York, New York, you can't help sensing the shadows of the three giddy pals who knocked the show together in 1944...And yet here it is, 70 years later, in its third Broadway revival, as big and breakneck and beautiful as ever. As imperfect, too; the revival, like the original, triumphs over some insufferable missteps...Everything great in On the Town, including the dances, begins in his score, and flowers from it, in alternating colors of blue and brass...So it's a pleasure to report that the musical aspects of the revival...are first-rate...The huge stage allows more room for Joshua Bergasse's choreography, which bows but does not scrape to the Robbins originals and is often quite gorgeous, especially in the self-contained numbers.

...when [McNally] writes about the theater, as he does in It's Only a Play...he knows what he's writing about. That's the great pleasure of it, and perhaps the great problem. It's the kind of show, filled with sly references and oversize personalities, that used to be called a back-stager or a love letter. But it isn't quite either. For one thing, it's more of an off-stager, set at the opening night party for a disaster-in-the-making called The Golden Egg...But having assembled a lifeboat of extreme personalities, McNally doesn't let much happen...Rather, what McNally offers, mostly in chop-chop joke format...is a comic rumination on life in the theater...If it's a love letter at all, it's a love letter to what theater has become, which is to say a horrible business filled with insane people, vindictive critics, and Tommy Tune.

There is more movement in The Curious Incident-the choreography is by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett-than in many a musical. All the technical elements, from lighting (by Paule Constable) to sound (by Ian Dickinson) are world-class. Yet no matter how brilliantly done, the choice to highlight the workings of Christopher's unusual brain onstage through narration and illustration comes with trade-offs. You fret over his confusion and follow his reasoning, but after a while they threaten to smother the drama.

What went wrong? Manhattan Theater Club, which did such a fine job on Margulies's Time Stands Still four years ago, has applied its usual polish, with Daniel Sullivan again directing. Yet the tone wobbles like one of those air socks at a car dealership: now inflated, now bent, mostly becalmed and flaccid. Perhaps the problem is that the play was purpose-built, commissioned by MTC, and too closely tailored to the interests, if not the real talents, of its star. Neither Danner nor the rest of the well-cast cast (Daniel Sunjata as the action star and Sarah Steele as the Yalie at least look spot-on) are able to get out ahead of their characters, to apply that spin that can make theater people, with their ludicrous vanities and bitter envy, enjoyable to watch. As a result, Anna and the others all just seem vain and entitled, which may have been accurate up in the Berkshires in Psacharopoulos's day but was never much worth watching.

There's no avoiding its old-fashionedness; You Can't Take It With You has a principal cast of 15, three acts, and a taste for whimsy over realism. Its idea of an au courant namedrop is Trotsky. But in this, the third of the eight 1930s collaborations between George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the dramatic architecture feels more purpose-built than those once-modish elements might suggest. The whimsy is tactical. The period is crucial. And the play's argument requires its big structure. That argument, as the title indicates, is about the uses of money: a topic no less worthy of consideration in 1938, when the country was leaping from depression toward war, than it is today, when it is doing something similar.

Gurney has an overfondness for structural tricks; another is currently on view in The Wayside Motor Inn at the Signature. But in Love Letters, at least, the artificial restriction brought out something compensatory in him, especially when the letters are allowed to escape their strict my-turn-your-turn alternation. Most moving are the holes, the lacunae left by one character's refusal, in a snit or in trouble, to reply, or to accept the feeble cajolery of the other, sometimes for years. The result, tellingly, is a spongiform record of a relationship. Are not all relationships as much empty space as connective tissue? But the pitfalls of the play's structure are just as evident, and Gurney steps right into them. How, for instance, do you end such a correspondence? Gurney does it, unfortunately, with an explicitly heart-tugging coda that breaks the frame - too little, too late. In a play (or even just an event) clearly meant to be a love letter to writing letters, he settles for a most uncomplimentary close.

Michael Cera, he of the turtle face and pipe-cleaner arms, has cornered the market on screen nerdism to the point you would think there was nothing left for him to mine from the indignations of the socially awkward. Turns out, given material deep enough, there is. He's found that material in Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth, and under Anna D. Shapiro's superlative direction uses it to fuel an unforgettable performance, the more so for marking his New York stage debut. As the overliteral, quasi-Asperger's lost-soul 19-year-old Warren Straub...he digs so far into the character's drugged-out disappointment you see only the shadows of it rippling the surface. Surprisingly that's enough; he's a triumph.

The show's ambition to remake the theater couldn't be more literal: The Palace has been converted from a traditional Broadway house into something more like a stadium, with its orchestra drastically foreshortened and steeply raked to meet the balcony after just nine rows. (Some 600 seats were eliminated in the process.) The former rear orchestra section is now given over to a few uncaptioned exhibits on loan from the National Museum of Hip-Hop, including a baby-blue tracksuit apparently worn by someone, and a pair of Timberland boots customized with portraits of Mandela and Obama. If the latter retrofit feels dinky and confusing, the bigger one, much mocked in theater chat rooms in anticipation, actually succeeds, all but hurling the audience into the action.

I'm not sure you could call Cumming, with his rouged nipples and S&M undergear, tame; certainly he's tireless. But as the only holdover cast member, he's also the only one with a need to articulate a deeper understanding of his character. I'm not sure this can be done with a character who is a concept; at any rate, Cumming over-articulates the Emcee, illustrating every word he speaks like a mime instructor. Some of the punch lines get killed by the huge pauses he takes to set them up...The performers who make the most of their material are in fact the two who have the least background in musicals. Michelle Williams's head voice is breathy, with a hummingbird vibrato; her belt is solid if somewhat coarse. But these are not handicaps with Sally, and in any case she acts the hell out of the role...Not even Richardson, superb as she was, brought quite this sense of brimming irrepressibility to the role: irrepressible eagerness and irrepressible sorrow. And, somehow, both together.