Jesse Green

But even within the new play's sampling of seven cross-dressers, the meaning of the act varies widely. For some it's a hobby, for some a sexual fetish, for some a substitute for the worse sin of gayness, and for some an expression of deep allegiance to the feminine side of their soul. For most, regardless, it's also a jumble...In any case, the way these motives come together, or don't, to advance the cause of liberation for 'self-made women' is the subject of this fascinating if somewhat musty play...Luckily, Joe Mantello's disciplined direction pulls the script swiftly past its punch lines and sops up some of its sentimentality as well. The design and the cast (which also includes John Cullum, Larry Pine, Nick Westrate, and Lisa Emery) are up to the Manhattan Theatre Club's usual high standards. Still, none of these fine attributes can quite disguise the odor of over-ingratiation that clings to Casa Valentina like day-old Prince Matchabelli.

This new Broadway production is ridiculous not just on the copyright page of the script by Eric Coble but also on every page thereafter...The play proceeds to tick off every item on the bad playwriting checklist (not to mention fans of good theater). Purple prose? How about Alexandra's ode to her father's Zippo: 'The flame is pure. Primal. It's like going back to where we came from. Like home.' Overwrought existential imagery? In a long monologue Alexandra compares life, with its spiraling perspectives, to the Guggenheim Museum...Deploying every trick she knows, Parsons miraculously makes this whirlwind of clichés coherent, but nothing can make her believable. And Stephen Spinella, in a sad ponytail wig as Chris, is essentially her caddy: carrying the lumpy bags of exposition and teeing up her shots. Nor can the director Molly Smith -- whose one big gesture, an aural cataclysm before the curtain, is a gross overreach -- do much to improve the texture of a play that's so synthetic it slips out of your memory even as you watch it.

But when it sings, Violet obviates such concerns. I don't mean just when it melodizes. Crawley's dialogue is as pungent and musical as his lyrics. And in Sutton Foster he and Tesori have found the ideal star. Foster has never been a vain actress, but here she seems to relish the opportunity to strip away everything inessential. (She has one costume, and it ain't pretty.) All spunk erased from her delivery, she's riveting in her portrayal of a woman who, despite everything, is ready to learn, from a black friend, about the thinness of skin. That's a very American story, in contrast, say, to The Cripple of Inishmaan, in which the title character's deformity particularizes the universal and irreversible ugliness of humanity. We're never even shown Violet's disfigurement - which, by the end, is the only thing wrong with her.

McDonagh - and Michael Grandage, who directs this near-perfect revival of the 1996 play, starring Daniel Radcliffe as Billy - pull out every stage-Irish trope for mockery: the flute music, the dour demeanors, the drink, the damp stone huts, the foul language, the overcolorful names. (Another character is Babbybobby Bennett, sometimes also known as Bobbybabbybobby.) It's hilarious - unless, I suppose, you're drunk, damp, deformed, demented, Irish, or human.

Unfortunately, the production that has actually resulted will likely satisfy neither the acolytes nor the cynics. Act One, the play, is too mild for the former and too credulous for me. Which is not to say it has no charms; charm is nearly all it has. Dozens of scenes, mostly the same length, paint pretty pictures of Hart's life...But this format of narration and illustration, enabled by Beowulf Boritt's gigantic revolving three-story set, is the opposite of dramatic; it's formal and repetitive like a pop-up book, about the last thing you want from Hart's you-go-kid story. The actors strain to connect, but it isn't until near the end of the long evening that any of them are given enough playable conflict to swing at.

Lennie is the showier role, and O'Dowd, in his Broadway debut, does not waste its opportunities. (Who knew from his appearances on Girls and in Bridesmaidshe could be so masterful?)...O'Dowd normalizes Lennie with a degree of humor and self-consciousness that's disarming...George has no such ingratiations to offer the audience, except the complicated love for his friend. As a result, Franco, a better actor than his meta-shenanigans sometimes suggest, gets off to a shaky start...Later though, as George becomes more protective and unselfish, Franco not only aligns himself with the part but justifies his star casting. The ambiguity of the bond between Lennie and George -- a bond regarded by other characters with suspicion or approval -- is well served by the ambiguity Franco bears with him always, like a perfume.

You will undoubtedly hear that what Audra McDonald is doing as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill is not an impersonation. It is, though. However much more it eventually becomes, it starts with capturing that eccentric, heartbreaking voice - and the capture is uncanny. Right from the first syllables of 'I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone,' which opens the show, McDonald nails the pinched tone, side-mouth delivery, and precipitous register leaps of Holiday in her heyday. Consonants are negotiable: 'love' is more like 'luhw.' Final vowels become dramatic opportunities: 'Hear my plea-uh and hurry home to me-uh!' Pitch is obscure or even absent; some notes sound fried in place yet remain part of the melody. McDonald's Holiday doesn't so much sing as play her voice, like a saxophone, with perfect confidence in (or indifference to) its expressive powers.

Which pair of Joneses, if either, is the 'realistic' one is not made clear, or even addressed, though a certain merging of identities in the Albee manner makes the question moot. This is not altogether unappealing. The jokes are funny, and when their content supports character development, as sometimes randomly happens, they even land quite nicely. The growing tension between Bob and John - a matter of peacock territoriality and something darker, it would seem - naturally finds expression in such conversational gambits...Eno brings a decided intellectual panache to the genre (as opposed to, say, Lisa D'Amour's more emotional Detroit) but I'm not sure that's an improvement if the aim is to produce meaning; it's like producing water by squeezing a hamperful of damp clothes. You might be able to do it, but is it worth the effort? So even though The Realistic Joneses is smart and witty and beautifully produced, it's not exactly enjoyable. As Groucho Marx, who knew from paraprosdokians, once said, 'I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

Everyone's moaning about Denzel Washington's age...Well, none of that matters. If anything, Washington comes off as no more mature than his character's pre-adolescent son. His Walter has the caught-in-a-trap itchiness of a teenager. He doesn't walk but rolls into a room, his loosey-goosey limbs desperately insinuating a joie de vivre his actual living lacks. (He's a chauffeur.) Washington has always been a very physical actor, locating the essence of a role in his body and in the music of the words, when he could get his mouth around them...Here, in the second Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry's classic, he's almost dancing the part, especially in a priceless drunk scene that ends with his burlesquing black minstrelsy and all but singing 'Mammy.' Even without reference to the previous Broadway Walter -- a stuporous Sean Combs -- this is an electric performance; you forget about the actor's age as quickly as you forget, in most plays that are cast color-blind, about race.

If/Then surely answers all those needs. You absolutely never know what is going to happen, right up to the last, surprisingly moving beat. You appreciate its addressing the central dilemma of career vs. family in a very direct way and then, quietly but completely, undermining it in the end. That it does all this while also looking as beautiful, and moving as smoothly, as any modern show could, with superior performances from top to bottom from a gorgeously multi-everything cast, are just some of the signs that the director Michael Greif is offering his finest work to date.

Tyne Daly isn't in Master Class this year, but she's giving one. And, paradoxically, rule No. 1 is: Give nothing away. As Katharine Gerard in Mothers and Sons, she doesn't clue you in to her intentions, or tease her next moves, or make big faces to indicate her anger at the world: an anger so unrelenting she could 'let that ottoman put me in a rage.' She resists crying and tells no jokes but jerks the most tears from the audience and gets the evening's biggest laughs just by standing or sitting and doing the plainest things. She reaches for a drink to balance her nerves, then doesn't drink it. She fishes reading glasses from her purse before looking through photos of her dead son. She stands within her secondhand fur coat as if it were armor.

..to say this production is not as bombastic as the original is to rate it at perhaps an 8 instead of a 10 on the Hugo scale. (The 2012 movie cannot even be measured with current technology.) At the same time, the simplified staging works against the show by further exposing the thinness of the writing...Ramin Karimloo, a next-generation mega-musical expert, who is passionate and precise as Valjean and delivers the most exquisite 'Bring Him Home' I've ever heard. A less-expected delight is Will Swenson. Though his Broadway credits (including Hair and Priscilla Queen of the Desert) did not suggest the stature and discipline needed for an effective Javert, he offers a highly mannered but convincing interpretation, biting decisively into every musical phrase like a Doberman. But in cramming the rest of the story into three hours, the authors have cherry-picked Hugo's plot so mercilessly that only its highlights remain. The result is both thin and flat, with nearly everything pitched at the same overwrought level.

For Aladdin, Disney's team builds on the take-no-chances, take-no-prisoners lessons of its six Broadway predecessors to all but guarantee a quality hit: if not a Lion King, at least not a Tarzan. They wrote the book on this sort of thing, and now, Walt be praised, they're going to heave it at you. This is not as unpleasant an experience as it sounds; if you're up for a meaningless fling, it might as well be with a pro... If the whole enterprise is arranged to prevent us from taking anything seriously, why should we respond when we're suddenly asked to care? (Spamalot didn't ask us to.) This also makes the romantic roles mostly unactable, at least by the stiff cuties Disney favors...So here's a new fantastic point of view: What if Disney applied its unparalleled know-how to stories that are not reducible to needlepoint truths at the first act curtain? Aladdin will surely be another of its successes; I hope it is. But what if it put its corporate muscle and smarts behind an artist instead of a franchise? What if they gave us a new West Side Story or Gypsy, instead of just quoting them for anachronistic laughs?

Take the score, by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, who (as Ragtimedemonstrated) know their way around iconic Americana. They work very carefully here, slowly developing a general musical atmosphere with shards of sung dialogue before allowing the emergence of a straight-up song. But, boy, do you feel the work. Ahrens, scrambling for hooks that won't sound musical theaterish and twee, has actually found some, but they come at the cost of a certain outlandishness, like Rocky's introductory solo 'My Nose Ain't Broken.' Similarly, Flaherty has identified a reasonable sound for the gritty story: guitar-heavy, with throbbing-headache bass, and bright chrome-on-a-used-car flugelhorning as suggested by Bill Conti's original movie scores...But within that compelling sound Flaherty mostly fails to make compelling songs...But because garage-band writing, however apt for the material, doesn't develop but rather repeats in torpid cells, the songs don't lift: they barely even move. Instead, the set does.

The Bridges of Madison County, though based on an insipid novel, is a very serious musical indeed, both rapturous and moral, with a gorgeous score by Jason Robert Brown. It is also one of the few recent Broadway shows to take up the challenge laid down by the great midcentury works of R&H and their cohort: to tell stories that weld important sociological upheavals to personal conflicts and somehow make them sing...the leading performances, shaped by Sher to preserve a sense of character modesty within the vocal extravagance, are exemplary. Kelli O'Hara, who plays Francesca, is never better than when working from loss and confusion; her prettiness has always contained more than a hint of hurt, which gives her voice its richest colors...And barihunk Steven Pasquale, as Robert, who starred opposite O'Hara in Far From Heaven off Broadway last spring...at last gets a chance to be heard singing on Broadway. He was worth the wait.

Simonson's stabs at spiritual significance sink Bronx Bombers just as they did his previous outings. Had he elected to stick with a character-based 'backstage' story, as he does in the first scene, he might have had a winner this time...It's not just that the story, having jettisoned whatever was interesting about it, is so undeserving of the emotional extremes that surrealism at its best can illustrate. It's also that Simonson, emerging from the dream, has nothing left to pitch. A lame wrap-up scene set in 2008, during the final game at the old Yankee Stadium, squeezes the nostalgia sponge well past the point where anything can be wrung from it.

Outside Mullingar is comforting in its theatrical familiarity. On the packing list of required elements, no item is left unchecked. Irish-ish stars? Sure: The production is headed by Brían F. O'Byrne (born in County Cavan) and Debra Messing (hey, she's got red hair). Dank setting? John Lee Beatty's scenery looks like it was dredged from a peat bog. An old Hibernian air? Please join me in singing 'Wild Mountain Thyme.' Everything, including the kitchen sink, screams Ireland as we know it from plays great and small: the wellies, the crucifix, the rain, the mad stories, the fierce colleen, the crafty old man, the wake, the Guinness, the touch of the poet. It begins with a yarn and is itself a yarn.

Whatever moral shiftiness may be squirming beneath its surface, Machinal is at least as worthy of revival as O'Neill's Strange Interlude, another expressionistic drama that opened on Broadway in 1928. Happily, the Roundabout, which has been steadily upgrading its 'classic' offerings in terms of both choice and execution, gives it the top-drawer mounting it deserves. The director, Lyndsey Turner, making an exceptional U.S. debut, pulls off the neat trick of realizing a Big Idea without letting it consume the play. She's also elicited compelling performances from the large supporting cast, and mustered all the technical elements into a comprehensible if resolutely mysterious whole.

Everything in Beautiful sounds better on Jessie Mueller. Or, for that matter, on Jake Epstein as Goffin, Jarrod Spector as Mann, and Anika Larsen as Weil. To the extent the show remains bizarrely enjoyable despite its essential hackishness, it's this central quartet of performers who make it happen. (The musical arrangements by Steve Sidwell are also good - and bonus points for hiring Dillon Kondor, King's grandson, on guitar.) Of course, there are the songs themselves, which excuse many faults. At one point we hear an actor playing Neil Sedaka sing his 1959 hit 'Oh! Carol,' supposedly written in heartbreak over King, whom he'd dated. 'It's a song, not a deposition,' King tells her worried mother. Beautiful is no deposition, god knows; there's virtually nothing true in it. But at its best, and only then, it's a song.

Everything in Beautiful sounds better on Jessie Mueller. Or, for that matter, on Jake Epstein as Goffin, Jarrod Spector as Mann, and Anika Larsen as Weil. To the extent the show remains bizarrely enjoyable despite its essential hackishness, it's this central quartet of performers who make it happen. (The musical arrangements by Steve Sidwell are also good - and bonus points for hiring Dillon Kondor, King's grandson, on guitar.) Of course, there are the songs themselves, which excuse many faults. At one point we hear an actor playing Neil Sedaka sing his 1959 hit 'Oh! Carol,' supposedly written in heartbreak over King, whom he'd dated. 'It's a song, not a deposition,' King tells her worried mother. Beautiful is no deposition, god knows; there's virtually nothing true in it. But at its best, and only then, it's a song.

And then, while you may be out having dinner, all the names change. Spooner and Hirst become Godot’s Estragon and Vladimir, the forlorn tramps condemned to an eternity of frustrated hope. Briggs becomes Pozzo, the fatuous landowner on whose property they trespass, and Foster becomes Lucky, his quasi-equine luggage-toting slave. The handsome sets by Stephen Brimson Lewis make a transition as well; when the curtain rises this time, Hirst’s home has lifted away to reveal, in Beckett’s woeful description of the setting, “A country road. A tree.” All that remains of Pinter’s poshness is the ruined classical frame at the proscenium, calling to mind an ancient theater.

This is all quite hilarious, going well beyond the old British trope of mistaken identity into the realm of existential terror. The comedy arises from the contrast between that terror, mostly interior to the two men individually, and the tortuous forms of speech they’ve evolved to keep it that way. No cliché is left unturned. (Of his mother, Spooner says, “I was fortunate to escape with my life.”) And while Hirst may seem at first too decrepit to play with words — in Act One Stewart squeezes great comedy out of merely considering saying something — he emerges in Act Two suddenly hale and lucid. This is extreme but not absurd. Who has not felt the shock of other people’s alteration? Or the slow apprehension of one’s own?

...the authors of the new musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder aim for droll comedy; especially in the knock-'em-dead performance of Jefferson Mays as various undearly departeds, they usually hit their mark...what this material needed from its songs, and does not get, is exactly what Mays brought to his task: a strong, clear, distinctive profile. Without it, for all its merits, the show never quite achieves musical liftoff. You want the score to raise the dead, not just bury them.

At one point in the return engagement of 700 Sundays, Billy Crystal recalls the first comedian he ever saw: an old-school tummler, circa 1958, prowling the stage at Kutsher's 'like a panther.' All these decades later, Crystal impersonates this creature, with his disowned aggression and tired shtick - 'Good evening, ladies and Jews' - way too well, and not just because he quickly borrowed the material to perform for his family back home in Long Beach. Crystal, now 65, is himself a brilliant repackager of tired material, with the timing of that panther, if a humbler presentation. (He wears, instead of a tux, black jeans and a sweater.) But make no mistake, he will eat you if you let him.

This is typical of the way the Globe’s methods enhance the experience of Twelfth Night. But it would be an excellent production anyway. It is (like Richard) beautifully spoken and perfectly audible throughout the theater without a single microphone. With so little in the way of trickery to fall back on, the actors’ choices are especially clear and sometimes novel. Samuel Barnett (one of the History Boys on Broadway) is a touching Viola and a game Cesario; Liam Brennan makes Orsino’s melancholy unusually manly; Angus Wright’s Aguecheek is somehow dignified in his imbecility. And Stephen Fry, in his first Broadway appearance, makes a smart and original case for Malvolio. Usually a grotesque prig and egomaniac, he is here nothing much worse than a stuffy manager-type; it is only the vicious baiting of the court rowdies that exposes his repressed self-delight and gaudy inner fop.