Jesse Green

Rylance is also the comic engine of Richard III, but the success of that unusual choice is more equivocal. Certainly Richard is amused by his own depravity; after murdering Lady Anne’s husband and father, and prettily getting her to marry him anyway, he instantly gloats: “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? / Was ever woman in this humour won?” But Rylance takes from such cues an idea of Richard as a grotesque glad-hander, an audience whisperer of Al Jolson proportions. He grubs for laughter, plays up his self-pitying streak as a ruse we are all in on. He’s perfectly happy to pimp his deformity, here rendered as a slightly warped leg and a tiny withered hand hanging from a palsied wrist like a brace of deflated balloons. You may think of Kristen Wiig’s demented Dooneese Boylan character.

If the ensemble dancing never quite rises to the level of the specialty solos and duets, and if one or two concepts for production numbers fizzle, After Midnightis still an unmitigated pleasure. And it may be the best kind of pleasure: the kind that changes with time. (After Barrino leaves the show in February, scheduled guest stars include k.d. lang, Toni Braxton, and Kenny 'Babyface' Edmonds.) Presumably, theatrical archeologists of the future won't have as hard a time rediscovering After Midnight as our era's transcribers did in rescuing the Ellington material. Because this is one for the record books.

A very tasteful, tranquil, and often beautiful performance of Betrayal begins. Its style is best exemplified by Ian MacNeil's scenery - a series of translucent boxes that fit within one another like Matryoshka dolls and float into place as scene succeeds scene. Or do scenesprecede scenes? Both, really. Though the standard description of Pinter's 'reverse chronology' is inaccurate (people don't speak backward, and several scenes in a row actually move forward) the overall trajectory is indeed toward the past...A bigger problem is the surprising lack of detail in the acting. Craig delivers a solid performance; he's smart and emphatic and deeply engaged, but not psychologically nuanced. (I'd like to see him in The Homecoming.) Weisz gives Emma a petulant spin that makes her seem a bit unlikely as the fulcrum of the ménage. (Well, she does look great.) The two feel deployed, not exposed. Spall, though, is sensational. He renders Jerry's various selves (randy, sexy, selfish, sulky, self-justifying) not as a series of poses but as a solid-state condition: the blur of traits by which great acting impersonates personality.

The Snow Geeselacks two qualities whose absence can't be finessed. One is freshness. Whereas Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, another Chekhov gloss, successfully put the master's archetypes in amusingly new situations, White gives us a play we feel like we've already seen...The actors do what they can, but here, too, there is a mismatch. On one team you have Mary-Louise Parker as Elizabeth, looking lovely in her widow's weeds. Parker can be extraordinarily compelling when playing contemporary characters; her thinking process, with all its starts and stops and pauses and reversals, is unusually legible and honest. (She'd be excellent in White's terrific play The Other Place, recently on Broadway.) Characters who are less modern pose a problem for her though, because they are usually written to think withthe lines, not between them. Parker just doesn't gravitate that way, and because her pull is so powerful the audience gets dragged into her style instead of the play's, and so do some of the young actors playing her sons.

Quick and confident characterizations, along with a very delicate balancing of them, are needed to keep a play so full of contrary energies from pulling apart; the Roundabout's 2011 Rattigan outing, Man and Boy, suffered from a too marvelous, overwhelming central performance by Frank Langella. Here, despite Nivola's bravura, the fireworks are better distributed, with Roger Rees, as the curmudgeon, mostly keeping in check his eagerness to amuse. Instead, he carefully delineates the steps along the path of the father's crisis, from gleeful chin-first aggression to obsession to exhaustion to resignation. And Michael Cumpsty, looking like a walking toothache, turns in a beautifully modulated comic performance as the nice man who will never get his girl. Quickly and piercingly he makes it clear that every person's disappointment is the world's.

Still, distraction, even when it's enchanting and absolutely necessary, is not itself a viable dramaturgy. If Paulus has succeeded, against the odds, in shaping a satisfying modern Broadway spectacle from material that's fairly empty...it's because she must have realized that the other thing she needed was an actor who could definitively cut through the dreck. Enter Andrea Martin as Pippin's feisty grandma, Berthe. A ham's ham but one with total discipline, Martin is both warm and demanding; she knows when to let out some line and when to snap it back...The somewhat stiff, presentational style of the other actors (Patina Miller as the Leading Player is awesome but not exactly mellow) relaxes, and so does the audience, now confident of getting what it came for.

Which, despite the expert attention of director Joe Mantello, is what I'll Eat You Last would do without Midler. She isn't delivering an impersonation or even exactly acting a role; she's running the Mengers prototype through her own sensibility and seeing what comes out.

The problem, intermittently, is the tone. The director, Michael Wilson, a Foote expert, for some reason lets much of the first act play like comedy. Humor is there in the script, no doubt, especially in the animosity between the two women; when Jessie Mae fumes, Carrie feigns subservience, then does exactly what she wants to anyway. But Williams’s hauteur and stupendous beauty throw the scale out of whack, and Tyson overcompensates with antic old-ladyisms.

Mary is becoming more modern, or rather, incorporating more modernity into her timelessness. This is subtly and thrillingly done, not just by Shaw, who is endlessly resourceful and even manages to squeeze a few laughs from the definitionally tragic material...The Testament of Mary does not work like most other plays, solo or otherwise, nor even like Tóibín's wonderful novella, which seems to occur spontaneously-an immaculate conception-in the reader's imagination. Instead, Warner has met the burden of staging the material by dividing it into a series of what might be called parables, albeit parables of skepticism.

The economy and cleverness of the staging is no less than you might expect from Tiffany especially, whose direction in both downtown and uptown modes (Black Watch at St. Ann's; Once on Broadway) displays an uncommon facility with big but delicate gestures. Every element of the design-set, sound, costume, video, lighting-is ideally tailored to the concept. And Cumming is more disciplined than you might imagine; his delicious sense of camp is confined to the appropriate characterizations, and his voice for verse, with those big Scots vowels, is outstanding. He's tireless and brave in enacting a difficult story.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. Or perhaps it was a castle in Transylvania, or the island of Monte Cristo, or a wormhole to Wonderland, or some other place known to us from classic novels with presold stories and no copyright protection...No matter; the techno thrums and swoopy electronica of the overture made it clear we were in Wildhornia, that land of dark roiling clouds, where actors scream, all the time, and no one alive-or, especially, dead-is safe from predation.

You can see why actors are attracted to it: The roles, with their various stylistic references and physical demands, are almost like five-finger exercises for drama students. And audiences enjoy watching them flex. I did too: It's undeniably a pleasure to hand yourself over to Baldwin for two hours. And under Daniel Sullivan's typically impeccable direction, Ben Foster and Tom Sturridge are also excellent as Teach and Phillip, the former giving a more naturalist performance and the latter pulling out all the expressionistic stops...But roles, even as well filled as they are in this production, don't make theater, and the question that lingers after the swift little dream of Orphans passes is: What just happened?

The Assembled Parties-despite that bland title-is Greenberg's most richly emotional work in years, and the most beautifully detailed...And the director, Lynne Meadow, who is also MTC's artistic director, has given it a top-drawer mounting. She seems to have taken a cue from Jessica Hecht's heartbreaking Julie in keeping the pathos at bay as resolutely and as long as possible. When it finally insists itself-as it does, for instance, in a very quick gulp of regret handled with marvelous economy by Judith Light as Faye-it is much more painful than a weepy speech would have been. (Light mostly makes hilarious, even triumphant speeches-good practice for the Tonys.)

For Beane, the play is a revelation that effects a rehabilitation. After writing the books of three fairly trite musicals, he has found a way to harness his love of camp and make it do something other than amuse with diminishing returns. When The Nance is sharp, it's very sharp indeed. But it isn't perfect; Beane will go almost anywhere for a joke, even years into the future, and the storytelling gets woozy and frankly a bit lost whenever it leaves the central plot behind...But Lane, in the apotheosis of his sad clown routine, is sensational throughout. Rarely have his innate qualities of pathos and quacking cheer been put to better use; it's hard to decide whether Beane has given him a part he was born to play or he has given Beane a role he was born to write.

To a roomful of people who have rarely if ever been part of the creation of a major musical, perhaps it seemed sufficient to tie a few dozen presold numbers together with just enough thread to tell a story. (Mamma Mia! has so far grossed more than $534 million on Broadway doing just that.) But the problem with jukeboxes has never been the songs. The problem is that when songs are forced to tell a tale they weren't designed for, they lose their deeper effectiveness, and usually end up like leeches, no longer supporting but sucking. In that respect, Motown is the worst jukebox (with the best tunes) I've ever encountered.

With an insider's devastating combination of repulsion and affection, [Ephron]'s written a most unlikely thing: a play about journalism, or really about telling stories, that is as rich and rough and elegiac and fun as the lost world it re-creates...Ephron was damned lucky; few writers write their best work last and manage to go out with a bang. She was lucky, too, in having eventually convinced Tom Hanks, who had been reluctant, to star as McAlary...And while it's no little compliment to his performance to say it is as good as that of his castmates, who are excellent from top to bottom, the triumph belongs to Ephron and Wolfe, who are almost one entity here. In shaping the final working script, Wolfe had access to Ephron's drafts and notes, and did no more or less than what Ephron, as engaged an author as ever there was, would clearly have approved.

How do you replace documentary reality with coherent drama when there's virtually no forward action except people collapsing? Hardbody's model seems to be A Chorus Line....The production is earnest and solidly performed by a cast including Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster under the direction of Neil Pepe. But all of their skill, and the authors', can't finesse a problem of emotional scale. How much can even a Texan want a truck?...For all the worthy effort to valorize lives not usually depicted in musicals, this has the opposite effect: It makes them seem petty.

It's more like Breakfast at Woolworth's: grittier perhaps, but hardly aspirational. Can't a girl be left to her dreams?

The real problem is how the different parts of the play connect to one another.... You begin to get the feeling that Durang, in modeling his structure on Chekhov, invested in the best luggage available and then packed it like someone with five minutes to get to the airport. Some of what comes out of the valise is gorgeous: thoughtful, quiet moments but also perfectly crafted comedy scenes that sustain their dizziness for improbably long stretches. Other elements-notably the borderline-offensive black cleaning lady, who's all sass and voodoo-make you think: Why did he bring that?...Like its Chekhovian characters, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is assembled from mismatched parts and is desperate for affection, which it miraculously earns.

This isn’t a political ad, and anyway, the audience is already sold. How could it not be? With no live foils onstage — another unavoidable condition of the genre — Taylor works the room relentlessly. Every laugh is procured and brought home like pork. And while she is a fine enough actress to integrate that kind of wolfishness into her characterization, you can’t help thinking it would be nice if she could press some actual onstage, co-star flesh. After all, it’s not just a good line and good politics, but good playwriting advice as well, when Taylor has Richards say, near the end, “Why should your life be just about you?”