Jesse Oxfeld — Theater Critic

In the British director John Doyle's emotionally rich and visually striking new production of The Color Purple...there is an elegant staging and three gorgeous star performances...Jennifer Hudson makes her Broadway debut here, and it only reconfirms that she's a star...Danielle Brooks...is Sofia, the rare woman in this world willing to stand up to her husband...she turns out to be a gifted stage actress. She's funny, sensitive, and compulsively charismatic...Erivo...plays Celie, who is diminished and defeated through much of the story but finally finds her strength. Erivo's portrayal of that transformation is remarkable. A quiet, subdued performance slowly gathers conviction, and when finally Celie asserts herself with her climatic anthem of self-possession, 'I'm Here,' its power is astonishing.

School of Rock isn't perfect. But if, as the musical suggests, perfection is less the point than trying hard and having fun doing so, then it succeeds. There's a bit in it, repeated from the movie, in which Dewey tries to convince the other teachers that he has an educational philosophy by lifting some lines from Whitney Houston. And if the children are in fact our future, School of Rock suggests we're in pretty good hands. B+

One note: a distraction from that joy on the night we attended was a cell phone that went off during the final, quiet, climatic moments of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” its ringtone set to that old-fashioned, Ma Bell rrriiinnnggg. Ms. LuPone once suggested, famously and angrily, that we have lost our public manners. That she did not stop this show to throttle the offender suggests she was right, and that the phones have won. It’s enough to make you cry.

Yet in 2011, after Real Worlds and Real Housewives, after three decades of media-star pontiffs, Blue Leaves feels very much like an artifact of the late 1960s. At a time when some of its key surrealism is commonplace, Blue Leaves' other antic bits of wackiness—a fatal bombing played for laughs; hearing aids confused for pills—are still funny but land less effectively. The farcical elements don't build up the comedy of ridiculous premises; they instead rub awkwardly against the entirely reasonable.

Smoothly directed by Doug Hughes on a sumptuous hotel suite of a set by John Lee Beatty, Born Yesterday is a perfectly pleasant, perfectly pretty, perfectly tidy and perfectly forgettable three-acter. The one thing you won't forget is its Billie—who shows that there can be a lot lurking behind a vacant, pretty face.

Thank God for Kathleen Turner. I say this not just because she plays a woman of God, a foulmouthed nun, in her new star vehicle High. No, I thank God for Ms. Turner because without her measured, commanding and utterly compelling performance as Sister Jamison Connelly in this melodrama about addiction, religion and redemption, sitting through High would be like sitting through an ABC After School Special.

But that's the accomplishment of Wonderland, written by Gregory Boyd and Jack Murphy, with music by Frank Wildhorn and lyrics by Mr. Murphy, and frenzied direction by Mr. Boyd. Its story is so overwrought and incomprehensible, its good cheer so forcibly relentless, its songs so overbelted and overmiked, that it blends into something entirely soporific.

It's too bad the story is so sadly simplistic, because Ms. Elliott's and Mr. Morris' stagecraft is so sublime. This play is full of literally breathtaking moments of theatrical inventiveness and stunning visuals—Joey and his fellow horses; a cavalry charge on the front; even the small, witty touch of an overeager goose on Albert's farm, a puppet on a bicycle wheel pushed by an actor. But, for all that, War Horse is based on a children's story, and it remains no more emotionally complex. Not long into the second act, the tedium of the predictable story begins to weigh more heavily than the thrill of the visual creativity. That's when you realize you're watching the cloying tale of a boy with an unnatural love for a half-thoroughbred.

The Motherf**ker With the Hat is something you don't see on Broadway much: a tough and fresh portrait of working-class life in modern, multicultural New York.

The Motherf**ker With the Hat is something you don't see on Broadway much: a tough and fresh portrait of working-class life in modern, multicultural New York.

John Larroquette, well cast in his own Broadway debut, gives it his smarmy all as J.B. Biggley, the World Wide Widgets president whom Finch successfully games. Derek McLane has designed a towering and very early-'60s modular set, all pastels and grays on a latticework of hexagons, like a singing three-martini lunch at whatever they're now calling Lever House restaurant. Catherine Zuber's costumes match: grays and pastels in mod slim suits and pillbox hats. And director and choreographer Rob Ashford has assembled a sprawling chorus and given them some gorgeous production numbers full of detailed, twitchy, athletic dances.

What's playing at the Palace is a high-volume, high-energy, never-let-up disco-drag spectacular with a pulsing soundtrack full of Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Madonna. Its (not particularly complex) source material has been dumbed down into a simple jukebox musical—and it's perhaps the best jukebox musical I've seen.

What's playing at the Palace is a high-volume, high-energy, never-let-up disco-drag spectacular with a pulsing soundtrack full of Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Madonna. Its (not particularly complex) source material has been dumbed down into a simple jukebox musical—and it's perhaps the best jukebox musical I've seen.

But be warned: The theater is kept at near-arctic temperatures, apparently to keep Mr. Reubens from sweating through his iconic gray suit and white face makeup. A trip down memory lane is nice, but it can also begin to drag, especially when you’ve got your collar turned up, your hands buried in your pockets, and you can no longer feel your toes.

Elf's tone can shift wildly, from naïve kids' humor to knowingly grown-up material. Many of the jokes don't land, whether dated ('Who's Billy Crystal? He sounds magical!') or just awkward, like Santa's line when he rushes in late for Act II ('Sorry, sorry, just made a quick trip to the cocoa cart, if you know what I mean,' which is either scatological or nonsensical but either way not funny). Everything seems flat, except a few production numbers and the show's one redeeming feature: Its star, Sebastian Arcelus, who manages to be the only one onstage having the consistently high-energy good time a show like this would seem to require. It's a Christmas miracle.

Ms. Rabe's portrayal is mesmerizing. The young actress is of course beautiful, poised and confident, but there's more. She displays an inner intelligence and certainty even at moments when the play allows Portia to be more frivolous, and she forcefully holds her own on the stage, even opposite Mr. Pacino, when Portia, disguised as a young jurist, faces off with Shylock and outwits him, depriving the moneylender his pound of flesh.

Mr. Yazbek's Spanish-inflected music is upbeat and catchy, and his smart lyrics are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The costumes (by Catherine Zuber) are awesomely bright and zany (her leopard-print Spy-vs.-Spy ensemble for Ms. LuPone's entrance deserves its own Tony), and the sets (by Michael Yeargan) are similarly spectacular.

Mr. Quinn is funniest when he's finding unexpected connections. Economists missed the impending collapse, he suggests, because they hold their annual conference in Davos, Switzerland: 'It's Plato's cave theory, which was basically if you live in a cave and all you see are shadows outside, you think that shadows are what's real. So if they hold the economic summit in Switzerland, you walk out of the hotel, 'Hey, things look pretty good. I'll see you next year.''

But the real star of the show is the director and choreographer Susan Stroman, who here creates some of her best work. There are exaggerated, athletic shuck-n-jive movements for the minstrel numbers, an upbeat tap dance around an electric chair and a brilliant pas de deux between a boy and a projected shadow as he recalls a lynching. It's the classic Kander and Ebb twist: horrible things, presented spectacularly.

It's a fine TV special, but it's not very riveting theater. And on TV it would have had what it conspicuously lacks here: narration by that deep, gravelly NFL Films voice.

In Mr. Esjornson's staging, the final scene—Daisy revealed, alone in a wheelchair—is stunning; it brings a tear to even a hardened theater critic's eye. Throughout, indeed, one's heart is warmed. But there's also nothing in the play that's tough or unexpected or genuinely thrilling. But that's what Miss Daisy likes: a smooth, easy ride.

Indeed, Rain might well be the brilliantly empty apotheosis of the jukebox musical: the songs it knows the audience wants to hear, unencumbered by a script that may or may not work. Without its plot, Good Vibrations would have been a pleasant night of cute kids in bathing suits singing Beach Boys hits. Ring of Fire, one of the small handful of shows I've fled at intermission, would have been just a Johnny Cash revue. This drama-free exercise is not, then, a play. And it's debatable whether it's really worth spending $121.50 for an orchestra seat to what by all rights you should be seeing in a bar.

Indeed, Rain might well be the brilliantly empty apotheosis of the jukebox musical: the songs it knows the audience wants to hear, unencumbered by a script that may or may not work. Without its plot, Good Vibrations would have been a pleasant night of cute kids in bathing suits singing Beach Boys hits. Ring of Fire, one of the small handful of shows I've fled at intermission, would have been just a Johnny Cash revue. This drama-free exercise is not, then, a play. And it's debatable whether it's really worth spending $121.50 for an orchestra seat to what by all rights you should be seeing in a bar.

And that points to another stumbling block: No matter how well acted—and this play is very well acted—it's not so much fun to spend two hours with an unbearable bore.

The sets and costumes, by Santo Loquasto and Laura Bauer, make the visual jokes of the show work brilliantly. We see the actors in the dressing room, in an empty theater and in mid-production, watching from behind as they play to an imagined audience along the upstage wall. The actors work their way through doughboy uniforms for a World War I scene, Elizabethan costume for a discussion of fencing technique, Napoleonic dress for when their climb upon the barricades, and on and on.