Joe McGovern

Thanks to his 40 years of work in movies and on TV - and his uniquely gnome-like, non-leading-man qualities - Danny DeVito is a performer with probably close to 100 percent name recognition. Me and you and everyone we've ever met know DeVito, whether from Taxi or Twins or Batman Returnsor It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And yet the actor is strangely underappreciated for his extraordinary comic timing, humongous heart, and inimitable presence. His unforgettable performance in Arthur Miller's The Price is serious reminder that DeVito belongs in the pantheon of greats. His supporting role - and the 72-year-old's Broadway debut - completely steals the spotlight in this wobbly revival of one of Miller's (deservedly) lesser-known plays about American male remorse and angst.

For the sixth time on Broadway, it's the season of the witch. Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, his raw if hyperbolic reenactment of the deadly Salem Witch Trials, struck a nerve when it first premiered in 1953 as a scorching condemnation of the House Un-American Activities Committee, then in the process of uprooting communists via innuendo, scare-mongering, and intimidation. The play's easy-to-understand themes of mob mentality and mass hysteria have made it Miller's most produced work (especially in high schools and colleges), yet in all honesty, the piece is somewhat flat when considered outside the allegory for McCarthyism. As a theatrical experience in 2016, The Crucible needs freshening up.

The material is self-evidently dark but the presentation is unrelentingly glum and lifeless..the play feels too severe and clandestine for such a big house...But the reason why audiences are drawn to the drama is because of the two plumb roles that offer a pair of performers the ultimate emotional tussle...Williams and Daniels are more than up to the challenge of going down the play's very dark road...And it just so happens that Daniels and Williams have both been working long enough as actors that we can picture what they would have looked like together. That my mind even went there is a testament to the play's dangerous pull. B

However, though the technical specs are excellent, the production suffers from a curious lack of tension. And, moreover, fun. The movie version had the benefit of close-ups, which Reiner took advantage of to the hilt, but in the play we feel too distanced from the intimacy and battle of wills that develops between Paul and Annie - or the notes of sympathy that is woven into each of them. Willis plays Paul with a flatness and passivity that feels too inert, even for a character who is bedbound. And as Annie, Laurie Metcalf is overly conscious of not echoing the line readings as they were delivered by Bates. During Annie's famous freak-out over Paul's decision to kill off his literary creation ('You murdered my Misery!'), Metcalf chooses the opposite tonal delivery for each of Bates' lines. And unlike in the book and the film, there's no grace period in which we discover that Annie is nuts. That's a symptom of making a play from material that is extremely well known, but it renders a great-looking production somewhat - to use a word - hobbled. B-

Though it was certainly never intended as such, Bartlett's text is also a boost to the recent argument (ignited by theOregon Shakespeare Festival) for presenting the Bard's work in modern vernacular. Richard III is written in free verse, an open form of poetry with no meter or rhyme, preferred by Shakespeare. But the language courses with the vivid moxie of 21st century life. Charles, in a moment of great frustration, refers to his subject's faces, 'Of no emotion, botoxed in place.' In a dazzling soliloquy in the first act, he speaks about the hipness and efficiency of GPS on a car, while smilingly comparing himself to a trusty old tool: 'When lost, and crisis strikes, we soon mistrust these modern ways, and reach for what we know: We seek the map.' We seek the map, too. Watching King Richard III is like looking at the topographical landscape of a familiar world, one which we faintly recognize despite not having yet seen. It is as fresh, as thrilling, and as awesome as an undiscovered country. A

Anyone who's ever slammed a door in anger will immediately recognize the hollow, stage-echo falseness of the two doors on the Fool for Love set-two doors that get slammed about once for each of the 75 minutes in Sam Shepard's 1983 play (playing now through Dec. 6 at Broadway's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre). The slamming, which produces a stereo boom you can feel in your organs, eventually becomes rote and numbing. As does much else in this staunch, uninvolving production, which features tempestuous performers in Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell, but offers them not much more than glum platitudes on bad romance.