John Lahr

In Rob Ashford’s inspired revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert, with music by Frank Loesser), we watch with delight as J. Pierpont Finch (Daniel Radcliffe) rises by cunning degrees from window washer to chairman of the board. Every nanosecond of this well-cast production is eloquent with craft and wit. But the laurels of the evening go to Radcliffe and the towering John Larroquette, as the boss, J. B. Biggley. Radcliffe’s youthful brightness is a perfect foil for Larroquette’s dopey severity. Radcliffe is having the time of his life; you feel his joy.

Bringing Pee-wee back is an act of courage in defiance of the media’s puritanical twittering; it is also a great relief to his legion of fans, who, on the night I saw the show, were whooping it up long before Pee-wee skittered onstage like a bow-tied water bug, his face clenched in its familiar rictus of surprise and delight.

'Women on the Verge' is a farce, and this poses a strategic challenge for a musical. Farce is about momentum, which is hard to sustain in musicals, where the songs require the actors to stand and deliver. 'Women on the Verge' meets the stop-start rhythm problem best in Laura Benanti's manic, sensational number as the model Candela, 'Model Behavior,' in which she skitters from phone to phone, babbling about her shallow life. The show's best and most moving song, 'Invisible'—Lucia's psychological aria about her lost life, superbly performed by LuPone—breaks the farce convention and just about gets away with it. In the end, with admirable effort, 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' picks up speed and flies, but never quite high enough.

Valere is a fabulous creation, and Rylance—in bohemian tatterdemalion and pheasant-plumed cap, and sporting a set of false choppers that give him a scary smile—inhabits him to the limits of wonderful. A renowned Shakespearean actor, he hits every iamb, every crisp consonant, like a hurdler running to glory. Swiftness is part of his triumph and of his character’s blinkered, annihilating aggression. As Elomire, on the other hand, Hyde Pierce is a master of the slow burn, a sort of panjandrum of pique. His suffering is terrific to watch; it lends oxygen to Rylance’s astonishing linguistic pinwheeling.

The production never quite finds its rhythm, but Mamet's writing certainly does. He shows us the poignance and the heroism of the performing life. 'The lights dim. Each to his own home,' Robert says to himself as he leaves the theatre, in the play's last line. But, to theatricals, home is where the art is.

In keeping with Addams’s graphic style, Zaks offers some delightfully surreal scenic moments: a tassel cut from the end of a rope scuttles offstage by itself; a giant squid and a monster iguanodon make surprise appearances. Zaks does his best to drive this money train down the bad track it’s laid on. (He replaced the show’s original directing team, Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch.) The show’s narrative, however, can’t handle Addams’s Grand Guignol edge; the book, written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, stays safely on the outside of Addams’s comic world, looking in. Of all the dark cards in Addams’s hand, the team has picked the weakest one: love. Wednesday, the crossbow-toting Goth, falls for Lucas Beineke (Wesley Taylor), a square from Ohio, whose buttoned-down parents come to dinner at the Addams house: in other words, it’s “The Birdcage” reimagined for Bela Lugosi. Except for the occasional blip of wit, fifteen minutes into the palaver the audience can feel the show flatlining.

As Rothko, the strapping Molina burns up the stage. Head shaved, striding across the studio with his barrel chest thrust forward, he is all feistiness and creative ferocity. Even in silence, he exudes a remarkable gravity. He also makes a gorgeous fuss. “I am here to stop your heart, you understand that?” he bellows at Ken, in one of their arguments about painting. “I am here to make you think. . . . I am not here to make pretty pictures!”

The premise of the fun is that all white people in blackface look alike. Justin Bartha gets to sing and swagger; the subtle Anthony LaPaglia gets to play dumb; Jan Maxwell gets to behave as outrageously as Lady Gaga; and the charming Tony Shalhoub, the impresario between a rock and a hard place, gets to do everything else, including spit wax fruit at the audience and twice try to strangle the Italian star he thinks has died on him. Unlike the modern masters of the form, Georges Feydeau and Joe Orton, Ludwig never raises the characters’ level of confusion or aggression to the point of breakdown. The shriek of madness, when it finally comes in Ludwig’s fun machine, gets laughs, but it’s unearned by the writing.

The musical’s book checks off all the thematic boxes: prejudice, violence, hardship, stardom, failure, and redemption. Although, for Huey and Felicia, love doesn’t find a way, “Memphis” allows them a union in success, which, on Broadway, trumps love. You leave “Memphis” knowing that you’ve had an exciting experience, but—unable to recall a song, a melody, or a line of dialogue—you can’t quite remember what it was.

A rumble of an altogether different kind takes place in the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s dark and hilarious farce “God of Carnage” (elegantly directed by Matthew Warchus, at the Bernard B. Jacobs), which in Christopher Hampton’s excellent translation has been relocated from Paris to the comfortable upper-middle-class environs of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In a handsomely minimal haute-bourgeois apartment (designed by Mark Thompson), a turf war takes place over a blood-red carpet, a coffee table chockablock with art books, and two elegant glass vases overflowing with white tulips.

Now the ninety-one-year-old Laurents is laying his claim to ownership: in this bold makeover, the story rules. From the musical’s first beats—which tone down the finger-snapping thrust of Bernstein’s signature prologue with pauses that allow us to take in the individual gang members—Laurents announces his intention to leave his fingerprints on the classic. They don’t smudge its beauty; in fact, his attempts to heighten the show’s realism only enhance it. In his version, the gang members actually look like teen-agers; the Latina chorus girls are not Broadway beautiful; the costumes (by David C. Woolard) and set designs (by James Youmans) explore the subtle, shadowy ranges of a color palette that takes the show away from glitzy spectacle and toward a grittier, more muted stylization. By eliminating blackouts between scenes, Laurents also adds to the story’s tension. The evening as a whole feels sculpted—no gesture, no word, no visual choice is arbitrary or wasted. Laurents’s most innovative touch is to have the Puerto Ricans sometimes speak and sing in Spanish. Fifty years on, in a multicultural America, this decision makes the production feel fresh,

But the show’s defining impact was not financial; it was subliminal. At the zenith of America’s postwar power—with abundance and intolerance at loggerheads within the nation—the ravishing score reminded America of its best self, and gave the fraught fifties a mantra of promise. “If you don’t have a dream, / How you gonna have a dream come true?” it asked. Under the elegant, astute direction of Bartlett Sher, Lincoln Center’s revival—the first on Broadway since the show’s début—is a majestic spectacle. Conjured by Michael Yeargan’s superb sets and Donald Holder’s evocative lighting, the romantic and rollicking nineteen-forties world comes to life. But there is nothing retro about the show’s debate. Now, as then, the nation is stuck on issues of race, war, and, as the musical puts it, a “thing called hope.”

This is direct, pedal-to-the-metal stuff, without nuance, irony, or wit-the sound, as the show insists, of the working people. Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice have written a clever book, which should become the template for this kind of musical excavation; it sets up the songs with well-judged humor and the elegant strokes of observation that the Four Seasons repertoire lacks. At one point, during Valli's first date with Mary (Jennifer Naimo), the baleboste who becomes his first wife, she asks why he spells his invented Italian surname with a 'y' and not an 'i.' - 'Y' is such a bullshit letter,' she says. 'It doesn?t know what it is. Is it a vowel' Is it a consonant?' 'Jersey Boys' knows exactly what it is: a money tree. The audience is tickled to death, but, given enough of these ersatz events, Broadway musical theatre may be, too.