Linda Winer

David Lindsay-Abaire calls his new play, simply, 'Good People.' Like everything in this deceptively amiable, stealthily gripping tragicomedy, however, the words are less plain than they first let on.

Somewhere very far away - as far, say, as the final 15 minutes - 'A Free Man of Color' becomes an important play. Finally, after 2 ½ hours of brain-blurring historical asides, strenuously costumed artifice and luxuriously overpopulated incoherence, the point and resonance of this crazy-ambitious collaboration between playwright John Guare and director George C. Wolfe fall deeply into place.

Instead of droll and charming, alas, Elf is mostly sticky and cloying, with bits of wit but derivative plot and generic music...Where Elf, the 2003 movie, played on the surface blandness and subversive underpinnings of Will Ferrell, our Buddy (Sebastian Arcelus) is just a pleasant fellow who sings, dances and smiles a lot...Everyone ends up in Central Park, trying to work up enough enthusiasm to fuel the sleigh. They are outside of Tavern on the Green, which obviously hadn't yet closed and had its bathroom fixtures auctioned off. What a metaphor. A timeless story that's already yesterday's news.

Everything that was very right about Daniel Sullivan's staging in Central Park last summer is even more impressive indoors, especially Lily Rabe as a Portia who begins with strength and wit and grows into devastating self-knowledge. And everything that was annoying - that is, the more jarring buffoonery - has been recast with theater veterans and redirected to smarten the comedy under a human shade of melancholy. After exploring Shylock on film and in the Park, Pacino keeps finding quieter and scarier layers in this sympathetic and flawed outcast.

The secret word, we're told early on, is 'fun.' If knowing that makes you want to yell and cheer - and use your outside voice - you are probably already primed to return to the otherworldly inside joke now called 'The Pee-Wee Herman Show.'

In a country where more and more people get their news from Jon Stewart, what's so unthinkable about getting our world history from Colin Quinn? To say we could do worse - a lot worse - is meant only as praise for 'Colin Quinn: Long Story Short,' the mostly smart and shrewd little stand-up comedy/psychopolitical history lesson.

It's sharp and snappy, imaginative and heartfelt. It has a real American tragedy to tell and some of the best in the business to tell it.

So what harm comes from 'Rain,' the aging Beatles cover band and paint-by-numbers multimedia show that has settled on...

At a distance, this threatened to be too easy a mark, too much of a sentimental sure thing for such theater legends. Surely, one might be forgiven for thinking Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones could have found a tougher, less familiar vehicle than 'Driving Miss Daisy,' Alfred Uhry's 1987 Pulitzer-winning drama and 1989 Oscar-winning movie.

There is probably a built-in audience for 'Lombardi,' the by-the-numbers biographical play that marks the National Football League's debut as a Broadway co-producer. That niche had better be a big one. For someone not previously enthralled with Vince Lombardi's famous winning streak as coach of the Green Bay Packers in the '60s, the only compelling part of Eric Simonson's untheatrical script is the mystery of what it's doing on Broadway.

Absolutes are hazardous to the credibility, but here goes. I'm betting Broadway has never seen a greater portrayal of obnoxious grossing-out than the one Mark Rylance is splattering all over 'La Bête.'

How important is charisma in the selection of American leaders? Who decided who got to claim what for whose manifest destiny? What is populism, and why would anyone trust the people with it? And while we're asking, what is 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' doing on Broadway, anyway? My answer to the last question is easy. It's doing plenty, just not in the usual ways.

It is also an exhilarating showcase for two terrific actors, Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight, and a thrilling joyride back to the days when Mamet was a baby virtuoso in crazy love with the theater.

Laura Linney was a star, but not yet the star of her own Showtime series, 'The Big C,' when the Manhattan Theatre Club opened 'Time Stands Still' last winter. But she already had a quiet, dazzling honesty as Sarah, a war photographer recovering back home in her Williamsburg loft after almost being killed in a roadside bombing in Iraq.

There are still thrilling bolts of recognition to be found in this Broadway rarity, even if the Roundabout Theatre Company's adequate production, starring Cherry Jones, is less wonderful than it needs to be. In other words, for starters, it is hard to understand Shaw's wicked and all-important words in this theater, which, for all its comfort and good looks, has a way of smearing articulation (phony British and the real thing), as well as swallowing up the energy of good directors.

The work, which began at the same area's Live Theatre in 2007 and became a London hit with the original actors and company director Max Roberts, has come to Broadway to tell another inspirational story and to be one. At least, that is the script with a happy ending. Unfortunately, despite fine performances, 'Pitmen Painters' is mild-mannered, talky and scattershot. Instead of firing up what should be a compelling chunk of art and social history, Hall weighs it down with dull exchanges, repetitious statements about the meaning of art and, ultimately, a confusing message about the significance of the group.

Last winter, fortunate theatergoers fell madly, hopelessly in love with 'Brief Encounter,' the enchanting British spin on the Noel Coward movie that had a limited sold-out run at the adventurous little St. Ann's Warehouse under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it turns out, our brief affair was not hopeless after all. The Roundabout Theatre Company has swept up the ingenious import and put it on Broadway...

'Everyday Rapture' is an easygoing end to a frantic Broadway season. This is Sherie Rene Scott's likable 90-minute, semiautobiographical musical - an Off-Broadway hit last summer at Second Stage and now the Roundabout Theatre's last-minute savior after the revival of 'Lips Together, Teeth Apart' crumbled with the abrupt departure of Megan Mullally.

Little wonder that, for the third time since 1997, a New York theater has turned to 'Collected Stories.' Donald Margulies' drama delivers an engrossing, if somewhat schematic, couple of hours with just a single set and two actors. What sets this play apart from dozens of others with identical descriptions, however, is that the characters are interesting, intelligent women, for a change.'

Despite the serious research and the playful imagination, the splendid new American cast and the irresistible craven puppets, the play tells us what it is in the first half-hour and then tells us again for another two hours. Board members are blind mice in suits. A video of Bill Clinton reminds us that he 'didn't have sex with that woman.' Voting in Florida was too close to call. Bush deregulated electricity and California is still paying for it.

Despite its 1987 Pulitzer Prize and its Tony Award, 'Fences' always was a glorious mess of a drama. As the second of what became August Wilson's monumental 10-play journey through African-American life in the 20th century, the early work is more plotted, structurally clumsy and melodramatic than the rest of the cycle. And that's the last negative observation you'll read in this space. 'Fences' has been magnificently revived - in all its messy glory - by director Kenny Leon with a splendid ensemble topped, but not dwarfed, by Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.

If you need to understand why Broadway - not to mention America - needed to change in 1968, take a look at 'Promises, Promises,' the emotionally and musically stunted show that opened the same year as 'Hair' and entertained the tired-businessman market for three boffo years. More baffling is the motivation for a major revival of the dated Neil Simon/Burt Bacharach musical-comedy (based on the superior 1960 movie 'The Apartment') about male-driven corporate sexual shenanigans in 1962. Unless exploitation of 'Mad Men' fashions can be passed off as motive. Nor is it likely that dream casting is the justification for director/choreographer Rob Ashford's busy and charmless production.

One would love to report that the performances were as transforming as the documentary. The cast is fine, especially the younger contingent: Leslie Kritzer, Euan Morton, Erin Mackey, Matthew Scott and, particularly, Norm Lewis. But, for all his likability and theater experience, Tom Wopat should not be expected to compete with the giants who have sung 'Finishing the Hat.'

If 'Spring Awakening' was the birth of genuine rock musicals on Broadway, then 'American Idiot' is its worthy son. Not as groundbreaking or original as its precocious papa in 2006, the punk-pop opera based on Green Day's multiplatinum album is an exuberant assault - a slick and tough 95-minute package of alienated suburban youth, media overstimulation and seamless, high-concept theatricality.

The corn is still as high as an elephant's feather boa in the St. Tropez transvestite cabaret owned by an aging male couple named Georges (Grammer) and Albin (Hodge). But the difference starts with director Terry Johnson's intimate but not skimpy production, which makes this a delightfully tacky club. Instead of the male chorus of Cagelles that meant to wow Broadway by their ability to look female, these guys play big-muscle thug-femmes who relish the blatant incongruities in their ballet moves and pumped-up gymnastics.