Linda Winer

Really, this is little more than a glorified club act, a concert of terrific formative rock and roll loosely held together with conversational connective tissue and telescoped rock history. Considerable care has clearly been taken to cast more for sound-alikes than look-alikes, and the musicians - especially Levi Kreis as irrepressible newcomer Jerry Lee - convey the raw, rough energy of guys raised dirt-poor and riding a comet to unknowable cultural change...[Sam] Phillips urges on his fine musicians: 'My God, this is where the soul of music never dies.' Well, perhaps it does turn over in its grave a bit.

Is it entertaining? Yes. Is it disappointing? Yes. The Addams Family, the hotly anticipated musicalization of Charles Addams' bleakly irresistible cartoons, has survived a troubled tryout in Chicago to take its place as the season's only new family musical on Broadway. The show looks fantastic - charming and dripping with ingenious cartoon grotesquerie. The casting - including Nathan Lane as a lovably ruthless Gomez, Bebe Neuwirth as a diabolically slinky Morticia and Kevin Chamberlin as a gracious nut ball of an Uncle Fester - is as close to ideal as imagination can dream up in the real world. The problem - and it is no small problem - is the material, which, after some giddily twisted one-liners in the first act, burdens the larky darkness with gooey sentiment, a wearying plot and increasingly generic songs by Andrew Lippa that have little or nothing to do with the plot or characters.

The hotel farce, about chaos behind 'Otello' at a Cleveland Opera gala, is not nearly as clever as Kaufman and Hart comedies, nor does it have the loony danger of 'Noises Off.' But after a self-conscious start (much of it about wax fruit), Tucci's ensemble nails just about every hyper-physical take in the comedy archives, building to the recap (around designer John Lee Beatty's timelessly ornate hotel suite) that telescopes all the action into about 45 seconds of sweet dazzle.

For a while into Red, the 90-minute London import about Mark Rothko (the marvelous Alfred Molina) and a young apprentice (Eddie Redmayne), it seems playwright John Logan is careening into the gossip-and-grandiosity rut of art-bio presumption. But suddenly, as the men prime an enormous canvas and themselves in a frenzied bacchanalia of red paint, the grips of Rothko's art and Michael Grandage's visceral production close in and refuse to let go. By the time Rothko, the brainy and difficult American abstract expressionist, declares his massive 'pulsing' color-field work is 'here to stop your heart,' the paintings throb at us as if they actually might.

They sweep down the stairs into the sleek but cozy deco club with the virtuoso big-band orchestra. Some come in couples, some alone. They've all dressed up for something slinky and maybe something special to happen as they get tossed and flipped and changed by an evening of Frank Sinatra and Twyla Tharp. And special it definitely is. 'Come Fly Away,' Tharp's dangerously gorgeous, wordless dance adventure, asks audiences to put aside the usual expectations of plot and to follow the delicious and foolish complexities of four relationships through exhilarating, scary-smart movement

'Next Fall' is a love story about belief. I'm afraid I am not a believer - not in the love story or in the play. Geoffrey Nauffts' drama, which has leaped to Broadway after a well-received run Off-Broadway last summer, has been embraced by its admirers as a thoughtful and sensitive exploration of a five-year relationship between two gay men of differing faiths in New York... The relationship between Luke and Adam is told in flashbacks, which director Sheryl Kaller and designer Wilson Chin maneuver with grace. Nauffts, an accomplished actor and artistic director of Naked Angels, where the play originated, creates individual characters with a breezy style. But the theological conflict is far too big and messy for such a tidy, ordinary play.

The matchup of Walken, unpredictably creepy American actor, and Martin McDonagh, virtuosically gruesome Irish playwright, has finally occurred. And it's as perfect a frisson as it always was meant to be - except for one problem. The play is really not good. 'A Behanding in Spokane,' the 90-minute McDonagh world premiere that lured Walken back for a rare stage appearance, is so thin, trivial and underdeveloped that the humor depends on two separate scenes of characters throwing severed hands at one another.

'A Little Night Music' is one of the most delectable musicals ever written, by Stephen Sondheim or anyone else. Angela Lansbury is giving a performance that deserves to be part of theater legend. Catherine Zeta-Jones is earthy and poignant in her confident Broadway debut. With all that, it is easier to live with - if not really forgive - the visual drabness and heavy hand of this gorgeous musical's first revival since its Tony-winning 1973 premiere. Director Trevor Nunn's skimpy production, conceived last year for London's tiny Meniere Chocolate Factory, arrives with another of those scandalously reduced orchestras that Broadway producers try to pass off these days as innovation.

Are we really meant to be shocked to hear that trials are entertainment or that people of different colors get different treatment? The generalizations - blacks have shame, Jews have guilt - are as inflammatory as a routine by Jackie Mason. The real shock of this Race is that Mamet cannot take them and run.

The songs, with Fela's potent pidgin-poetry in subtitles, are a jubilant, subtle mixture of Afro-Caribbean rhythm, jazz brass, Yoruban chant and R&B. But they were never meant to carry a story on their back, and they do not.

The remarkably rich and raucous character-driven songs, by Bon Jovi cofounder David Bryan, lovingly capture the insinuating, earthy authenticity of rhythm and blues, gospel and early rock and roll without sounding derivative. The moody and inventive production has been put together with down-and-dirty elegance by director Christopher Ashley, choreographer Sergio Trujillo, set designer David Gallo and costume designer Paul Tazewell, who let the musical and dramatic and pop-up scenic discoveries peel off one another at a pace breathless and disciplined, original and authentic. When a singer lets loose - and, eventually, they all do - the vocal pyrotechnics come from deep within the storytelling.

As emotions get drastic, however, the songs just aren't up to it. The music has unpredictable transitions with lovely overlapping harmonies, but composer Kitt falls back on monotonous singsong melodies for the real drama. Yorkey's lyrics keep trying to express profundities with banalities about light and right and night, but nursery rhymes are more inspiring.

Yes, the exuberant revival oversells itself in the first act and, more often than we'd like to admit, looks a bit like a flower-power commercial for air freshener. But the Public Theater's production of its '60s 'American Tribal Love-Rock Musical' grows again into an important, lovable, achingly timely piece about the horrors and the marvels, the burdens and the wild fun of young social change. Despite all that is different since 1967 - not to mention all that's different from pre-election August - the show finds a modern pulse of fury and hope without betraying the specifics of a period piece about Vietnam and all flavors of liberation.

Like 'Art,' Reza's globally successful '90s play about male friendship and modern art, this one is a fast-moving extended sketch that's never much deeper than its big-issue smart-talk veneer. But the French playwright - in another of Christopher Hampton's exquisite translations - cannily manipulates social observations that appeal to vast audiences and creates characters that bring out the best in actors.

The much-anticipated rethinking of 'West Side Story' is neither revelation nor vandalism. It is still 'West Side Story,' with those jazzy, jagged, gloriously (and shamelessly) sentimental Leonard Bernstein songs and (most of) Stephen Sondheim's swaggering, dazzling lyrics. In other words, it's still a wonderful show. As promised, new director (and original author) Arthur Laurents has darkened the violence in his bilingual revival of the 1957 landmark musical that transports Romeo and Juliet to mean-street Manhattan... The physical production is surprisingly conventional - modest in imagination if not in budget. And despite the tougher edge in Joey Mc-Kneely's reconsideration of Jerome Robbins' character-defining choreography, the second-act ballet sequence, 'Somewhere,' is as sappy as a love-in and sung by a boy soprano. Why do the Jets pretend to row a boat in a hard-hitting 'Gee, Officer Krupke'? And how are we to buy the concept's gritty new realism when the Jets have the same artfully applied smudges on their faces throughout the show?

Well, she flies. She opens her parrot-handled umbrella, takes hold of her carpetbag, then soars out and up over the seats at the New Amsterdam Theatre - presumably to a place where a magic nanny can hole up until required by the next unruly family. Excellent flying. Otherwise, 'Mary Poppins,' the show for which 'The Lion King' got kicked to the Minskoff Theatre, is a quaint, muddled, beautiful-looking musical with plenty of spectacle but even more emotional distance.

Why does 'Jersey Boys' succeed - and it does, exuberantly - when most jukebox musicals have been a pain in the Broadway butt? For starters, the creators of the show about Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons don't just love this blue-collar DNA-pop music from the '60s. Authors Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, director Des McAnuff and choreographer Sergio Trujillo obviously also understand why they love these dopey romantic lyrics with the simple song structures, the gorgeous harmonic blends and the immaculate yet easygoing doo-wop beat.

We are watching a torch pass from the lost glory of the Bob Fosse musical to - at the very least - this single important revival. And it is bliss. It is also edgy, erotic, cynical, funny, nonstop stylish and, though based on a 21-year-old show, so prescient about '90s justice, the press and celebrity that it's almost eerie.