Linda Winer — Theater Critic

If sincerity and noble intentions were enough to make a good musical, 'The Last Ship' would be a smash. If haunting folk-tinged melodies and choruses of rousing determination could float this boat, Sting's heartfelt debut musical would justify the years he devoted to the $14 million epic about a depressed English shipbuilding town very much like the one where he grew up.

...this just is a breezy, peppy, pleasantly libidinous valentine to New York-New York that respects Leonard Bernstein's jazzy brainy score with a lush 28-piece orchestra. The cast, except for Jackie Hoffman overdoing four comic cameos, doesn't hit the sly jokes by Betty Comden and Adolph Green too hard. And the big ensemble, led by the amiable if slightly bland Tony Yazbeck as sailor Gabey, makes the huge Lyric Theatre (Spider-Man's former home) feel almost homey...Joshua Bergasse, choreographer of NBC's 'Smash' in his Broadway debut, defines characters persuasively in classic, jazz and comic movement and, though the two big ballet scenes don't build into more than serviceable pastiche, the dancers are attractive and strong...'On the Town' never was one of the great musicals or an urgently needed revival, but it needs a throat-catching sense of the world outside to make it more than diverting.

If the entire dream cast of Terrence McNally's backstage revenge play had less than split-millisecond timing, the merciless inside-showbiz observations about the theater and theaterfolk might wound deeper than they amuse. Instead, McNally's major update and overhaul of his 1985 work is likely to remind the gleefully unrepentant among us of Alice Roosevelt Longworth's quote that, more or less, said, 'If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me....Lane revels in the ego and insecurity of the actor with the TV series who turned down a part written for him by his playwright-buddy, underplayed with deft earnestness and panic by Broderick, the comedy's straight man. Channing is delicious as an aging star with drug issues and a parolee's ankle bracelet. Mullally has a dumb-smart way with malaprops as the eager fledgling producer. Grint -- all spiked red hair and raccoon eyes -- is perfectly bratty as the British directing genius, while Abraham skulks creepily around as a vicious critic with an agenda...As long as they're not up there laughing at you, however, this is the rare Broadway comedy that's as smart as it is funny.

The results brilliantly capture the sensory overload in the journey of a sweet, compulsive, instinctive and unpredictably violent child as he investigates the murder of his neighbor's dog Wellington. What the adaptation does not do, at least until the very end, is transcend the spectacle to dig out the emotional life that coexists with Christopher's confusing perceptions.

It is easy to understand why playwrights, especially those fascinated by the layers of human relationships, are drawn to the work of Anton Chekhov...Except for the fine cast led by the formidably elegant Blythe Danner, however, there is little else that feels right enough about 'The Country House.' Margulies...is straining here to update Chekhov's 'The Seagull' to a summer house full of theater people at the Williamstown Theatre Festival...Of course, it is always a pleasure to watch Danner have her way with a big character, even such a familiar one as the shrewd, tempestuous, increasingly insecure theatrical diva...[but] the banter is hackneyed and, ultimately, the crises are pointless. Worse, these people are dull.

Most deliciously, there is the dancing daughter, played by Annaleigh Ashford -- almost entirely on her toes -- with a joyful combination of humor and virtuosity. Jane Greenwood's terrific costumes appreciate that people without money are not people without style. And there are pet snakes and a massive turntable set used perhaps once too often and, just in case too much is never enough, a basket of kittens to admire.

So there is a bit of undeniable wistfulness in the Broadway return of 'Love Letters,'...But this turns out to be anything but a middlebrow, star-driven gimmick of nostalgia marketing. At least that's true with the inaugural pairing of the phenomenal Mia Farrow and the touchingly solid Brian Dennehy in director Gregory Mosher's minimal, subtle production...Dennehy...has a poignant vulnerability as Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, the responsible one who loves writing and who never dared displease others to fulfill his own desires. But what a range of emotions Farrow portrays as she simply sits reading behind the desk...As Melissa Gardner, Farrow somehow transforms from bright, petulant, rich girl to restless woman and disturbed loner with little more than a squint or a bray or a flick of her long, fuzzy, golden hair. It is hard to believe she has not spent her life on the New York stage.

There are just three characters in 'This Is Our Youth' and three gifted, demographically hot-button actors onstage in this Broadway premiere of Kenneth Lonergan's 1996 slacker comedy. And yet, as the deceptively shaggy story unwinds in a single one-room crash pad, we don't just get to know these three privileged, directionless offspring of successful Upper West Side Jewish parents in 1982. Thanks to the playwright's meticulously hand-picked insights and Anna D. Shapiro's tight yet seemingly easygoing direction, we somehow feel we have spent a couple of amusing and ultimately painful hours with an entire world of offstage parents, drug dealers and friends of friends.

Cumming, who began his huge American career with this Tony-winning pansexual ghoul of a performance, seems older, seedier, more used up than he did back when Sam Mendes' you-are-there environmental staging of the 1966 Kander/Ebb masterwork was so new and dangerous and radical. In other words, Cumming is better than ever -- wiser, more dissipated, even more deeply entertaining in the role he stunningly recreated from Joel Grey's iconic original. And that freshness is so infectious it spills over into a landmark production that closed in 2004 but feels, with one uneasy exception, as confident -- and about as dangerous -- as if it has been running ever since. The exception, alas, is Michelle Williams, making her Broadway and musical debut as Sally Bowles...Her Sally is timid, bland and covered up in costumes that make her seem almost chaste.

Never underestimate Harvey Fierstein's gift for revealing new worlds within worlds we think we know well...Here he is back without a band with his first nonmusical in decades. And it's moving, beguiling and, yes, again historically significant without lecturing or threatening...The pitch-perfect cast has been directed by Joe Mantello with equal parts joy, anxiety and understanding of just the right handbags... Fierstein wants us to understand the vast spectrum of gender and sexuality. Along the way, bless him, he understands how to entertain.

Harris, who has triumphed in serious musicals, light TV, and award-show hosting, may not be the strongest rock howler who ever sang Stephen Trask's thrashing, unpredictably touching songs. Nor is Harris, 40, the most effortless dancer to ever climb into the torn fishnets of John Cameron Mitchell's Obie-winning, transgender diva of a show. But he is extraordinarily lithe and buff, irresistibly endearing and way beyond merely game as Hedwig, who takes us on his journey of self-discovery in the guise of an autobiographical concert.

The production, a success at Washington's Arena Stage, has been directed with an admirable minimum of sentimentality by that theater's artistic director, Molly Smith. Even with actors the caliber of Parsons and Spinella, however, this is a once-over-lightly insult to a subject that deserves so much more than a mechanical showcase for gold-standard performers.

So here it finally is, 17 years later and officially considered a revival, in a taut, vibrant, dirt-kicking show directed with exuberance and minimal fuss by Leigh Silverman...Colin Donnell plays the hunk, surprised to find himself drawn to her. Joshua Henry portrays the black man, the first Violet ever knew, who sings that he wants her to 'see me the way I see you'...In the middle of it all is Foster's Violet, with lank hair and lanky limbs and a glorious voice that cuts through complicated emotions without ever belting. She embodies both Violet's defensive armor and the childlike trust in a miracle that will give her 'Gene Tierney's eyes and Ava Gardner's eyebrows'...Yes, this is an ugly-duckling Cinderella tale about beauty being skin deep. But it is filled with unexpected details, compassion for its quirky characters and, especially, a rigorous score that reaches its own destinations through gospel, bluegrass and heart-aching anthems to tentative hopes.

Michael Grandage, the Tony-winning director of 'Red,' directs a lovely cast in the gleeful poetry of outcast inhumanity...The play is subtler than McDonagh's more melodramatic hit gore-fests, especially The Beauty Queen of Leenane. The worst these townfolk do -- except for the blunt insults -- is 'peg' one another with stones and break raw eggs on unsuspecting heads. The work also has none of the political chill of his masterwork, The Pillowman. He seems here to be both satirizing and celebrating the cliches about primitive Ireland and primal Hollywood, sending up the cruelties and seductions of the parallel universes as mutually exploitable pleasures. How right to have a real movie star as its heart.

So much love and care and ambition have been poured into 'Act One,' playwright/director James Lapine's sprawling stage adaptation of playwright/director Moss Hart's celebrated 1959 memoir. But as the Lincoln Center Theater's in-house magazine reminds us, Hart himself wrote, 'Playwrighting is not a gentle or sentimental profession, nor, may I add, is any part or portion of the theater.' Putting gentleness aside, one therefore must report that this play about the theater has a dazzling theatrical set but a dispiriting lack of drama. Autobiographical peaks and valleys that read with such charm and intensity in Hart's words are translated here into almost three hours of busy, flatline narrative.

The inevitable headline is that James Franco...is making his Broadway debut in John Steinbeck's 1937 'Of Mice and Men.' But the real news is that Franco is just one fine element in this straightforward powerhouse of a revival, directed by Anna D. Shapiro with inspiring trust in the impact of classic storytelling...Franco has an easygoing presence and a dark, cranky, cowboy voice and, except perhaps for overly manicured facial hair, never suggests he might be smarter or hipper than his character. O'Dowd's Lennie is a big, childlike mouth-breather whose deliberate speech contrasts touchingly with his delicate fingers, which appear to dance -- at times too heavily -- with a mind of their own...No matter how well we know the story, it is hard not to hope that, just maybe, things will turn out better this time. This may be one good definition of a classic.

In Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, a late entry in the Broadway season, McDonald has taken on the task of impersonating a real person in what's virtually a solo show about the late jazz singer Billie Holiday, whose rough life story is almost as familiar as her distinctive sound...McDonald doesn't let Holiday wallow as she tells us, almost offhandedly, about her rape at 10, her prostitution at 14, the macabre death of her great-grandmother, a slave, and the racism that haunted her career. Long before we are shocked, yet again, by the haunting images of her great song about racism, 'Strange Fruit,' this amazing actress and this jazz icon are indivisible.

In Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, a late entry in the Broadway season, McDonald has taken on the task of impersonating a real person in what's virtually a solo show about the late jazz singer Billie Holiday, whose rough life story is almost as familiar as her distinctive sound...McDonald doesn't let Holiday wallow as she tells us, almost offhandedly, about her rape at 10, her prostitution at 14, the macabre death of her great-grandmother, a slave, and the racism that haunted her career. Long before we are shocked, yet again, by the haunting images of her great song about racism, 'Strange Fruit,' this amazing actress and this jazz icon are indivisible.

The last times Woody Allen wrote plays for Broadway, his single drama suggested he hadn't seen one since middle-period Arthur Miller and his comedies were a tired throwback to Neil Simon. But with 'Bullets Over Broadway,' his first Broadway musical, Allen has created an old-fashioned, madcap lark of a show that seems precisely where it belongs. Director-choreographer Susan Stroman is back in idea-crazy form in Allen's adaptation of his 1994 backstage-Broadway movie about gangsters and tootsies and self-serious thespians in the '20s. The show takes a while to hit its stride, feeling competent but mechanical at first, as if the job could only get done if everyone bellows and hard-sells the lamest jokes. But once inspiration strikes -- and it eventually does -- the smartly cast, good-looking production relaxes into the confidence of its own gleeful, high-gloss ridiculousness.

The last times Woody Allen wrote plays for Broadway, his single drama suggested he hadn't seen one since middle-period Arthur Miller and his comedies were a tired throwback to Neil Simon. But with 'Bullets Over Broadway,' his first Broadway musical, Allen has created an old-fashioned, madcap lark of a show that seems precisely where it belongs. Director-choreographer Susan Stroman is back in idea-crazy form in Allen's adaptation of his 1994 backstage-Broadway movie about gangsters and tootsies and self-serious thespians in the '20s. The show takes a while to hit its stride, feeling competent but mechanical at first, as if the job could only get done if everyone bellows and hard-sells the lamest jokes. But once inspiration strikes -- and it eventually does -- the smartly cast, good-looking production relaxes into the confidence of its own gleeful, high-gloss ridiculousness.

In The Realistic Joneses, the world is familiar and, then again, very scary. It's also weird and cruel and profound in all sorts of unexpected places -- as sad as life but a whole lot funnier. Provocative playwright Will Eno, whose dry and odd work has tended to cause the theatrical equivalent of fistfights Off-Broadway, has come to Broadway with a macabre and melancholy yet strangely delightful comedy...At its most basic, the play can be reduced to a drama about caregivers and the different ways people deal with illness and mortality. But much like work by Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett, Eno's closest forbearers in existential absurdity, there's a challenge in keeping up with these Joneses. As John says, 'This was fun -- I mean, not fun, but some other word.' Indeed.

Remember the questions raised about Denzel Washington being too old to play Walter Lee Younger...Forget all that. Forget any and all reservations, except the kind that are so hard to get for director Kenny Leon's shattering revival of Lorraine Hansberry's seminal 1959 drama about a struggling black family in Chicago. Washington, 59, is magnificent -- disaffected, exuberant, heart-shredding -- as the character Sidney Poitier created on Broadway when just 32. Yes, this Walter Lee now says he is 40, not 35, in one of his raw and bruised laments about a life that never really began. But the numbers mean nothing in this devastating portrayal, except to deepen it.

We are meant to feel a bit off-balance, a little disoriented, maybe even confused in parts of 'If/Then' -- and that's the sharp point. In this intelligent, surprising, altogether original new musical, the main character is a 39-year-old divorced woman, Elizabeth, who returns to New York after 12 years as a wife in Phoenix. This is a fork-in-the-road show, a back-to-the-future entertainment in which we briefly see the consequences of different roads taken...Greif's gleaming, inventive production has lots of moving parts, including double-decker sets by Mark Wendland that add more levels with a mirror that adds layers of ceiling and sky. Disorienting? Indeed, but in attractive, unpredictable ways.

We are meant to feel a bit off-balance, a little disoriented, maybe even confused in parts of 'If/Then' -- and that's the sharp point. In this intelligent, surprising, altogether original new musical, the main character is a 39-year-old divorced woman, Elizabeth, who returns to New York after 12 years as a wife in Phoenix. This is a fork-in-the-road show, a back-to-the-future entertainment in which we briefly see the consequences of different roads taken...Greif's gleaming, inventive production has lots of moving parts, including double-decker sets by Mark Wendland that add more levels with a mirror that adds layers of ceiling and sky. Disorienting? Indeed, but in attractive, unpredictable ways.

Terrence McNally, who has astutely chronicled the thrills, the taboos and the tragedies of gay life since the mid-'60s, feels a bit too much like a playwright on a mission this time...This is a 'never forget' message that McNally surrounds with a sentimental, four-generation family story with plenty of his sharp observations and wit, but not enough to disguise the mechanics and contrivances that drive his worthy intentions.