Linda Winer

'Twelfth Night' is the centerpiece that gives the most chances for nuanced sexuality and comic delight. In 'Richard,' Rylance chooses to play a villain who dissembles as a joking bumpkin, his guileless eyes betrayed by sinister eyebrows. Still, an almost cuddly Richard, despite his creepily effective dead and withered hand, lowers the stakes of the tragedy.

'Twelfth Night' is the centerpiece that gives the most chances for nuanced sexuality and comic delight. In 'Richard,' Rylance chooses to play a villain who dissembles as a joking bumpkin, his guileless eyes betrayed by sinister eyebrows. Still, an almost cuddly Richard, despite his creepily effective dead and withered hand, lowers the stakes of the tragedy.

To everyone's credit, Barrino is not cordoned off from the company like a traveling VIP. The singer, who catapulted from 'American Idol' popularity to Broadway respect in 'The Color Purple,' primarily does greatest-hits songs -- 'Stormy Weather.' She has a tangy baby/woman voice, a slow and clear scat and the ability to say a lot with stillness and a pout.

As [Daniel] Craig proved to Broadway when he played a quietly desperate cop in 'A Steady Rain' in 2009, the actor is far more than Bond, James Bond. As Robert, a book publisher, he begins with a dapper, sardonic edge and lets us watch that famous granite profile crumble...If Pinter wrote in cool, witty line drawings, Nichols colors them in with robust clarity and broadens the wit to sex-comedy humor. Where Pinter leaves us to question the depth of Robert's distress, Nichols clears that up by having Craig sloppy drunk by the time Jerry arrives for lunch. When we finally see the first frisson of Jerry and Emma's affair in 1968, Nichols piles on the time-machine cliches by getting them high on marijuana...Pinter liked to say that 'life is more mysterious than plays make it out to be.' By probing too many psychological motivations, Nichols makes these people understandable but awfully ordinary.

How sad, then, that the play is such a muddle. It's an interesting neo-Chekhovian muddle, mind you, and I'm not a bit sorry to have shared the time with White, 43, a late-blooming playwright whose corporate job has been supporting his family in their Hudson Valley home. Given the rich situation and director Daniel Sullivan's darkly luscious production, however, the disappointments hurt. Parker, whose extensive theater career includes her Tony-winning performance in Sullivan's staging of 'Proof,' makes a fascinating, poignant wraith -- a lost soul in silky black mourning gowns (by Jane Greenwood), just beginning to realize how much is lost. But her voice is sometimes hard to hear, especially in the wordy exposition when everyone in the family is babbling at the same time about many important plot points. Victoria Clark is exquisitely down to earth as the pious sister, while Danny Burstein has touching fury as the German-born doctor enduring wartime xenophobia.

Courtroom dramas once had a long, respectable tradition as entertaining, easy-mark theater. After decades of legal procedurals on TV and film, however, it takes fresh urgency, irresistible casting and a real pulse to justify a big-ticket Broadway version. Under Ethan McSweeny's conscientious direction, what we get instead is 2 1/2 hours of competent acting and monotonous storytelling that seldom elevate the serious plot -- a black man shoots the white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter -- from the genre of theatrical hokum.

Directed with exquisite nuance by Lindsay Posner, the production -- Broadway's first since 1947 -- runs two and three-quarter talky hours and employs 11 delightfully stylish actors to make something magnificently satisfying from a petty, basically irrelevant very English story...Roger Rees is wonderful as father of the boy (Spencer Davis Milford)...But this is a genuine ensemble that makes incredulity seem real and very human.

Well, so much for hopes about 'A Night With Janis Joplin.' Goodbye to a glimmer of faith that, just maybe, Broadway might restrain itself from flattening this formative rock outlaw into another cheese-ball tribute like the ones that mass-market the singularity of Elvis and The Beatles...Writer-director Randy Johnson and the siblings Joplin left behind in Port Arthur, Texas, have scrubbed her up and domesticated her into just another ordinary '60s chick who idolized black women blues singers, loved literature, sang loud and died fast...Mary Bridget Davies has the lungs, the notes and the screaming moan in the back of the throat to suggest the real thing in 'Cry Baby,' 'Me and Bobby McGee' and 'Ball and Chain.' But the actress, who also toured in a different Janis revue, is too externalized (and badly costumed) to touch the layers of vulnerability, much less the brazen sexuality that helped galvanize the adventures of a generation.

..it's a pleasure to watch [Norbert Leo Butz] engage in the fantastical adventures of both the healthy and the dying Edward Bloom, irrepressible teller of tall stories and bad jokes in 'Big Fish.' In fact, there are many pleasures in this ambitious but disappointing adaptation of Daniel Wallace's Walter Mitty-esque novel and Tim Burton's 2003 movie about a father's inability to make a truthful connection with his serious son...So it's crushing to realize, early on, that this gentle, sincere, beautiful-looking show is deadly dull. Author John August, who also wrote the screenplay, strings sentimentality and hackneyed picaresque escapades together as if they were equivalent balls on a string. Tension never builds, even when Edward's son Will (Bobby Steggert) tries to unravel the father's secret life.

People actually seem to hang there on the stage, as selective and eccentric as memory, in director John Tiffany's unsettling, viscerally powerful revival of Tennessee Williams' 1944 masterwork, 'The Glass Menagerie.'...What could be ridiculous and mannered is, instead, bold and terrifically effective in this willful but fascinating vision by Tiffany and much of the team responsible for the enchanting Tony-winning 'Once.' It helps that Zachary Quinto portrays Tom with the wary, restless humanity of a trapped poet, while Cherry Jones carves out a less delusional, more sturdy Amanda with kaleidoscopic layers of hope and bile.

People actually seem to hang there on the stage, as selective and eccentric as memory, in director John Tiffany's unsettling, viscerally powerful revival of Tennessee Williams' 1944 masterwork, 'The Glass Menagerie.'...What could be ridiculous and mannered is, instead, bold and terrifically effective in this willful but fascinating vision by Tiffany and much of the team responsible for the enchanting Tony-winning 'Once.' It helps that Zachary Quinto portrays Tom with the wary, restless humanity of a trapped poet, while Cherry Jones carves out a less delusional, more sturdy Amanda with kaleidoscopic layers of hope and bile.

Alas, these lovers are not just star-crossed but so mismatched that they could be from different galaxies in director David Leveaux's busy-with-brainstorms but broad and surprisingly unmoving production. Bloom -- more famously the elf prince and a Caribbean pirate -- makes a dashing, appealing, if not exactly youthful Romeo. He has a flashy entrance in ripped jeans on a motorcycle that, ask not why, is never seen again and he catapults from a playful romantic to a doomed one with a winning grace. It hurts to have to say this, but Rashad -- who has much-deserved Tony nominations for 'Stick Fly' and 'The Trip to Bountiful' -- is not a natural Shakespearean. Her voice has little variety, and she basically has two expressions -- happy and n

There is no credible reason for these people to belong together, except that author Austin Winsberg and composer-lyricists Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner put them into their well- staged, musically-generic little pop show...Rodriguez has a pingy, lively voice. So does Levi, though first he has to drag out a shameless dead mother story and he doesn't get an edgy song until about 85 minutes into the 90-minute show. Director Bill Berry contributes most of the brightest ideas with a throwaway glance here and a well-timed visual surprise there. The audience at Friday's preview appeared to be having a great time. But, really, if matchmaking is this forced and random, no wonder so many marriages don't last.

Now we have 'Let It Be,' which -- I lose track -- is a rip-off of an imitation of a cover band of a sound-alike replica for people who may also take comfort in beloved dead animals stuffed by taxidermists...But 'Let It Be,' still running in London, strikes me as the cheesiest yet of the Beatles so-called celebrations, intended for audiences who prefer live fakes to experiencing the real thing on great documentaries and albums...I hasten to report that many in the audience happily rose from their seats, clapped and danced when encouraged to do so. But when projections of strawberries streamed across the proscenium during 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' the lyric 'nothing is real' felt really sad.

The guest headliners at 'Forever Tango' through Aug. 11 are Karina Smirnoff and Maksim Chmerkovskiy, those superstar virtuoso-celebs from 'Dancing With the Stars' by way of Ukraine. And their audience-pleasing, hyper-theatrical, show-off numbers are lots of fun -- especially if you appreciate the allure of unbridled ego...But the real stars of Luis Bravo's 'Forever Tango' -- the ones keeping the forever in the tango -- must certainly be the 16 dancers and the 11-piece orchestra now serving as more than mere summer filler on Broadway.

No matter how one feels about Stephen Schwartz's sappy 1972 hit, this production pumps up the facile material with nonstop, fearless brainstorms. These are by Paulus (who braved more sacred icons when she took on 'Hair' and 'The Gershwins' Porgy & Bess') and 'circus creator' Gypsy Snider, founder of Canada's circus troupe Les 7 doigts de la main.

How much fun is it to have Bette Midler curled up barefoot on a sofa on a Broadway stage, chatting at us for 90 minutes in a periwinkle blue caftan with silver sparkles to match her long fingernails? So much fun that, even when the script doesn't scintillate as much as it intends to, a happy contentment seems to permeate the theater.

Tyson, who has said she admired this play since she saw Geraldine Page in the 1985 movie, says she told her agent, 'get me my 'Trip to Bountiful' and I'll retire.' Better, perhaps she'll make Broadway home.

For more secular theater lovers, however, the peril comes in missing 'The Testament of Mary,' adapted by Colm Tóibín from his own novella. With both enormous audacity and bottomless grief, Tóibín's 90-minute stunner imagines a version of the Christ story 'from the silent woman we pray to.'

The revival has been restaged and rechoreographed with imaginative low-budget economy by Jeff Calhoun, who also did both the hit 'Newsies' and 'Bonnie & Clyde,' Wildhorn's most mature (but still short-lived) show. Tobin Ost's functionally minimal sets -- mostly five hanging panels -- have a cutdown theatricality that must be useful on the road. His costumes for the fancy maids reveal at least as much cleavage as Jekyll/Hyde sees at his late-night visits to the brothel.

How terrific to have Baldwin back onstage and in such sly command of every nuance. Though he is hardly the steamy beauty who captured theatergoers with offbeat romances and scary Joe Ortonplays in the mid-'80s, there is no hint of the sluggish actor who dragged himself through 'Macbeth' in 1998.

'The Assembled Parties,' [Richard Greenberg's] first new play here since 2006, has been lovingly directed by Lynne Meadow and cast with such experts of emotional nuance as JudithLight and Jessica Hecht. The tragicomedy, despite a few unexplained improbabilities, shocks us into realizing how hungry we have been for witty and wounded grown-ups who toss off gorgeously written observations without knowing how little we know about what we think we know.

As a bookend with the superior early 'Golden Boy,' this seriously flawed but perversely enjoyable artifact is Odets' own cautionary tale.

So even when material lets him down, which it finally does in 'The Nance,' Douglas Carter Beane's splendidly ambitious but psychologically superficial tragicomedy, it's thrilling to watch Lane bond with a character who demands the full attention of so many gifted layers of him.

And his book, though clunky and schematic and much too long, is not entirely a cornball tribute to his noble self. Despite the fine Brandon Victor Dixon as Gordy, we don't feel much of anything for the impresario and sometimes songwriter who, inspired as a kid by black boxing champ Joe Louis, borrows $800 from his loving family in Detroit and builds a music empire.