Linda Winer

The show, adapted from Roald Dahl's mordant 1988 children's book, is a surprisingly low-tech pleasure from the same Royal Shakespeare Company that blew up 'LES MISERABLES' into a mega-spectacle. Director Matthew Warchus, a master of character-defining physical comedy, has put big handfuls of tiny gifted actors and monstrous authority figures into Rob Howell's relatively simple set of Scrabble-like alphabet tiles and towers of bookshelves.

But there is also news in this entirely predictable, tenderly unassuming extravaganza, written by Harvey Fierstein ('La Cage') and directed by Jerry Mitchell ('Legally Blonde') with almost scene-by-scene, line-by-line fidelity to the film. That news -- and it is very good indeed -- is Cyndi Lauper, who makes a smashing Broadway debut as composer and lyricist...Lauper, unlike many recent theatrical pop-crossovers, changes her sounds to illuminate each character without losing her identity...Lauper and Fierstein are never onstage, but their spirits elevate a very conventional show with wit and sweetness.

Wolfe and a laser-eyed creative team take control of our gaze with the rhythm and allure of a noir movie. David Rockwell's brilliantly inventive, sleek black-and-white sets make headline projections and sliding furniture look new again. Desks are seldom out of sight for these workaholics, even when they're at the bars. In 'Imaginary Friends,' Ephron's grossly underrated 2002 Broadway play about Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, Hellman says, 'We're all just stories. The question is, who gets to tell them.' How lucky, if that's not too paradoxical a word, that Ephron got to tell this one.

'Hands on a Hardbody' may well be the best musical ever written about 10 people holding onto a parked truck. But if you go into the show wondering why a gifted creative team would want to adapt the 1997 documentary about poor Texans in an endurance contest for a red Nissan pickup, you are likely to leave wondering the same thing.

Alongside the sentiment is Durang's deeply touching faith in the ability of a cartoon style to sustain serious -- no cosmic -- purpose without sacrificing trust in the transcendent pleasures of the wicked and silly. Broadway can handle that.

Even her defeat by George W. Bush and her cancer, which killed her at 73 in 2006, do not sour her gusto for a fairer government. The production, which already toured Texas, Chicago and Washington, feels primed to get out there on the road again. A 'fresh from Broadway' label can't hurt the marketing. Otherwise, this trip does not feel necessary.

Broadway has embraced many - perhaps too many - breeds of 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' in recent years. Tennessee Williams' hungry and restless Maggie has been reincarnated as a slinky sexpot (Elizabeth Ashley), a sexual bulldozer (Kathleen Turner), an ineffectual flower (Ashley Judd) and, barely five years ago, a smartly luscious kitten (Anika Noni Rose) in the all-black production best remembered for James Earl Jones as Big Daddy. What we have not had, at least in my experience, is a sedate Maggie in a tasteful, even timid revival of Williams' 1955 Pulitzer winner about voracious Southern-gothic greed and a loveless, lying family.

Metcalf's Juliana begins tough and funny, oozing a sexuality that cannot be separated from her braininess. Against startling changes of sound and light designs, her body -- including those no-longer-confident legs -- shape-shifts as she is pummeled by delusions and a genuine life-altering trauma. Operating within a honeycomb of overlapping wooden frames, Metcalf transforms from moment to moment and back again, from sublime competence to a helplessness that is hard to watch. But dare you to take your eyes off her.

The play, which runs less than two hours with an intermission, feels less furious than melancholy -- and, yes, more thoughtful -- this time around.

The point of this Lincoln Center Theater production is the rare opportunity to see a pivotal American period piece staged deeply into the period by Bartlett Sher ('South Pacific') with a huge, expert cast that only a nonprofit can afford to showcase with such luxurious dedication today on Broadway…In almost three hours, we watch [Seth Numrich] transform physically into a convincing fighting machine and, ultimately, to a barely recognizable monster of sharp edges and shadows….Sher encourages a few actors to lay on the cultural cliches pretty heavily, but, then again, so did Odets. Mostly, the production combines an exhilarating fast-talking swagger with both Odets' real and overwrought lyricism.

But 'The Anarchist,' which runs just 70 minutes, may well be the most severe of Mamet's hyperserious philosophical declamations, a stark and needlessly opaque debate between Cathy (LuPone), a radical prisoner who killed two cops during a leftist political act, and Ann (Winger), her caseworker for the past 35 years...More needlessly opaque debate than drama.

...how did Holmes and a bushel of theater talents, including director Jack O'Brien, take a wrong turn into this slim screech of a sitcom, a scattershot slice of stereotypical life with characters as unbelievable as they are unlikeable? Written on commission by a theater in Rebeck's hometown of Cincinnati, the script pretends to embrace Midwest over New York values but flattens both into insults...On the plus side, audiences coming to see a miscast Holmes will be introduced to Norbert Leo Butz. The actor, actually the star of the play, does yet another of his nonstop hyperactive eccentrics with which he won Tonys in 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' and 'Catch Me If You Can.' Sure, he starts at manic and revs up from there. If he seems to be working too hard this time, notice, please, how little there is to push against him.

This is called 'A Christmas Story,' not 'The Christmas Story,' so, parents, please take note. The musical based on the popular 1983 movie is neither candy-cane sweet nor sacred. In fact, not much is sacred in this droll, imaginative, definitely and a bit defiantly off-center tale of a 9-year-old bespectacled kid named Ralphie and a flawed but loving family in Indiana in the 1940s. That is, 9-year-olds (and up) and their flawed, loving parents are probably the target audience for the newest addition to the holiday offerings, wickedly directed by John Rando ('Urinetown') with a clever and enjoyable score by newcomers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul ('Dogfight'). The humor is not so much politically incorrect as, well, politically retro and a little dark...I could live without the awful joke about Chinese accents, the blue joke about the bowling ball, the playground line 'when you act like a fruit, you get crushed like a grape.' Even if kids liked to talk like that, Broadway should not endorse it.

There is nothing remotely scandalous about 'Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson,' the biographical musical that has book, lyrics and additional music by Kathie Lee Gifford. Despite the inevitable celebrity-lite target on Gifford's back, the musical about the media-star Christian evangelist of the 1920s does not have the toxic aura of a vanity production. It is well-produced and professional. It's also not interesting, alas, at least not interesting enough to sustain 2 1/2 hours of fast-forward storytelling and inspirational songs that almost always end in throbbing climax…But we have a reason to give thanks, and that is Carolee Carmello. One of our most deeply wonderful, inexplicably underutilized singing actors, Carmello finally gets a giant vehicle that needs her massive talents.

There must be a way to say this without sounding prim. 'The Performers,' which finds a game but miscast Henry Winkler and a sweet Alicia Silverstone in Vegas at the Adult Film Awards, is not shocking because of the nonstop use of playground dirty words or because of its unblinking attitude toward its tired subject matter.

The show does have some jaunty, quasi-operetta music with beautiful harmonic blends and a ravishing cast -- including Chita Rivera as Princess Puffer, madam of the opium den, and Jessie Mueller as the slinky-to-her-eyebrows Helena Landless, who, with her brother (Andy Karl) brings a bit of Colonial commentary as the exotics from Ceylon. Jim Norton maneuvers around the fast-patter songs with aplomb as the emcee; Stephanie J. Block is authoritative as Drood, the young gentleman who disappears. His beloved (Betsy Wolfe) is coveted by the opium fiend-music teacher (Will Chase)...Instead of trusting the characters and the mystery to build the suspense, however, Holmes aims for the campy, tiresome and childish. To vote, one presumably cares about who does what to whom. Considering Dickens' storytelling genius, the real mystery is why this isn't fun.

For all the freight of timeliness, this remains a sweet spot of a family musical, full of adorable, but not sticky-adorable, waifs punching the air with their teeny fists and belting 'Tomorrow' over and over until every cynic within earshot might be a believer. Director James Lapine's handsome yet lovable vision finds the emotional core without losing the cartoon magic. There is a modesty, a humanity within the spectacle that helps the too-large theater feel embracing...As Annie, Lilla Crawford has a self-possessed intelligence...She also has lungs to match her big presence...I'll hear no negative words about Katie Finneran, who, unlike her much-admired campier predecessors, makes Miss Hannigan both a cruel clown and a genuinely erotic creature whose thwarted ambitions seem just the slightest bit sad.

Maybe, if someone never saw the revelatory Cherry Jones in the 1995 revival of 'The Heiress,' well, maybe the one now starring Jessica Chastain would make the 1947 drama by Ruth and Augustus Goetz feel like a genuine demi-classic discovery.

From the opening moments, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company's brilliantly cast and justly celebrated production, which opened Saturday on the masterwork's 50th anniversary, gives off a voltage of the new and the giddy-making confidence that comes from being in sublimely trustworthy hands.

Douglas Hodge is a kind and rather rough-hewn Cyrano. Alas, in most other ways, this is a busy, generic production...Page goes so far beyond the cardboard outlines of this villain that we wish the play were about Cyrano and him. The translation by Ranjit Bolt is unpleasantly fixed on exclamations of excrement. For a play about loving words and a hero for whom bad poetry is a fighting offense, this just feels wrong.

So much of 'Grace' sounds like an easy joke that, when the noose tightens, the surprise cuts sharp and deep. This strangely entertaining, seriously unsettling play...keeps teetering on becoming a glib cartoon about religion. But the actors -- Paul Rudd, Michael Shannon, Kate Arrington and Ed Asner -- make it impossible to look away long enough to doubt their characters.

Don't be put off by any grumbles about the conversational, tightened two-hour adaptation that the Manhattan Theatre Club uses for the rare Broadway production of this timely classic. Yes, British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz tosses off the occasional jarring anachronism -- 'cash cow,' 'restraining order,' etc.

Well, hello, Rob McClure. Welcome to the show that's going to make you a Broadway star. It's hard to guess how long the musical -- with its excellent stagecraft, but a badly lopsided book and a banal score -- will be around. Whatever the problems of the material, however, this is a performance that lasts.

This is a harmless entertainment, at least for the audience, cheerfully put together by such offbeat Tony winners as writer Jeff Whitty ('Avenue Q') composer-lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda ('In the Heights') and composer Tom Kitt ('Next to Normal'). But for all the positive messages and appealing contributions from these new-generation pedigrees, the hero of the show must surely be director-choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler ('In the Heights'), who turned theater-trained singers and dancers into confident acrobats and real-life competitive cheerleaders into believable characters.

If the term summer stock were not so besmirched with straw hats and desperation, the Roundabout's production, starring the sweetly formidable Jim Parsons, could be thought of as Broadway's excellent summer vacation. Parsons, in a small but significant stretch from the haute-geek he plays on TV's 'The Big Bang Theory,' does not shirk from creating an Elwood P. Dowd who stands tall yet somehow separate from the long, bright shadow cast by Jimmy Stewart in the 1950 movie. Director Scott Ellis has surrounded Parsons with an appropriately fine assortment of character actors to play dithering dowagers, dotty psychiatrists and incredulous family members...Especially impressive is Jessica Hecht, much admired in drama, turning into a multileveled, delightfully goofy comic as Elwood's impatient, financially dependent cousin.