Linda Winer — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.