Linda Winer — Theater Critic

This time we have a fierce dynamo of a Broadway debut by Elena Roger as Eva, the ambitious street girl with a contradictory fondness for finery, Mussolini and the poor, and who slept her way to superstar first lady before dying of cancer at 33. Roger, despite a few frayed top notes at Tuesday's preview, is a justly celebrated Argentine native whose sprite of a dancer's body belies a massive theatrical presence and the steely heft of her tangy voice. (Christina DeCicco plays the strenuous role on Wednesday nights and Saturday matinees.)

The British actress is so good that, for someone not a serious Judy devotee or somebody who gets kicks from watching train wrecks, she is really, really hard to be around. No doubt, this is not the response desired by producers of 'End of the Rainbow,' the pseudo-biographical play-with-music that transferred from London with understandable raves for Bennett.

The three-act structure of Vidal's 1960 campaign melodrama is a bit creaky. But everything else about this joyfully shrewd star-encrusted revival -- including, for starters, the untouchable James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury, plus a deeply touching Candice Bergen and an astonishing John Larroquette -- feels as pertinent and as boldly impertinent as the daily machinations in our latest mud-fight to the White House.

What the show, directed with rousing two-dimensional enthusiasm by Jeff Calhoun, lacks in originality is disguised -- if not quite hidden -- by a big, talented cast of actors (and several actresses). There is also ingenious erector-set scenery by Tobin Ost and, especially, lots of exuberant, soft-bounce high-precision tap, balletic and acrobatic invention by choreographer Christopher Gattelli. Jeremy Jordan, who made his first impression this season in the short-lived 'Bonnie and Clyde,' is the heart -- even the heartthrob -- of the action as Jack Kelly, leader of the homeless urchins. With his big jaw and his bad-boy glint, Jordan suggests the seriously comic appeal of Donald Duck's handsome nephew.

What the show, directed with rousing two-dimensional enthusiasm by Jeff Calhoun, lacks in originality is disguised -- if not quite hidden -- by a big, talented cast of actors (and several actresses). There is also ingenious erector-set scenery by Tobin Ost and, especially, lots of exuberant, soft-bounce high-precision tap, balletic and acrobatic invention by choreographer Christopher Gattelli. Jeremy Jordan, who made his first impression this season in the short-lived 'Bonnie and Clyde,' is the heart -- even the heartthrob -- of the action as Jack Kelly, leader of the homeless urchins. With his big jaw and his bad-boy glint, Jordan suggests the seriously comic appeal of Donald Duck's handsome nephew.

The cast is full of strong wailers and howlers. Paul Nolan, as Jesus, has a big voice but not much charisma and, dare we say it, seems a bit of a mope. Jeremy Kushnier, ably replacing the ailing Josh Young as Judas at Tuesday's preview, deftly captures the character's fierce mixed emotions and strenuous, contrasting vocal styles. Tom Hewitt is sardonic and rueful as a debonair Pontius Pilate, Bruce Dow nails the welcome camp as the vaudevillian Herod and Chilina Kennedy makes a credibly concerned asexual Mary Magdalene.

But the musical, with its beguiling book by Enda Walsh, also has the team's new songs, equally strong, with hypnotic rhythms, gorgeous harmonic blends and insinuating melodies that make unexpected interval leaps seem natural and easygoing. Guy is still played with endearing slacker sweetness by Steve Kazee. Cristin Milioti remains pert and odd, with a forthrightness it would be wrong to mistake for pat adorableness.

Let's get this out of the way at the top. Philip Seymour Hoffman is too young and soft to be the standard-issue iconic Willy Loman chiseled on the Mount Rushmore of American drama. Andrew Garfield seems too delicate and sensitive to be the Biff we know as the curdled former high-school quarterback and big Willy's golden-boy son. And none of that matters a bit in Mike Nichols' revival of 'Death of a Salesman,' a wrenching, powerfully inhabited production that honors Arthur Miller's 1949 masterwork -- complete with original sets and music -- while finding new shades of humanity all its own.

The actress, last onstage here in her Tony-winning portrayal as the inconsolable mother of a dead child in the 2006 'Rabbit Hole,' is virtuosic at looking as fragile as a girl, almost at the same time she withdraws into a distant and forbidding beauty. Here, with her shaved head covered by a red baseball cap, she is still most convincing in the flashbacks to the childhood moment when she learned she loved words and to the character-forming lesson from her tough mentor (played with beautiful restraint by Suzanne Bertish).

Yet there is no denying that 'The Road to Mecca,' even with the priceless Rosemary Harris atop a fine acting trio, turns out to be a slow curve instead of a kickoff to Signature Theatre's upcoming season of Athol Fugard's important and wonderful work.

But taken on its own terms -- which is the way I prefer right now to take it -- the abridged-for-modern-Broadway production bursts with fierce immediacy. Despite sugarcoating the tragedy with upbeat promise of redemption, the show respects its internal logic. The sets -- boarded up buildings for the neighborhood, a blue sheet for the picnic sky -- are aggressively drab, a decision that guards against happy-peasant whitewash. From the start, McDonald's Bess is no fast-living, coke-loving spitfire. With a deep scar on her cheek and an undercurrent of gravity, this Bess is more a victim of rough circumstances than a wild thing with the potential for goodness. She also happens to have a voice that's luminous on the top, burnished in the middle and an astonishing technique that channels clear emotional truth.

But taken on its own terms -- which is the way I prefer right now to take it -- the abridged-for-modern-Broadway production bursts with fierce immediacy. Despite sugarcoating the tragedy with upbeat promise of redemption, the show respects its internal logic. The sets -- boarded up buildings for the neighborhood, a blue sheet for the picnic sky -- are aggressively drab, a decision that guards against happy-peasant whitewash. From the start, McDonald's Bess is no fast-living, coke-loving spitfire. With a deep scar on her cheek and an undercurrent of gravity, this Bess is more a victim of rough circumstances than a wild thing with the potential for goodness. She also happens to have a voice that's luminous on the top, burnished in the middle and an astonishing technique that channels clear emotional truth.

Don't get me started. I missed the upbeat show with the repugnant concept last summer when the Transport Group had a successful run with it downtown in a hip church gym. Transferred now to Broadway, the thing proves to be as trivializing and demeaning as it sounded. Worse -- in terms of entertainment, if not message -- this is also ludicrous, busy and unrelentingly dull.

So it's a relief and a special pleasure to report that Mayer, in a square-cornered turn from his smart-rock productions of 'Spring Awakening' and 'American Idiot,' has joined playwright Peter Parnell to change an unworkable plot into a more-than-serviceable gender-bending framework. There's a mostly-classy cast, a fantasy op-art set and almost two dozen wonderful songs from the Broadway production and the film. ... It helps credibility that Jessie Mueller, who plays her, happens to be pretty irresistible, too. Mueller, a Chicago talent in her Broadway debut, has a forthright, confident rhythm that suggests the young Liza Minnelli but a delicate, deliciously precise sound all her own.

Kenny Leon directs six fine actors -- including the superb Condola Rashad as the quietly seething maid's daughter with ambitions, Dulé Hill as the son who'd rather be a novelist than a lawyer, Mekhi Phifer as his brother the womanizing plastic surgeon and Ruben Santiago-Hudson as the patriarch....There's a tight, bright, nasty 90-minute play lurking in this sprawling 2¾-hour work, named after an etymological practice of gluing fast-moving flies on sticks to be magnified. Stuck under a less-than-perfect microscope, they still move.

There should be -- and I'm guessing there will be -- a place on Broadway this season for 'Bonnie & Clyde.' Certainly, Arthur Penn's 1967 film masterwork of violence and gorgeous outlaws does not cry out to be a musical. And, if it did, vanilla-pop composer Frank Wildhorn would not appear on most lists of feasible adapters. And yet . . . the show has two of the elements that broad audiences seem to like in a musical: A recognizable story and music that sounds like music we've heard before. More, director Jeff Calhoun's good-looking production is exceptionally well-cast, including a breakout performance by Jeremy Jordan as a seething yet sympathetic Clyde Barrow.

Patinkin, who co-created the show with his invaluable pianist Paul Ford and also directs, genuinely seems to adore showing LuPone off. They joke through a sweet ballet on rolling desk chairs. The show starts with Sondheim's 'Another Hundred People,' about New York being 'a city of strangers.' Not at the Barrymore it isn't.

This is healthy, even inspirational. Equally bold, but more distressingly improbable, is the play itself -- a slim, 100-minute pseudo-serious piece about the twists and turns of nasty creative mentoring.

[Cattrall has] been paired off here with Paul Gross, who matches her in both light-comedy physicality and major sexual chemistry...after decades of revivals that exploited Coward's most popular comedy as a sideshow for aging actresses with something to prove, this one keeps the stakes up at what Coward calls the 'big tables.'

It is this section that shows off his terrific dancing, his crazy-feet tapping, his ability to hover in the air and devour the expanse of the stage with dazzling insouciance. His tangy -- if occasionally pitch-wobbly -- voice can linger a bit monotonously in heady nasality these days.But when the nightclub routines stop and he sings a ravishing 'Soliloquy' from 'Carousel,' he reminds us of the theater artist we really want back.

It is this section that shows off his terrific dancing, his crazy-feet tapping, his ability to hover in the air and devour the expanse of the stage with dazzling insouciance. His tangy -- if occasionally pitch-wobbly -- voice can linger a bit monotonously in heady nasality these days.But when the nightclub routines stop and he sings a ravishing 'Soliloquy' from 'Carousel,' he reminds us of the theater artist we really want back.

In blows Vanda, a seeming ditz of neurotic desperation with golden hair down to her black bustier. She just happens to have the same name as the play's character, knows the lines and brought perfect thrift-shop costumes (by Anita Yavich). For almost two nonstop hours, Arianda makes whiplash changes from gawky hopeful to scary siren -- with stops at elegant countess, Jerry Lewis, a deadly spider, a skinny duck, a classic comedian, a grand tragedian, an actress in a revenge fantasy and a goddess who knows the power of bare thigh above a high boot.

The nine performers are talented young people who get less cloying in the second act, when they stop trying so hard. They begin in business clothes, talking into cellphones, but soon change into ragtag thrift shop/fairy-tale style. They dance the Macarena, shoot confetti at us from pop guns and, in one of the better numbers, jump on trampolines revealed under trap doors. Scrupulous journalism requires me to report that Friday's audience leaped to its collective feet, roared with approval and many even went onstage for thimbles of wine at intermission. At the risk of appearing to kick a puppy, I admit I was not among them.

That this is a major work won't surprise anyone who loved it at Lincoln Center Theater's Off-Broadway space last winter. Recast for Broadway with two new actors, the five-character family drama feels even more powerful -- a boldly conventional yet altogether gripping work that knows individual psychology as keenly as it understands the world around it.

One can kindly describe 'Relatively Speaking,' the umbrella title for these three minor playlets by major comedy writers, as a theatrical throwback. Unfortunately, throwbacks, if they are to get somewhere, need to have aim, momentum and a sense of direction. For those keeping score, Allen's play has the most jokes. May's has the most heart. And Coen seems the most lost.