Linda Winer

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.

It's a relief, not to mention a thrill, to report that Katori Hall's 'The Mountaintop' -- which arrives with powerful fistfuls of sparky chemistry between Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett -- crackles with theatricality and a humanity more moving than sainthood...There is an up-close-and-personal intimacy in director Kenny Leon's sure-handed production.

The critical relationship between father and son strains for Ibsenesque revelation. In lieu of anything near that, we get to watch Langella demonstrate how much a master can communicate with the weary flick of a cigarette and deliver sophisticated, horrifying lines as if words actually leave their tastes in his mouth. Dare you to take your eyes off him.

Finally, we have this one -- the first staged 'Follies' I've seen that wouldn't work better as just a concert of blazingly theatrical Sondheim songs without James Goldman's mawkish dialogue. This rich and wrenching revival -- first directed by Eric Schaeffer at the Kennedy Center last spring and starring, for starters, Bernadette Peters and Jan Maxwell -- seems blissfully unaware of any such problem.

So, is it better? Yes, the story makes sense now and, so far, no one has fallen down. But is it better than junk-food theater in a jumbo package? No.

It feels ungrateful to dismiss any new musical that offers Donna Murphy a chance to play a Nazi-oppressed Polish star of the Yiddish theater and an old Jewish grandmother in New York, to be so persuasively comic and tragic, to use so many parts of her marvelous voice in traditional Broadway ballads, operetta, vaudeville and the ancient stirrings in the klezmer music.

'The Normal Heart' was never meant to be a subtle work. Larry Kramer wrote it in 1985 to be a shock to the system, an alarm siren, a blunt instrument to bludgeon Ed Koch's New York, Ronald Reagan's Washington, the indifferent press and complacent medical industry into acknowledging the mysterious disease destroying gay men...'The Normal Heart' still beats today.

Now we have 'Baby It's You!,' a bio-revue that uses hits from the late '50s and early '60s to trace another pop-producing/composing career, this one of a New Jersey...it's just another jukebox musical.

Whatever we think we know about the absurdity of modern celebrity, forget it. Believe me, John Guare saw it first and said it better. As early as 'The House of Blue Leaves,' circa 1970, the playwright nailed people's desperate hunger to be famous, or at least chummy with the famous, and made it all as wretched and laughable as anything curdling our culture today.

The play is part 'Snooki Comes to Washington,' part 'Pygmalion.' Without a fabulously clever ditz in the tootsie role, however, this can be just a familiar old vehicle that confronts power ethics with the innocence of a sweet old civics lesson.

It has nothing to do with the Middle East, though it is about lost tribes. Jez Butterworth's fascinating 'Jerusalem,' imported from London to showcase the uncontainable and strenuous life-force named Mark Rylance, is set in a junk-piled clearing of an Old English woods where, just maybe, giants, elves and fairies once flourished.

To say that 'Sister Act' lacks plot development is probably beside the point. To people who love this show (and, judging from audience reaction at the performance I attended, that will be many), cheerful entertainment is the point. Make that breathlessly cheerful. Relentlessly cheerful. In this corner, OK, make that mindlessly, bafflingly, springtime-for-Hitler-quality cheerful.

'We all suffer from some form of addiction,' says Father Michael to Sister Jamison, urging her to continue the counseling of a 19-year-old suicidal gay hustler and meth-head named Cody. Sister Jamison, played by Kathleen Turner, doesn't appear to nod off at the banality of that proclamation or the many other snoozers in Matthew Lombardo's simplistic sin-and-redemption psychodrama, 'High.'

Broadway's scramble to find another 'Wicked' for moms and tween daughters has led, perhaps inevitably, down the rabbit hole.

To describe 'War Horse' as awesome is to regret the word's devaluation as praise for a good burger or a pretty haircut. This extravaganza at the Lincoln Center Theater, based on a 1982 English children's book by Michael Morpurgo, is awe-inspiring both as a blast of pure theatrical imagination and as a deep gut-kick about lost innocence in war.

Forget the smarty-pants title. I can't print it anyway. What you need to know is that Stephen Adly Guirgis' dark new comedy, which we're reduced to calling 'The ---- With the Hat,' is crazy-mad in love with its exhilarating nonstop language and with its screwed-up, hotheaded, odd-hearted urban characters. And so am I.

News that the guys from 'Hairspray' and 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' were making a musical based on the movie 'Catch Me If You Can' raised a couple of intriguing -- also daunting -- questions. How? And why? That is, how could songs, dances and a Broadway stage add to the plot-heavy adventures of a real-life teen con man without losing the odd and breezy travelogue style of Steven Spielberg's...

Ethel Merman used to say that 'Anything Goes' was about 'a girl on a boat.' And that's pretty much the whole deal, except for the other girls, the guys and the fact that the boat is a deco ocean liner stocked with nonstop Cole Porter standards, standard-issue mistaken-identity convolutions and the usual bunch of '30s musical-comedy mugs...Bottom Line: By-the-numbers revival, but the numbers are prime.

He sings. He dances. Yes, the British mega-star formerly known as young Harry Potter even shaves, proudly, while delivering that irresistibly all-American self-love ballad, 'I Believe in You,' to his mirror in the executive bathroom in 'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.'

'The Book of Mormon,' the jubilant and expert one-joke Broadway musical by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is everything you should expect from a show by the heat-seeking rascals of 'South Park.' What you may not expect, however, is the sweetness.

John Leguizamo is a gifted chameleon with -- as he warned in the title of his debut solo 20 years ago -- his own special nonstop mambo mouth. He bounces off anecdotes and observations as a balloon careens around the room until the air is out, except that he never does seem to run out of air, or energy, or the ability to seduce an audience into the contradictory emotions that drive the public revelations of his life. What he does not have, alas, is an editor. 'Ghetto Klown,' the fifth chapter in what has become a live-onstage autobiography, runs almost 21/2 hours, including intermission. The length would not be an issue, except that his solo has compelling material for a 90-minute treat.

The feel-good story is loaded (OK, a little overloaded) with good cheer, as is the cast -- including an altogether endearing Will Swenson as the sensitive Tick and a hard-hitting (at times, too hard-hitting) Nick Adams as the over-the-top young Adam, aka Felicia.

Arcadia, back on Broadway for the first time since 1995, is a heady, aching thrill of a tragicomedy. Part historical-literary mystery, part academic satire, Tom Stoppard's time-traveling masterwork is, above all else, a ravishing romance -- a great love story, really -- between the worlds of the mind and the heart. See it when you're not tired, and try to sit close. The production's acoustics are not brilliant. Stoppard is...Director David Leveaux's celebrated English revival, mostly recast for the Broadway import, is visually lean and emotionally exuberant.

Despite its creation in a tumultuous era, this never was a more than a solid piece of middlebrow message-naturalism. And despite the care and affection lavished on the handsome production, it remains a male-bonding parlor drama that signals its big secrets more clearly than it justifies a high-profile revival. Granted, the bar was set high on this one. Last season, Mosher directed a staggering production of 'A View From the Bridge,' starring Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson, revealing unimagined depths in Arthur Miller's melodrama. When Mosher chose Kiefer Sutherland, Jim Gaffigan, Chris Noth, Jason Patric and Brian Cox for this conventional piece of curdled mid-America, one could be forgiven for thinking the director had something special in mind for it.