Lisa Schwarzbaum

Denzel Washington is a powerful presence as restless working-class family man Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun...The minute he walks on stage, the Oscar winner receives a roar of audience delight, and his tightly coiled physicality is a pleasure to watch, with one caveat: Washington's characteristic aura of forceful energy, as well as the 59-year-old actor's middle-aged maturity, throws off the emotional balance of this smooth new production, directed by Kenny Leon a decade after he staged a previous Broadway revival of the show. While Washington's charisma is a great boost for ticket sales, his vitality contradicts just how precarious the dreams of Walter, written as a younger, weaker black man, really are.

Midler only leaves the sumptuous peach Ultrasuede couch - the centerpiece of Scott Pask's perfectly Mengersian set, lit with sophistication by Hugh Vanstone - when the dishy 90-minute show is over. (A perfectly placed bit of audience interaction spices up the goings-on.) Yet even before she speaks, Midler owns the place with one flip of her frosted coif. With dynamic direction from Joe Mantello, the star makes lounging and smoking look both lazy and athletic - the very opposite approach to monologue from Fiona Shaw's showy exertions in The Testament of Mary. Which is fine because, kiddies, Mengers has much to say and all the time in the world to say it.

In 2013, the old Hollywood studio system is dead. In the age of spin and image control at the speed of Internet, the gossip-columnist power nexus is dead, too, with its ability to 'kill' a career dead in its tracks. The reason to watch The Big Knife now may be to appreciate the personal meaning it held for its author (Odets died in 1963); or to take a nostalgia-infused whiff of the sweet smell of success (Odets worked on the screenplay for that 1957 movie beaut of the same name, too) with its acrid undertones of the era; or to think big thoughts about how to square a purity of artistic impulse with the seductiveness of luxury and celebrity. Or, never mind that, to see Richard Kind steal the picture. B+

Lucky Guy boasts a posthumous script by the beloved late writer and director Nora Ephron; the Broadway debut of super-duper movie star Tom Hanks; and the real-life story of Mike McAlary, a swaggering New York tabloid columnist...That's a lot of juicy back story - none of which saves Lucky Guy from its fate as a dull, stalled play about a not-particularly-noteworthy mug with a flair for self-promotion. Two hours of Lucky Guy and a theater-goer with no previous knowledge of McAlary and his tabloid cronies will still have no idea why Ephron was so enamored of this blowhard, no sense of McAlary himself, and no explanation for why a Broadway production, directed by the inventive George C. Wolfe with so much energetic set-changing and stage business, nevertheless feels so inconsequential and dramatically inert. C+

But LuPone and Winger might just as well stand at lecterns, two deeply interesting, star-quality actors subsuming all that's interesting about them in service to brusque badinage between opaque symbols. And although passing mention is made of Cathy’s love of women and Ann's broken marriage, the femaleness of these (rare) female Mamet characters turns out to be of little real interest to their creator. As he recently wrote, in a newspaper feature about his own play, 'Patti LuPone plays the convict, Debra Winger plays the jailor, and there you have it.' B-

The production is utterly, profoundly, ridiculously British in its high-low antics and wordplay. There's no need to brush up on Commedia dell'Arte, Christmas pantos, or music-hall ditties to enjoy One Man, Two Guvnors. You'll know smart hilarity when you're guffawing at it.

If, in the end, Seminar belongs to Hamish Linklater, it's not only because the actor does such a good job of creating, sustaining, and quietly intensifying Martin's full personality, building to the play's one honest dramatic climax. It's also because Rebeck has taken the care to make Martin a person, not a just a plot piece. Leonard would have something barbed to say about him — and then approve. C+

Hall's depiction of Dr. King is daring in its vulnerability, and the ideas she explores, through King's conversation with Camae, are provocative, mature, sometimes even dark...toward the end, when we feel like we know everything, the playwright digs deeper and The Mountaintop somehow becomes more majestic, inviting each of us in the audience to join the ascent as we see fit.

If Ned Flanders and his fellow amateur thespians on The Simpsons staged a Springfield community musical about Jewish grandmothers and Yiddish theater in pre-war Poland and called it The Plotz Thickens!, they could do no worse than The People in the Picture, now singing and dancing near the footlights of desperation at Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio 54.

Both the playwright and the production find resonance in the raves and rants of an ornery sot and his relationship to the succeeding generations of kids who use him and drop him. And much credit goes to Rylance, one of the most magnetic, fearlessly physical actors on stage today. Just as he wowed New York audiences in La Bete and Boeing Boeing, the actor uses his dense body as much as his words, this time contorting with the specific, hopping, pained hobble and the puffed-out chest of a proud, foolish, self-destructive fantasist who can't believe that his body (or at least his bum foot) has betrayed him. (Not for nothing does Rylance thank his trainer and his chiropractor in his Playbill credits.) His Johnny is a roaring wreck (he's got a wife who's left him, and a young son), barred from every pub in town. Yet he's got deep-down English pride in his battered bones. Rylance wears Johnny's contradictions like vivid warrior paint.

At the same time, with no LuPone-prone camp to her capers, Foster stars - yet generously blends - with the rest of the assured cast. As the lovelorn Billy Foster, Donnell suggests a somewhat more compact Jon Hamm as a much less agonized Don Draper. Laura Osnes brings a crystalline grace to the role of debutante Hope Harcourt, pressured by her status-conscious mother (hooray for Jessica Walter) to marry into class - and money. Mama's quarry, the audience knows, is Lord Oakleigh, a prime specimen of an upper-class twit, all foppish, repressed postures. What the audience doesn't know is that British theater regular Adam Godley will, by the time he busts loose with Foster in 'The Gypsy in Me,' steal his crucial bit of the show and utterly delight the cheering house with his brilliant comic timing.

Every detail of the production — choreographed with typical brilliance by Spamelot's Casey Nicholaw and codirected by Nicholaw and Parker — serves a purpose. Every character signifies. Every song is crafted with erudition about what a song is meant to do. The cast is uniformly nimble and charismatic, including Michael Potts as a Ugandan village leader and Nikki M. James as his daughter, a lovely young woman desperate enough to escape her own impending genital mutilation that she listens to the new Mormon visitors with an open mind. Costumes, set, lighting, dancing that will look great at the Tonys when the cast comes to collect what I predict will be an armload of awards: This is what 21st-century Broadway can be. If Broadway has the balls.

The first sight of the star of The Pee-wee Herman Show is a trip. Eternally natty in his little red bow tie, young master Herman steps out from behind a curtain to open his beguiling time-warp Broadway romp. The fan-filled audience cheers wildly — they love him enough to marry him! For a moment the clock spins backward: Paul Reubens — who first pranced in character three decades ago — may be a decidedly adult 58-year-old man, but the exuberant, hyperactive boy in the spotlight is an age-resistant, rouged child of 1980-something.

The plumage and elegant dialogue-in-verse of NYC-born David Hirson's wily comedy suggests Molière-era France, but don't be fooled: In director Matthew Warchus' exuberant Broadway production, the issues are blog-post current.

Still, as directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford, the show forges ahead through the sheer force of design elegance, dance-floor stamina, performance energy, and the quick thinking of Hayes. The actor is nimble, funny, likable, and much more asexually wholesome than one might expect given that his character has agreed to allow his philandering bosses to use his midtown apartment for trysts in hopes of securing a promotion. While his performance style flips the calendar ahead to 1990s sitcoms that break the fourth wall, Hayes buoys the show with his generosity. He also compensates for Chenoweth's discomfort in her role (and unflattering wig!) as his love interest, the seemingly innocent coworker who turns out to be yet another company superior's plaything. And when, in a second-act show-stopper, Hayes is paired with agile and hilarious Katie Finneran as a lonely lady at a bar, the two break through barriers of time and setting to produce timeless audience laughs of pleasure.

The shock is that the author (who previously staged a two-person dramatic tap dance about men and women, truth and lies in Oleanna) elicits little more than a shrug once all the thrusts and parries, revelations and reversals are toted up. The foursome bark out short, blunt, rhetorically provocative dialogue intended to demonstrate that black people and white people are doomed never to understand one another. But the arguments feel like moves on a game board, not words from the heart.