Marilyn Stasio

God may have created the heavens and the earth and all living things - but the Devil surely created Tyrone, the filthy-minded, foul-mouthed sock puppet that has audiences howling at 'Hand to God.' Robert Askins' furiously funny comedy about adolescent rebellion against religious cant has made a smooth passage from workshop (at Ensemble Studio Theater) to Off Broadway (in an MCC production) to Broadway. Moritz von Stuelpnagel hasn't touched ahair on the head of his clever production and the original cast is still golden. At 800 seats, the intimate Booth proves extremely hospitable to this fiendish little satire of all things holy.

The fierce pas de deux of love and loss and anguish executed by Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy in 'Skylight' leaves you breathless -- and wondering how they can sustain this level of emotional intensity throughout the show's 13-week Broadway run. David Hare's 1995 drama, which floored West End audiences when director Stephen Daldry staged it last year with the same great cast, registers as a character-flaying study of ex-lovers whose lives and sensibilities have diverged since they parted. But deep down, it's a scathing censure of the Thatcher government's political legacy of social inequality and economic injustice...Whatever the takeaway for audiences hankering for a good political brawl, it's the tragic clash of human emotions that really stings.

A shoddy production can't dim the lights of this long-overdue revival of Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play, 'The Heidi Chronicles.' On the page (and from recollections of previous productions), this 1989 play is the writer's bittersweet valentine to her generation of educated baby boomers who embraced the 1970s women's emancipation movement with gusto. Elisabeth Moss (waving goodbye to 'Mad Men') is effortlessly endearing - and wonderfully real - as the brainy, mixed-up heroine, and the thesps playing her male friends pass muster. But, under the direction of Pam MacKinnon, Heidi's girlfriends are an embarrassment.

Scott Ellis's dazzling production of 'On the Twentieth Century' looks like one of those legendary Broadway musicals that exists largely in our collective memory of great shows we never saw. Like those phantom productions, this 1978 tuner comes with a fine pedigree (book & lyrics by Comden & Green, music by Cy Coleman), has been mounted in high style and is performed with manic energy by a super cast toplined by charismatic stars Kirsten Chenoweth and Peter Gallagher. For a lot of us, this is the show of our dreams.

David may not be a convincing stage actor, but every word out of his mouth is funny. And he's even funnier when he's speechless -- falling to his knees and throwing out his arms in thunderstruck disbelief at the sheer absurdity of everyone else in the room but him. And to do him full justice, he seems to be sticking to the script (after all, he wrote it) and not giving in to any rash impulse to turn to the audience and start improvising...Helmer Anna D. Shapiro...has shrewdly surrounded her star with some of the best character actors in the business...to give master classes on how to time a laugh...Instead of sticking to a conventionally constructed plot, this 'Fish' swims from one comic situation to another -- which may not make it much of a play. But there are plenty of laughs in the play's minor comic questions...just watch Houdyshell savor the punch line to this cynical joke. Give him his due: David is generous enough not to hog all the best lines for himself.

'Honeymoon In Vegas' answers gloomy Gotham's crying need for some good old lowbrow farce -- the kind of show with silly songs, mindless physical comedy and towering showgirls in feather headdresses. Scribe Andrew Bergman has turned his not-quite-cult 1992 movie...into a not-quite-knockout Broadway musical. But with catchy tunes and clever lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, sweet comic turns from Rob McClure and Tony Danza, and a bevy of Elvis impersonators, this brassy little show might brighten up this town over the winter.

Short and sweet and strangely haunting. That's the quick take on 'Constellations'...Gyllenhaal has the charm and good looks of a leading man, but he's also got the acting chops of a chameleon character actor...Here he gets to play someone whose character changes from minute to minute, and he's pretty amazing. So is Wilson...Her style as the brilliant, desperately needy Marianne is mercurial -- and enchanting...The important point here is that the devilishly clever scribe is not playing games with either his characters or his audience, because with each iteration Roland and Marianne grow closer to one another -- and become more important to us. And by the end of the play (has it really been only an hour?), we're fully invested in their lives. All of them.

As Treves dispassionately drones on about his subject's twisted limbs and misshapen torso, Cooper stands stock still in a cone of light and silently contorts his own perfect body into an approximation of each deformity. The piece de résistance is his depiction of the 'wide slobbering aperture' that is Merrick's mouth. Shaping his own mouth into a fleshy oval, the thesp gives expressive voice to the sensitive and intelligent human being imprisoned in his own body. It's a stunning performance, deeply felt and very moving.

'A Delicate Balance' is no play for sissies...All these years later, it's still very disturbing to look this work in the eye...Close, with her fine bones, imperial manner and elegant wardrobe (by Ann Roth), is positively regal as Agnes...Although Agnes admits to the all-too-human fear of losing her marbles and becoming 'mad as a hatter,' she'll brook no challenge to her authority from husband Tobias, played in Lithgow's carefully calibrated perf as a worm of a man -- but a worm who will eventually turn and deliver a blistering reckoning of the family's alienation from the living...It takes guts to take on a role famously played by Marian Seldes in the original production and by Elaine Stritch in the 1996 Broadway revival. So hats off to Duncan for the devilish joy she takes in the spiteful humor of that social rebel, a colorful scandal to the whole family, but a real menace to her sister's domination of the household.

The new, improved 'Side Show' smells like a hit. Helmer Bill Condon's shrewd reworking of this short-lived 1997 cult musical by Henry Krieger and Bill Russell...is both darker in tone and lighter in theme than memory has it. Leading ladies Emily Padgett and Erin Davie are perfection as Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins in real life who were plucked out of a carnival midway by a rascal showman and transformed into vaudeville stars. A lot of things that didn't work in the original version still don't work now, but no question about it, this show has the best freaks on Broadway.

The lighting (by UK designer Charles Balfour) is subtly seductive, and the ever-inventive sound maven Ian Dickinson (of the Autograph design team), who also did the fancy work on 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' and 'Jerusalem,' has invented a symphony of provocative night sounds that sustains the mood of the play from beginning to end, even when the human voices start to grate on the ear. Things start to go south when the Woman opens her mouth to reveal a shallow, rather silly character who gains no stature from Jumbo's perky performance. And while Jackman puts heart and soul into Butterworth's mystical meditations on the spiritual properties of trout fishing (even as he efficiently guts and cooks a very real fish on stage), fishing is still fishing and after a while you feel the urge to throw these fishy speeches back into the water.

Roundabout rounded up name players for this revival of 'The Real Thing,' Tom Stoppard's meditation on the vagaries of love and the elusive nature of reality. Ewan McGregor makes an impressive Broadway debut as a British playwright whose new play reflects both his own rocky relationship with his cool and distant wife (Cynthia Nixon) as well as his affair with the vivacious wife (a radiant Maggie Gyllenhaal) of the star of his play. Stoppard is a witty brainiac who likes to tease and torment an audience, but helmer Sam Gold's mannered production is so steeped in artifice, it's almost antagonistic to the text.

Issue-driven plays are thought to be relatively impervious to production vagaries. That's generally true of Akhtar's perhaps overly schematic play, which is constructed like a house of cards, its highly civilized human relationships in perfect harmony until someone breaks out of character and throws them all off balance...Some of the production alterations for Broadway are purely cosmetic. Being more elaborate, John Lee Beatty's set design of a stylish Manhattan apartment (a terrace!) and Jennifer Von Mayrhauser's fashionable costumes put more emphasis on the elegant life style of the characters. The new cast, including Josh Radnor as the curator, is perfectly satisfactory, but so was the original one that played in the smaller-scale production at Lincoln Center...But it must be said that replacing Aasif Mandvi...as Amir with Dhillon...puts a new perspective on the central character.

Sting lives up to his nickname, 'the King of Pain,' with 'The Last Ship.' Melancholy tones of sorrow and regret saturate this highly personal and intensely felt musical play, which is set in Wallsend, the industrial town in the north of England where the singer-songwriter grew up. The somber book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey takes place in 2007, the year the historic shipyard closed and the town lost its purpose and identity. The lyrical language of Sting's mournful score gives poetic voice to the distressed shipbuilders, but depicting their story as a heroic allegory is regrettably alienating.

'On the Town' is back on Broadway, and whaddya know, it's still a helluva show. Helmer John Rando (who directed the musical at Barrington Stage last year) has given the kid-glove treatment to this 1944 musical salute to New York...Joshua Bergasse's choreography, classic in design and elegant in form, pays its respects to Jerome Robbins' groundbreaking choreography, and although the young and vital cast is light on acting chops, the dancing is sensational.

Nobody does mean-nasty-vicious like Terrence McNally, bless his black heart. The pitiless playwright has exhumed 'It's Only a Play,' his 1986 love-hate letter to those big babies who work and play on Broadway, and updated it for today -- and for the timely if schmaltzy reunion of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. The comedy's slight plot, about the high drama (and low comedy) of the opening night of a new Broadway show, is still a trifle. But the well-aimed and highly personal zingers are more malicious, and delicious, this time out.

Believe the buzz. The National Theater Production of 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' is spectacular, like Cirque du Soleil with brains. Scribe Simon Stephens has made sensitive work of adapting Mark Haddon's bestselling book about a high-functioning boy with Asperger's Syndrome who learns to use his uncanny genius for math to navigate the world. Under Marianne Elliott's imaginative direction, a brilliant design team allows us to inhabit the boy's consciousness on a terrifying journey that begins with the death of a dog and ends with his discovery of the power of his own mind.

Donald Margulies gets a big, sloppy kiss from leading lady Blythe Danner, who is effortlessly lovely and irresistibly charismatic as the queenly head of a fractious theatrical family in his new play, 'The Country House.' The scribe also gets a big hug from Daniel Sullivan's buttery direction, which slathers a golden gloss over the plot holes and character cracks in his pleasant but hardly earth-moving play.

'You Can't Take It With You' declares itself in a stage direction: 'This is a house where you do as you like, and no questions asked.' That license to live the carefree life of children at play, extended by this 1936 comedy classic by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, appealed to a nation sunk in the Great Depression. But for a modern audience paranoid about 'entitlements,' not so much. That's one excuse, anyway, for this curiously inert revival helmed by Scott Ellis. Toplined by the great James Earl Jones and Rose Byrne, a perfectly swell cast can't convince us that they're having fun living the life of social parasites.

Although still a popular regional attraction, this 1989 two-hander has been largely forgotten by Gotham. Or maybe not so much forgotten as deemed irrelevant for a culture that doesn't get the point of love letters, or any kind of letters, or maybe even love itself. Older theatergoers who remember those quaint artifacts should turn out for stars of their own generation who also remember.

Steppenwolf's revival of 'This Is Our Youth,' Kenneth Lonergan's 1996 play about disaffected rich kids in the Reagan era, might be re-titled (or marketed as) 'These Are Your Parents.' These post-adolescent slackers living on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 1982 could easily have grown up to reproduce themselves as our current crop of privileged youth. In fact, this demographic is turning out in strong numbers for the show, drawn by its cast of baby stars Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson. That makes two generations of potential ticket buyers for this superbly directed staging. We can see the family theater parties now.

Here's the big question that should be on the minds of the producers of 'Holler If Ya Hear Me': Now that we've built it, will they come? The quick answer: Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the marketing campaign. That's the gamble investors took on this musical treatment of works left behind by Tupac Shakur, the now-sainted rap artist who died at the age of 25 in a 1996 drive-by shooting. Despite a clunky book, this show is on fire. But it's going to be a hard sell with traditional auds, and can the real fans spring for Broadway ticket prices?

Alan Cumming must have sold his soul to the devil to acquire his divinely debauched persona as the Emcee of the Kit Kat Klub in 'Cabaret.' It seemed nuts, but proved shrewd of Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall to retool their dazzling 1998 revival of the Kander and Ebb masterpiece, fit Cumming with a new trenchcoat for his triumphant return, and bring the decadent netherworld of 1920s Berlin back to Studio 54, the revival's ideal venue. Inspiration flagged, however, in casting Michelle Williams, so soft and vulnerable in 'My Week With Marilyn,' as wild and reckless party girl Sally Bowles.

The inspiration for Harvey Fierstein's 'Casa Valentina' was a discreet sanctuary in the Catskills where manly men (with wives and children and other baggage) could get their kicks in the bottled-up postwar era of the 50s by dressing up like girly-girls. But the play doesn't venture much beyond the facade of its true-life model. Fierstein vividly captures a group of these brave pioneers with their girdles on, and a trim ensemble helmed by Joe Mantello lends them character. But the plot is messy, the action static, and attempts to probe the psychosexual dynamic of transvestism are tentative and superficial.

The screaming starts when a bespangled Neil Patrick Harris parachutes onstage in 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' and doesn't stop until he's back in his dressing room. That's the kind of rock-star performance he gives in this spectacular revival -- helmed with fabulous flash by Michael Mayer -- of the 1998 musical (and later movie) by John Cameron Mitchell (book) and Stephen Trask (music & lyrics). Harris' Hedwig is an imperfectly transformed transvestite who grew up in East Berlin before the wall came down, resplendent in the punk drag of a nihilistic rocker but still concealing a heap of hurt under her wig.