Marilyn Stasio

Maybe it takes a black Irish heart to fully appreciate McDonagh's savage humor. But from bizarre stage plays like The Lieutenant of Inishmore to a psychotic film like Seven Psychopaths, the scribe always tempers his killing wit with affection, and even sympathy for his victims. That's the way it works with The Cripple of Inishmaan...McDonagh's sly point here seems to be that Irish humor, so wickedly cutting and clever, doesn't always mean to inflict pain. There are times when the marvelous musical verbiage that rolls off the silver tongues of the Irish can serve as secretive, even protective camouflage for truths better not spoken.

Moss Hart has a lot to answer for. Just think how many future brain surgeons and rocket scientists were lost, lured to Gotham to pursue a theater career after reading 'Act One,' the eminent Broadway playwright-director's captivating 1959 showbiz autobiography. Still, Hart can't be blamed for the missteps of playwright-director James Lapine in adapting that seminal book. Having learned the tricks of the trade from the great George S. Kaufman, Hart would surely have taken a scalpel to this verbose, unwieldy, overacted production -- but kept the spotlight on winning star turns by Santino Fontana and Tony Shalhoub.

James Franco and Chris O'Dowd may be the big draws (and well deserving of all their kudos) in this emotionally devastating revival of John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men.' But the other star of the show is helmer Anna D. Shapiro, who turns in an impeccably mounted production without a single blemish. The ensemble acting is flawless. The design work is breathtaking. And Steinbeck's Depression-based views on the human connections that are our only hope of survival in desperate times are just as relevant -- even imperative -- for living through our own cruel times.

The ungainly stage at Broadway's Circle in the Square has proved an inspiration for set designer James Noone to recreate Emerson's Bar & Grill, the seedy joint in North Philadelphia where Billie Holiday played one of her last club dates in 1959, three months before she died...It's a known fact that McDonald is a majestic singer. (Maybe the best Bess, of 'Porgy and Bess,' our modern stage has seen.) In more than a dozen songs, she captures the plaintive sound, the eccentric phrasing and all the little vocal catches that identify Billie Holiday's unique style. But it's her extraordinary sensitivity as an actor that makes McDonald's interpretation memorable.

'Bullets Over Broadway' is the show everyone hoped would get those flickering Broadway lights blazing again. In certain wonderful ways -- Susan Stroman's happy-tappy dance rhythms, the dazzling design work on everything from proscenium curtain to wigs, and a fabulous chorus line of dancing dolls, molls and gangsters -- Woody Allen's showbiz musical is the answer to a Broadway tinhorn's prayer. Surprisingly, though, the book (from Allen's own screenplay for his 1994 film) is feeble on laughs, and certain key performers don't seem comfortable navigating the earthy comic idiom of burlesque. So, let's call it close -- but no cigar.

Unfortunately, this kind of cutting wit, snappily delivered by a couple of certifiable stars like Collette and Letts, lulls the aud into thinking they have walked into a brittle comedy of manners. (Cue the patters of applause for every damned laugh line and, less plausibly, the knee-jerk impulse to clap after every scene, however brief.) Eno does write comical lines and witty exchanges, but his humor is not the reassuring stuff of sitcoms. It's the desperately funny chitchat of political prisoners awaiting the hangman...The all-star cast not only brings out character nuances that would be lost in a less savvy production, they might even manage to keep the house open for much if not most of the show's limited run. But word is bound to get out that Eno's tragi-comic sensibility is hard to digest for anyone who hasn't already acquired a taste for it. So, while there's an air of mystery about this piece, the biggest mystery is what this downtown show is doing on Broadway in the first place.

Denzel Washington's rabid fans won't be seeing their idol in this heart-stopping revival of Lorraine Hansberry's ground-breaking 1959 play, 'A Raisin in the Sun.' They'll be seeing Walter Lee Younger, the scion of a hard-working black family who sees his dreams of success slipping away on the post-WWII racial battlefront of Chicago's South Side. The performance is a personal triumph for Washington, who refrains from star-strutting to fold himself into a tight-knit ensemble of committed stage thesps who treat this revival like a labor of love.

Terrence McNally tries to cover a lot of territory in 'Mothers and Sons': the relationships between mothers and their gay sons; the satisfactions of gay marriage; the dark, enduring legacy of AIDS; and the generation gap within the gay community. Lucky for this high-profile scribe, he has sensitive interpreters of these themes in thesps Frederick Weller and the ever-astonishing Tyne Daly. But the ideas are so diffuse and the dramatic structure so disjointed, there's no cohesion to the material and no point to the plot.

Les Miserables' is back, and those irreverent satirists at Forbidden Broadway must be licking their chops. There's no clunky turntable to mock in this reverential revival of the barnburner musical that Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg shrewdly fashioned from the classic Victor Hugo novel, which ran for 16 years on Broadway. But those excitable French revolutionaries are still storming the barricades, marching in place and singing at the top of their lungs. And unlike the tentative 2006 revival, this one is a solid piece of theatrical architecture, built to survive every critical arrow shot through its heart.

The magic-carpet ride is magical. The Cave of Wonders is wonderful. And yes, you'll hear the tunes you loved in the 1992 movie. But the notion that 'Disney Aladdin' somehow resurrects the spirit of the late Howard Ashman, who had the original inspiration for the movie and contributed most of its clever lyrics, is a joke. Restoring a person's work without respecting his artistic sensibility is no tribute at all.

Whatever your expectations going into 'Rocky,' you come out rocking the technology. No mystery about where the $16.5 million capital investment went in this musical iteration of the 1976 movie that made an iconic hero of Rocky Balboa. Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens no doubt took their pittance for scoring the book by Thomas Meehan and Sylvester Stallone. But the real coin for helmer Alex Timbers' extravagant production went into the spectacular projections, sound and lighting effects, and into the scenic showpiece - a regulation-size boxing ring that puts the audience ringside for the big fight. Looks like it was worth every penny.

What do you say we take up a collection and send every one of those clowns in Congress to 'All the Way,' Robert Schenkkan's jaw-dropping political drama about President Lyndon B. Johnson's Herculean efforts (and Pyrrhic sacrifices) to get the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. Bryan Cranston - three-time Emmy winner and everybody's favorite bad boy as the scholarly drug czar in 'Breaking Bad' - owns the role of LBJ, cracking the politician's hard shell to expose the man's personal crisis of conscience. But the shocker is watching real legislators legislating, crossing the aisle, however reluctantly, to get difficult things done.

Everybody knows that playwrights shouldn't direct their own plays. But composers might also think twice about doing their own orchestrations. In an intimate house, Jason Robert Brown's lushly melodic score for 'The Bridges of Madison County' would seem a proper fit for Marsha Norman's book, which is gushy but more literate than Robert James Waller's mawkish 1992 novella about soulful lovers in a hopeless adulterous affair. But although Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale are in glorious voice as this passionate pair, the bombastic orchestrations and Bartlett Sher's overstated helming inflate the production into some quasi-operatic beast that thinks it's 'Aida.'

So, what's next - golf? Scribe-for-hire Eric Simonson and producers Fran Kirmser and Tony Ponturo have this factory assembly-line thing going with pro sports organizations: First came 'Lombardi,' backed by the National Football League, then 'Magic / Bird' with the National Basketball Association, and now, 'Bronx Bombers,' which has the blessing of the Yankees and Major League Baseball. Marketing this one might be more of a challenge, though. With the exception of the baseball-crazy Japanese, can you sell the Broadway tourist audience on this rah-rah cheer for the home team?

It may not be as dramatic as 'Doubt' or as funny as 'Moonstruck,' but John Patrick Shanley has not written a more beautiful or loving play than 'Outside Mullingar.' The rural dialect spoken on the farms and villages of Ireland translates into prickly poetry under Doug Hughes' helming of this bittersweet family drama about the unresolved issues between cantankerous parents and their obstinate offspring. Playing neighbors whose families are caught up in a bizarre feud over a contested strip of land that separates their two farms, Debra Messing and Brian F. O'Byrne are a match made in heaven.

Enthralled as we are to our digital gadgetry, you'd think we'd identify with the heroine of 'Machinal,' Sophie Treadwell's 1928 Expressionistic melodrama (inspired by the infamous Ruth Snyder case) about a woman driven to murder trying to escape her fate in a mechanized society. Helmer Lyndsey Turner's stunning production creates an appropriately bleak environment for this dark drama, and Rebecca Hall (a member of British theatrical royalty better known for her movie work) makes a compelling case for this fragile creature. But it's tough to empathize with someone who lacks a backbone and hasn't a brain in her head.

The early life and career of legendary singer-songwriter Carole Kingsurely deserves more imaginative treatment than the corny chronological storytelling (And then we wrote ...) and old-fashioned musical format (scene/song/scene/song) of 'Beautiful.' But whenever this bio-musical stumbles over Douglas McGrath's flat-footed book, helmer Marc Bruni rushes to the rescue with some snazzy piece of stagecraft for the sleek production numbers. And all is forgotten, even momentarily forgiven, whenever Jessie Mueller, in the modest person of Carole King, sits down at the piano and pours heart and soul into familiar favorites from the composer's songbook.

The early life and career of legendary singer-songwriter Carole Kingsurely deserves more imaginative treatment than the corny chronological storytelling (And then we wrote ...) and old-fashioned musical format (scene/song/scene/song) of 'Beautiful.' But whenever this bio-musical stumbles over Douglas McGrath's flat-footed book, helmer Marc Bruni rushes to the rescue with some snazzy piece of stagecraft for the sleek production numbers. And all is forgotten, even momentarily forgiven, whenever Jessie Mueller, in the modest person of Carole King, sits down at the piano and pours heart and soul into familiar favorites from the composer's songbook.

How very daring - a witty musical about a serial killer that Stephen Sondheim didn't write. Fashioned from the ingeniously absurd plot of the novel that inspired the classic Alec Guinness film comedy 'Kind Hearts and Coronets,' 'A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder' proves an ideal vehicle for the versatile talents of Jefferson Mays. Reveling in his multiple roles, Mays plays eight wacky members of a noble family doomed to die at the hands of a distant heir who covets the family title and fortune. The English music hall format is the perfect performance style for this adorably wicked show.

The secret villain that Rylance unmasks in Richard’s soliloquies also goes against the grain, an assassin consumed less by envy and hatred of his victims than loathing for his own twisted self. It isn’t political ambition but psychic pain that compels him to destroy all the people who genuinely love him, among them his brother Clarence (Liam Brennan, a manly Orsino in “Twelfth Night” and here a most poetic murder victim); his nephews, the young Princes in the Tower; and, most fatefully, his loyal partner in dark deeds, the Duke of Buckingham, played by Angus Wright in full, sonorous voice (at least, on those nights when he isn’t making a wonderful honking fool of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in “Twelfth Night.”) In the end, Richard has no one left to hate but himself, which he finally acknowledges in his last soul-baring soliloquy (“Alack, I love myself / Alas, I rather hate myself”) on the eve of battle at Bosworth field.

Tuning up for his wise fool antics as Feste in “Twelfth Night,” the agile Peter Hamilton Dyer demonstrates a tricky piece of fingering on the recorder for goggle-eyed patrons. Suiting up for his sober role as the tragic Lord Hastings in “Richard III,” Paul Chahidi twinkles and waves at a groundling who has recognized him for the scheming Maria he plays in “Twelfth Night.”

When Duke Ellington and his orchestra played the Cotton Club, the swells donned their white tie and tails and went uptown to Harlem in limousines. Everyone else took the A train. 'After Midnight,' a musical revue that Jack Viertel and Warren Carlyle steered through Encores! to this snazzy Broadway production, salutes that fabled era without attempting to re-create it. This stylized treatment of a midnight floorshow at a 1930s jazz club is gorgeously designed to showcase roof-raising performances from top-flight talent - backed up by a 17-piece swing band loaded with brass and holding down the stage.

Anyone who shelled out the big bucks to see James Bond in the flesh will get more than they bargained for in Mike Nichols' impeccable revival of 'Betrayal.' They'll be getting a powerful performance fromDaniel Craig, a movie star who still has his stage legs. Rachel Weisz, Craig's wife in the real world, and Rafe Spall, both superb, claim much of the stage time as the adulterous lovers in this enigmatic 1978 play that Harold Pinter based on one of his own extramarital affairs. But it's the smoldering Craig, as the cuckolded husband, whose brooding presence is overpowering.

Mary-Louise Parker is much too delicate and entirely too fashionable (in stunning widow's weeds designed by Jane Greenwood) to be stuck in Syracuse in the dead of winter and at the end of the Gilded Age in America. But that's the price of playing a Chekhovian heroine in 'The Snow Geese,' Sharr White's bland homage to the master of upper-class existential malaise. The family in this domestic drama is, indeed, as melancholy as any family in a Russian play. But they're so shallow and self-centered that they are welcome to their misery.

Rupert Holmes' stage adaptation of John Grisham's first novel, 'A Time to Kill,' comes at a sweet moment for the author, whose belated sequel to that 1989 book, 'Sycamore Row,' is being published this month. But a 25-year time lapse that works on the page doesn't necessarily play on the stage, and there's a distinctly dated feeling to the material - not the topic of Southern racism, but the youthful idealism of its hero. And despite a sturdy ensemble production helmed by Ethan McSweeny, this courtroom drama feels as if it were made for an earlier, less cynical era.