Mark Kennedy

The gloriously gory, sleek, over-the-top musical that opened Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre is a darkly wonderful adaptation of the once-controversial novel by Bret Easton Ellis...Walker, who is a Patrick Bateman both superficial and a critic of superficiality, is built like an Adonis - hard not to notice since he spends most of the show in his underwear - and has a detached, menacing air. He manages to make his Bateman charming, evil and funny...Credit story writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, songwriter Duncan Sheik and director Rupert Goold for going whole hog...Sheik's electronic- and choral-based score is marvelously varied... the cast includes a deliciously airheaded Heléne Yorke as Bateman's girlfriend and a sweet, beautifully voiced Jennifer Damiano as Bateman's secretary. Alice Ripley plays several parts and is great in all but we'd love to see more.

Posters for the new Broadway revival of 'The Crucible' feature a photo of Saoirse Ronan, looking absolutely witchy as Abigail Williams. She's awfully good in it, but the real sorcery is delivered by Ben Whishaw. The English actor is astounding in Arthur Miller's classic tale about the Salem witch trials. He plays doomed farmer John Proctor and holds nothing back, going from slightly arrogant to flustered to full-out broken over the course of the play, a master stroke by a 35-year-old making his Broadway debut. The revival...is more uneven, lacking the singular, brilliant focus of van Hove's earlier revival this season...

The new Broadway musical 'Bright Star' starts with a bit of bluster, maybe even some swagger. 'If you knew my story, you'd have a good story to tell,' the leading lady sings. But after 2½ hours of this down-home hokum, the answer is clear: No, we don't. Comedian and banjo enthusiast Steve Martin has teamed up with singer-songwriter Edie Brickell to write a cliche-ridden, foot-pounding, over-eager Southern Gothic romance that ill serves a wonderful Broadway debut in Carmen Cusack. The show that opened Thursday at the Cort Theatre never hits an honest note and seems to have been written by two people who adore classic Broadway musicals but who have intentionally decided to make a third-rate version. The music, with a few exceptions, is weak...The book and lyrics are even more feeble, with graceless lines...and weird characters...Director Walter Bobbie gets everything out of his cast and keeps a frenetic pace going but for no clear payoff.

An astounding cast, a nifty story and memorable songs turn this revival into a celebration of classic musical construction. It's worth skipping work to see...Benanti charms from the moment she steps onstage but never coasts even though the role is firmly in her wheelhouse. She's genuinely buffeted by emotions that swing from disgust to fondness, and she is vocally in a league of her own, flawlessly knocking back the near-operatic demands of the part. Levi turns out to be no slouch either. The part requires a singer who can act and has comedic chops, and Levi nails it. He has the unenviable task of immediately following Benanti's triumphant, bed-bouncing 'Vanilla Ice Cream' with the title song and yet he owns the stage as a heel-clicking giddy man suddenly in love. He even does a cartwheel.

It turns out there is a place more uncomfortable to be on Broadway than a bullet-ridden hut watching sex slaves try to preserve their humanity. That would be among the audience watching the harrowing -- and absolutely brilliant -- revival of 'Blackbird'...Michelle Williams plays the spiky, vengeful and still-broken victim, and Jeff Daniels is the stressed-out, humiliated one-time aggressor. With this indisputably superb cast, the play ducks and weaves enough to take your breath away under Joe Mantello's taut direction.

Nyong'o loses herself utterly in the searing and stunning play 'Eclipsed,' which opened Sunday at the Golden Theatre, also marking the important Broadway bows for playwright Danai Gurira and director Liesl Tommy. Oscar-winner Nyong'o ('12 Years A Slave') plays a 15-year-old known only as The Girl who finds herself enslaved in a rebel compound during a bloody civil war in Africa. The five-member cast - all women - is a true ensemble and must not be missed.

Smoke effects, Adam Cork's ghostly music, which fills a few long pauses, and the rumblings of the busy street outside give this 'Hughie' a spectral, slightly macabre feel. It has the effect of making these two men more meaningful and of deepening the meaning of the play. Whitaker's confidence grows as his Erie becomes comfortable around the new night clerk. As he gets looser and more animated, the actor also shows the gnawing loneliness of Erie, his disgust and also the respect he shared with Hughie...Whitaker handles the overripe dialogue...without overplaying it, and adds nervous touches...One of the pleasures of reading O'Neill's script is the extended interior thoughts of the night clerk, which somehow Wood must translate onstage beyond a general sullenness...Wood is perfectly clipped and standoffish...Grandage lets it breathe and the actors make it work as a parable about connecting and disconnecting in modern life.

A sickening thud is the first thing you hear at Stephen Karam's powerful Broadway debut 'The Humans.' It's an unexplained noise, and unsettling. There are clearly unseen forces at work here. The dark comedy opened Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theatre with a terrific cast and an unsentimental look at the way we live today - anxiety-ridden, having little control over our environment or bodies, forever stretched and always a step from the abyss. It is an absolute triumph.

Michael Frayn's farce about putting on a stage farce is breathlessly clever and funny, a staple of the contemporary theater repertoire. How can it be made even funnier? The Roundabout Theatre Company somehow has found a way, armed with inspired casting...All add little touches to their parts, like Hilty mouthing everyone's lines and slithering down some stairs. Martin, we always knew, can make just holding a plate of sardines hysterical, and here she's in her element. Shamos...shows his physical comedy chops here, prat-falling and slipping on a slick stage over and over like a character from Sunday morning cartoons. McClure's manic, unhinged energy is perfect and his ferocious shaking when he's forced onstage as a replacement is stunning. Furr is a true revelation: Just listening to him bluster or watching him frantically rush around can make your ribs hurt...Everyone onstage has to believe that the risks are real, and this new ensemble never mugs or winks, despite the silliness. They are utterly, terribly good at being bad, which is meant as a supreme compliment.

Cynthia Erivo is an absolute marvel in the lead role of Celie, playing her at first with defeated deference, then indignation and then righteous might. Her voice lifts the roof off the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. There are times you forget Jennifer Hudson also is onstage...Doyle's pacing in the first act is so swift that there's little time to breathe as misery seems to visit Celie without release...Things loosen up in a more airy second act...Hudson as the hedonistic Shug Avery rushes her lines a tad but no one will care when she opens her mouth to deliver the title song...There is purity and astounding horse power in her voice. Danielle Brooks...makes a strong Sofia, one whose spirit of mirth never gets lost.

Webber blasted the theatrical doors down to let rock in with such shows as 'Jesus Christ Superstar' and 'Cats' but how could he handle this assignment? Not too badly, it turns out. While leaning a little bit too much on his new song 'Stick It to the Man,' Webber, with lyricist Glenn Slater, turns in some perfectly solid mainstream rock-ish anthems in 'Mount Rock' and 'If Only You Would Listen.' He even mocks the genre with 'I'm Too Hot for You.'

There's no understudy for Al Pacino in David Mamet's new Broadway play 'China Doll' -- and nor could there be. No one else could possibly fit into the main character -- a blustery, charming and venal political mover and shaker -- like Pacino. The part has been tailored for him like the snappy three-piece Georgio Armani suit he lounges in. And while the Oscar- and Tony-winner is impossible to stop watching -- mostly because he never leaves the stage and also because the only other character is an assistant -- the play itself is a meandering one-note character study of a doomed man.

In the end, 'Misery' isn't total misery. It's just weird. Apart from the fact that it's a completely unnecessary adaptation, you oddly start to root for the monster, not the bona fide action hero. That's because Bruce Willis makes an appallingly ill-conceived Broadway debut in the thriller that opened Sunday at the Broadhurst Theatre. But Laurie Metcalf rescues the 'Die Hard' stud by doing enough good acting for both of them.

nternment camps, racial discrimination and an atomic bomb blast are challenging topics to incorporate into a satisfying night of theater. The heavy-handed, cliche-driven 'Allegiance' which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre tries to take on all three - but does so unsuccessfully in a bombastic and generic Broadway musical. It has an ambitious agenda - touching on pride, citizenship, degradation, interracial romance, bravery and honor - and it's too much. While it's great that an Asian cast is telling a chapter in its own history, it's through an old-fashioned, stereotypical style that's out of touch with where Broadway is going.

The infectious, earnest musical 'On Your Feet!' initially stutters out the gate and ends somewhat awkwardly, but has a fun, percussive middle, even as it skates perilously close to melodrama. It's saved by its genuine heart - and a list of great tunes, ones that nicely make the transition from radio to stage.

Much like 'Hamilton' uses hip-hop and R&B to retell the story of Alexander Hamilton, Bartlett borrows England's greatest writer to frame a tale about what might happen when the current English queen dies. Bartlett uses verse and iambic pentameter to spin his web, leaning on 'Macbeth' and 'Richard III' and 'King Lear.' A splendid Tim Pigott-Smith reprises his role as King Charles III, which he played in London, leading it to a best new play win at the Olivier Awards. He fiddles with his cuffs like Charles and nervously turns his signet ring, but never falls into mimicry. His descent into madness is Lear-lite and Pigott-Smith is up to the task.

Director Evan Cabnet has encouraged the humor, passion and the horror but all those elements stewing together over the 2½-hour play eventually start to spoil. The horror doesn't really stay sustained, the love curdles oddly and the humor breaks the momentum of both...Knightley gives it her all and she's wonderful as she goes from odd duck...to lip-quivering lust...As her sickly, dismissive husband Camille, Gabriel Ebert is superb and Ryan is strong as the overwhelmed lover, but Judith Light as Camille's mother is too, well, nice. Light is supposed to be overbearing and sour but comes across as simply doting. Her triumph at the end is muted. Perhaps the show's biggest star isn't Knightley at all but Beowulf Boritt, whose set design is remarkable and sublime.

Man's best friend may never have a better tail than A.R. Gurney's charming play, which opened Tuesday at the Cort Theatre. It helps when you have a hot dog in the title role and Annaleigh Ashford, a new Tony Award winner, is at the top of her co-me-tick game. She's off and running...Daniel Sullivan directs with howling success...Ashford...captures the playful, naughty essence of a dog without being led a-stray by camp...For all the doggie brilliance, there's a fourth member of the cast -- a rubber-faced Robert Sella -- who is of a different breed, entirely. He plays three roles, including a dog-lover with a pooch named Bowser, a haughty Manhattan matron who Sylvia turns into a mutt-ering mess, and a marriage counselor of indeterminate gender. He is hysterical.

It's taken almost half a century for 'Dames at Sea' to come to Broadway. There really was no rush. This insubstantial musical, which sits awkwardly between celebration and parody, opened Thursday at the Helen Hays Theatre like a riff off a long-forgotten joke. And its bad identity crisis lets down one of the most hard-working casts in the business...It's the 1960s laughing at the 1930s, but in this century, it comes off as hopelessly hidebound. The music by Jim Wise is so light and derivative that it leaves no mark on the brain or heart...The show is weighed down by references to old stars...Randy Skinner directs and choreographs very tidily, keeping the hijinks bright, the hoofing electric and the 'Golly gee willickers' delivered at a rosy, Technicolor level...But while everyone is sweating up a storm, the purpose is unclear. The dames are all at sea.

One thing you should probably not bet against at 'The Gin Game' on Broadway is the little old lady onstage who seems to have supernatural luck with cards. Another is the two-person cast, James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson...The handsome and beautifully acted revival of D.L. Coburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play...about two lonely, alienated nursing home residents is directed by Leonard Foglia, who has put an emphasis on the play's humor. That makes for an enjoyable evening but also makes the come-out-of-nowhere ending a gut-wrencher...Jones curses up a storm, pushes for faster games and slaps the cards down on the table in hopes of winning just a single hand. Tyson plays her little old lady with a stutter-step and tentativeness to her gait, but a mind sharp and stinging. There's a girlish glee that comes over her as each new round ends with her victory. Watching them together is a sheer honor.

That Thom Yorke is the first from the creative team to greet you at the new revival of 'Old Time' is the first indication you're in for an unsettling show...There's lots of lounging around, staring at each other and trying to repress the bubbling longings beneath the polite chitchat. This is a play where crossing or uncrossing one's legs is fraught with meaning...Clive Owen makes his Broadway debut with jaunty menace in this Roundabout Theatre Company production opposite the British actresses Eve Best and Kelly Reilly, both lovely and enigmatic and ferociously elegant in not-so-retro costumes by Constance Hoffman. Owen's edgy, masculine charm and absurdist sense of humor are on show and Best, as Anna, is completely believable as the object of lust for at least one of her dinner companions. Reilly has less script to work with and so often must communicate her uneasy marriage and unburied past with just soulful eyes and by pivoting her body.

The result is an exhilarating and fluid hybrid of song, word, dance and sign - and a sheer triumph for director Michael Arden and choreographer Spencer Liff. The songs sit seamlessly in the show, often as brightly lit fantasy sequences that snap back into the grim narrative.

The hip-hop-based musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary of the United States, has gotten even more 'scrappy and hungry' like its hero...This is a musical often stunning in its audaciousness...Perhaps Act 2 wanders a bit and the ending is a slight let-down. But there's no denying the show's sheer brashness and freshness. It is a revolution: A reclaiming of America's founding story by a multicultural cast using modern music and themes...The standout performances are Leslie Odom Jr. as a wary Aaron Burr, a cautious yin to Hamilton's impulsive yang. Odom throws down a career-defining marker here, graceful and cunning and haunted as both the narrator and the man who will kill Hamilton in 1804. Renee Elise Goldsberry as Hamilton's sister-in-law is glorious as the treasury secretary's secret crush, rapping and singing like a virtuoso, and Phillipa Soo is a tender and swanlike wife to Hamilton...mostly [Miranda} seems to have cut back the historical underbrush that sometimes bogged the show down.

Trust a John Kander-Fred Ebb musical to make the sunny color of vitality and youth positively menacing...[Kander's] music is wonderfully complicated; some are fully fleshed out numbers and others seductive sketches that pull you in...Hould-Ward...has a surreal retinue of three men in tuxes and black hats who wear sunglasses, caked-on makeup and extravagant yellow shoes. They sing in falsettos and are utterly chilling...Rivera is as elegantly regal, funny and sly as always. Her billionaire is haughty and irritable but there's simply no denying her...'The Visit' is sophisticated and beautiful and yet has that typical glorious chilling view of man that you expect from a Kander and Ebb show.

'Something Rotten!'...is fresh and hysterical and irreverent. It's easily the funniest thing to arrive on Broadway since 'The Book of Mormon'...the song 'A Musical,' in which the writers get to goof on such shows as 'Rent,' 'Pippin,' 'Les Miserables,' 'On the Town,' 'Annie' and the Rockettes. It's one of the highlights of a show that is full of them, all led by director Casey Nicholaw at his exuberant, daffy best...A stunningly good first act...invariably leads to a somewhat weaker second act, but that's still better than most entire musicals on Broadway right now...But Borle as Shakespeare seems to be having the most fun of all. He shakes his butt, gets to put on a disguise and plays a preening peacock of a man...'Something Rotten!' is a valentine to Broadway musicals...these outsiders have created something far from rotten. Or a turd. It's awesome.