Mark Kennedy

This 'Glengarry Glen Ross' is a hoot. The timing is pretty good too: Florida real estate and horrible desperation in offices is now in vogue.

A dazzling revival of Clifford Odets’ ”Golden Boy” opened Thursday, still packing a punch after 75 years. Tyson could do well to watch how to successfully put together a show about the rise and fall of a boxer…Tony Shalhoub is a stand-out as Bonaparte’s father, a role whose lines are written in broken Italian-accented English which could be a disaster in the wrong hands...But Shalhoub is so skilled that only a deeply felt character emerges…Numrich, who starred as the young farm boy Albert Narracott in “War Horse,” is a nimble former “shrimp with glasses” here, maintaining his air of insecurity despite a toned physique and a solid left hook. The actor nicely does impetuousness and brashness, but also you can feel his inner tumult at betraying his father….Sher has embraced the realism of this dark world — the sweat, gore and rushes of blood to the head. There are passionate kisses but always a lingering threat of violence. The place reeks of leather and failure.

Running an intermissionless 70 minutes, “The Anarchist” starts in second gear and never really speeds up or slows down, just becomes wave after wave of staccato dialogue that is more pleasant on the page than spoken. No one talks like this and the two actresses struggle to make something unnatural seem natural.

[Holmes] mostly tries hard to keep up with stage veterans Norbert Leo Butz and Jayne Houdyshell in Rebeck's oddly thin new play...Director Jack O'Brien struggles to both get the five-person cast to really jibe and the rhythm of the plot to get going. Holmes relies too much on a whiny teenage angst and a guilelessness that worked on TV but lacks nuance onstage...Rebeck, who created the first season of NBC's 'Smash' and several well-received plays including 'Seminar' and 'Mauritius,' has stumbled a bit with 'Dead Accounts,' a love letter to the hardworking, plainspoken Midwest, but one that lacks the sharpness and depth of her previous work...The heavy lifting is done by Butz...Butz at first seems to be overcompensating for the smallness of Holmes, but the anguish and heart of his character are revealed beautifully...But 'Dead Accounts' doesn't really resolve anything or really end. It just sort of peters out, its momentum lost and none of its issues resolved.

We've all seen the scene in 'A Christmas Story' when the kid gets his tongue stuck on a frozen flagpole. Now on Broadway is that very same scene – plus the kid actually singing through it, or at least trying to sing. 'Sthlun luv a...,' he mumbles at the end. It's just one great touch in a musical that dares to mess with one of the most popular Christmas-time movies of all time and yet manages to not only do the film justice, but top it. The show...is a charming triumph of imagination that director John Rando has infused with utter joy. It's also a snappy piece of mature songwriting from a pair of guys barely as old as the original 1983 film...Purists may be upset to miss some film elements – such as Ralphie's decoder ring – but few will walk away thinking 'A Christmas Story' has been dishonored, itself a little Christmas miracle.

Most of the jokes from the new Broadway comedy 'The Performers' cannot appear in a family newspaper. The world of adult films doesn't lend itself to cleanliness…The funny thing is that the show has a pure heart and a traditional feel-good message despite the waving of adult toys, simulated sex acts and language that would trigger a seizure in a network censor. Read has somehow found sweetness in porn…Director Evan Cabnet has aimed at, and struck, the tender heart in a script that could easily be performed with more darkness or more cartoony. The great cast — especially a squeaky, muddle-headed Graynor and zesty Winkler — keeps the show giggling.

Perhaps the best part is watching the first-rate cast have so much fun — Stephanie J. Block shows real comedic power, Jim Norton is having a ball, Chita Rivera is giggly, Gregg Edelman is just silly and Will Chase is over-acting perfectly...This is a play where overacting can be done to perfection…The jokes are hoary, the songs are ditties ('Off to the Races' is the best known) and the mystery not so mysterious — 'You might like to add that line to your list of suspicious statements!' says one character to the audience — but the fun is infectious, even if it seems that the folks on stage might be having more of it than the paying guests…In the wrong hands, it can sit awkwardly in a Broadway house — too zany, too arch. But these are the right hands: There are veterans at every turn. So no matter who gets the most votes, everyone wins.

The slow-to-start musical features an appealing 11-year-old Lilla Crawford in the title role, an overcooked Katie Finneran as Miss Hannigan and a first-rate Anthony Warlow as Daddy Warbucks...Finneran and Warlow seem to be in different shows. If you missed her in her Tony Award-winning turn as a daffy, drunken floozy in “Promises, Promises,” she reprises it here. In fact, she does very little new...If Finneran is big and brassy and broad, Warlow is the opposite. This Australian actor brings gravitas and a sumptuous voice to Warbucks...While Crawford is excellent, as is usually the case with “Annie,” a younger orphan often steals your heart. In this show, that would be Emily Rosenfeld as Molly, who is cuter than a dump truck of plush teddy bears.

The latest revival of 'The Heiress' has done the near impossible - it's drained the light from one of the most luminous actresses working today. In a good way. Jessica Chastain, that ravishing redhead with the milky skin who shot a dose of bubbly charm to the film 'The Help,' turns almost ghoulish in the title role…What's left is a skittish woman with hollow eyes, a simply horrible hostess who, when she speaks, does so in a dull monotone. Even her hair looks mousy. Full credit goes to Chastain, who has buried herself in dullness to play one of theater's more formidable proto-feminist roles. The men in her life - David Strathairn plays her father and Dan Stevens of 'Downton Abbey' her suitor - aren't too shabby either, each turning in performances that are complex and sympathetic. Neither actor, under the superb, subtle direction of Moises Kaufman, emerges as a straw man.

MacKinnon, who recently brilliantly directed 'Clybourne Park' and has worked closely with Albee ever since she directed the premiere of his 'The Play About the Baby' in 2001, proves again that she is a master at pacing and getting the best out of her actors who are wrestling with tough material. At Saturday's opening night, Albee came up on stage to wild applause – and bowed to her.

Despite a wonderfully yeasty Hodge, an always welcome Patrick Page and a lovely Clemence Poesy as Roxane, this 'Cyrano' often lumbers over its 2 hours and 45 minutes, tending to get bogged down in the florid, repetitive verse...This production may be a tad overdone, overstuffed and overwrought at times, but it has something that Cyrano himself considered one of the most important things in the world. It has panache.

The unraveling of Steve is at the heart of this play, and it is a sad and wondrous thing to watch Rudd, the childlike man of Judd Apatow films, go from a smug, big-smiling, self-assured guy to a shattered man whose faith has evaporated and who now holds a revolver…[Asner] has the comedy timing perfectly, not surprisingly, but it's also nice to see his angry side, too…Shannon and Arrington, a real-life couple, are stage animals through-and-through, and we are the beneficiaries.

Boyd Gaines and Richard Thomas are marvelous as the battling brothers at the heart of the play, but there are terrific turns also by Gerry Bamman, Michael Siberry and Kathleen McNenny. Director Doug Hughes paces it like a thriller, with the heat rising steadily.

The new musical 'Chaplin' opens with the sight of the Little Tramp balanced on a tightrope high above the stage. It's a fitting metaphor for the show itself – a wobbly, high stakes attempt to avoid gravity. Guess what happens? Gravity wins…Rob McClure in the title role certainly deserves more than this to work with. He has clearly put his heart and soul into playing Chaplin – he not only sings and acts with feeling, he also tightropes, roller-skates blindfolded, does a backflip without spilling any of his drink, and waddles with a cane like a man who has studied hours of flickering footage. But save for one sublime scene in which the various inspirations behind Chaplin's decision to embody the Little Tramp is revealed, the show McClure leads is equal parts flat, overwrought and tiresome.

heerleaders got crushed last season on Broadway when 'Lysistrata Jones' hit the mat hard and never recovered. But 'Bring It On: The Musical' has more – more athletics, more songs, more dazzle, more interesting characters. Someone may just need to regularly count the cheerleaders.

At 'Harvey,' there is overacting and under-acting, poor sound quality and endless windups for lame payoff jokes. And it is led by an actor who seems to be completely shorn of any charisma. Parsons, who plays a hard-core physicist nerd on 'The Big Bang Theory,' has merely transferred his pursed-mouth, vaguely creepy and unsocialized TV character to the stage. With no laugh track. For two hours.

The last musical of the official Broadway season comes into town like a huckster promising salvation. But it's the show itself that needs saving.There's a strong musical somewhere in 'Leap of Faith,' which stars a soulful Raul Esparza and has some of Alan Menken's best songs. But what opened Thursday at The St. James Theatre is sometimes confusing in its tone. Like its main character – the devious faith healer Rev. Jonas Nightingale, ready to scam residents of a down-and-out Kansas town – the musical is hard to pin down. There's too much misdirection.

t's tired, warmed-over farce that involves seltzer spraying, imaginary insects, boob jokes, loads of alcohol, people jumping over sofas, and the cast running around in dressing gowns. It's all very predictable and really not funny...But if you're in the mood for a European farce, a better one is 'One Man, Two Guvnors,' a play that seems to have swiped all the manic humor and good cheer from this one. If that sounds a bit like cheating on your wife, then how very appropriate.

The portrait that emerges – Manhattan Theatre Club's 'The Columnist' opened Thursday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre – should send a chill down the spine of any pundit who begins to think he or she is bigger than the story. Director Daniel Sullivan has tried to make each scene stand on its own, but the result is a play that may be more fun to perform than watch.

While O'Hara and Matthew Broderick are the stars on stage, the real credit for this very enjoyable romp goes to book writer Joe DiPietro and director and choreographer Kathleen Marshall. They've managed to take about 20 songs from the George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin catalog, marry them to the skeleton of the 1926 musical 'O, Kay!' and emerge with a plot that makes madcap sense with songs that feel right for the occasion. If this is a jukebox musical, this is how you do it right.

Sam’s final, drawn-out goodbye ignited clapping for its visual beauty — going to heaven looks really, really cool even if the dialogue (”See ya” and “Bye”) is somewhat lacking. But there are some clear missteps, notably the character of the hospital ghost who greets the dead Sam right after his murder. The ghost, which has been reworked since London, still isn’t right, an odd combination of vaudeville and soul that doesn’t fit this shocking moment. Overall, it’s an ambitious, carefully orchestrated work that raises the bar on technological innovation. In London, “Ghost The Musical” has become a hit. How will a Broadway audience likely respond? Ditto.

The first-rate cast — Linda Lavin, Dick Latessa, Michael Esper, Kate Jennings Grant, Brenda Pressley and Gregory Wooddell — has made the trip north after the production made its debut last fall off-Broadway at The Vineyard Theatre. Mark Brokaw returns as the director, and the play has been trimmed into a tighter, harder little gem...Lavin is an absolute wonder to behold as Rita Lyons, a nag of a mother with a collection of firm beliefs and eye rolls, a matriarch who is both suffocating and keeping everyone at arm’s length.

At the end of the play, a broken Blanche, the woman who represents the Old South, utters one of the most self-evident lines in Williams’ repertoire: “I’m anxious to get out of here — this place is a trap.” She’s right but the production definitely isn’t — it’s a joy that reminds us again how good Williams was.

'Clybourne Park' is everything you want in a play: Smart, witty, provocative and wonderfully acted by the well-knit ensemble of Crystal A. Dickinson, Brendan Griffin, Damon Gupton, Christina Kirk, Annie Parisse, Jeremy Shamos and Frank Wood. Director Pam MacKinnon lets each actor shine, pulls out the humor and is a master at the slow boil.

Bean and director Sir Nicholas Hytner have made further tweaks to accommodate the unfamiliarity of most Americans with some British expressions. It’s been said our two countries are divided by a common language, but the joyous laughter emanating from this production could reunite them at last. Staged by Hytner with close attention to farcical nuance, the extremely accomplished original British cast animatedly sends up the politically incorrect, often-bawdy jokes and stereotypes of that bygone era, aided by frequent audience participation and interludes of peppy skiffle music.