Melissa Rose Bernardo

Nathan Lane is at his tragicomic best in The Nance...Beane - along with director Jack O'Brien, who knows a thing or two about showbiz razzle-dazzle (see: Hairspray) - has come up with a few genuinely fresh burlesque bits (no easy feat!), accompanied by Glen Kelly's too-darn-catchy tunes. And they've assembled a crack comic team to play the Irving Place performers...the priceless Lewis J. Stadlen portrays Efram, Chauncey's usual scene partner. Stadlen and Lane have built up quite the easy-breezy comic rapport over the years in shows such as Laughter on the 23rd Floor, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,Mizlansky/Zilinsky or 'Schmucks', and The Man Who Came to Dinner. If they got an act together, they could take it on the road. B

The play may be - okay, is, definitely - overstuffed. Fortunately, the performances are first-rate. Durang's old Yale Drama pal Weaver and Nielsen, his favorite character actress of late, know his brand of eccentric comedy better than anyone. Nielsen, especially, is at her bug-eyed, bobble-headed best - really, this is a good thing, particularly when she's impersonating Maggie Smith. And sure, Hyde Pierce's second-act harangue against technology, TV, and self-stick postage stamps goes on about five minutes two long - though the Frasier star's delivery couldn't be more spot-on....But restraint has never really been Durang's thing...Whatever he borrows from long-dead Russian playwrights, Vanya and Sonia... is entirely, indisputably, oh-no-he-didn't classic Durang.

But outside the confines of that fluorescent-lit, pressure-packed, disinfected room, The Lyons feels ill at ease. Though Silver has wisely excised Lisa's rambling Alcoholics Anonymous monologue since the late 2011 Off Broadway run, an extended apartment-showing scene lingers at the top of act two; and on second viewing, it seems less compatible with the witty whirlwind we've just witnessed. (It actually feels like a short play in itself, like one that might appear at the EST Marathon mentioned in the scene — 10 points for audience members who get that inside-NYC-theater reference.) It does provide a convenient route back to the hospital, where comic order is, thankfully, restored. But there's only so much struggling-actor shtick a viewer can take, even from a hunky blond broad-shouldered broker (Gregory Wooddell). Besides, that all-white apartment could really use a Rita Lyons makeover.'

Thankfully, Pam MacKinnon's crackerjack production hasn't lost any of its punch since its 2010 premiere at Off Broadway's Playwrights Horizons; in fact, it's tighter, a touch faster paced, and even more unflinchingly intense. And actors have only improved (though improvement was by no means necessary). Dickinson makes Lena ever so slightly more sympathetic; Kirk is even more beautifully clueless in both her roles; and Shamos, an always terrific, long-unheralded actor, is a poker-faced marvel as both Karl and Steve.

Once the entire gang of orphans, pirates, and aristocrats get caught up in a doozy of a sea storm, the show starts to get a little bumpy as well. (Directors Roger Rees and Alex Timbers’ deliberately low-tech staging — think spray bottles, sticks, and wires — is terribly clever and impeccably paced, but that is one looong shipwreck scene.) And when everyone finds themselves wandering through a jungle, your mind may begin to wander as well. A bunch of savages with names like Fighting Prawn and Hawking Clam who want to 'butterfly and deep-fat fry' Peter & Co. definitely overstay their welcome.

There are three questions facing any woman in the title role of the 1979 Andrew Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice musical Evita: How is her 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina'? How is her arm raise (a.k.a. the signature Evita pose)? And how does she handle that vocal-cord-killing score? For Argentine actress Elena Roger in the adequate new Broadway revival, the answers are: Passable. Effective. And badly.

McAnuff has assembled a glorious group of voices, including Paul Nolan (Jesus) and Josh Young (Judas) — both extraordinarily good rock screamers — and Chilina Kennedy as hooker-turned-handmaiden Mary Magdalene. (Also impressive: the smooth stylings of Marcus Nance as conniving high priest Caiaphas. It can't be easy to enunciate under that Battlefield Earth hairdo and Matrix-style trench.) Would that Nolan had a little more — or any — charisma to go with his killer vocals on the climactic 'Gethsemane.' But given a choice between a boring Jesus who belts it to the balcony and a charmer who can't hit a high D, I'll take a superstar singer any day.

Wit is about so much more than one woman's disease. It's about knowledge, ignorance, humanity, love; 'the play is about simplicity and complications,' schoolteacher Edson has said...Fearless doesn't even begin to describe Nixon's performance. She never leaves the stage — the same stage, incidentally, where she delivered her Tony-winning performance in Rabbit Hole in 2006. And from her 'Hi! How are you feeling today?' introduction until her rebirth-like valediction, she never fails to captivate. (Grade: A)

Credit the Roundabout Theatre Company for selecting one of South African playwright Athol Fugard's more unknown works, 1984's The Road to Mecca. Credit Roundabout, actually, for selecting one at all: The last Fugard production on Broadway was in 2003, a revival of his 'Master Harold'...and the Boys. After all, the prolific Fugard has penned nearly three dozen dramas. Yet this Road to Mecca, at the American Airlines Theatre through March 4, is long, winding, and, in the end, more than a little unsatisfying.

With a combined 74 years of Broadway experience and more than a dozen main-stem musicals under their belts, Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin could probably put together a bang-up concert built entirely on their greatest hits...There's none of that fake banter or forced audience interplay that typifies (and drags down) concerts like these. It's just two hours of good old-fashioned musical theater.

If the whole show were simply about getting a laugh out of bad Chinese-to-English signs, it would get really old really quickly. (Of course, one must devote a certain amount of attention to a placard that reads 'F--- the Certain Price of Goods.' That sign should actually read 'Dry Goods Pricing Department' and the convoluted explanation - concerning Communism, Chairman Mao, and the simplification of writing 'beautiful, arcane, devilishly complicated' Chinese characters - is priceless.) And the mistranslations would be silly if they weren't, in fact, true: The play is inspired by the Asian-American playwright's own business trips to China, where he saw a handicapped restroom labeled 'Deformed Man's Toilet.'

I won't bore the uninitiated by comparing, contrasting, and breaking down the content of this revival versus previous productions. But for my part, this is the best Follies I've ever seen. (Full disclosure: I never saw the original, save a few video clips; I'm going on the fine but underwhelming 1998 Paper Mill Playhouse version, the terribly depressing 2001 Roundabout revival, the terrific 2007 Encores! concert, and, of course, the Kennedy Center staging in May.) Is it perfect? Of course not. But I'm not sure any Follies ever could be. The show's beauty, I suspect, lies in its imperfection.

McNally's well-crafted, quip-filled drama — which depicts Callas teaching at Juilliard, circa 1971 (her voice was virtually destroyed by then) — is less a biography and more a love letter to La Divina. So who knows if she really made a singer puke before the poor girl performed Lady Macbeth's letter scene in the Verdi opera, or if Ari actually spoke about his 'big thick uncircumcised Greek d---'? Incidentally, the soprano with the shaky stomach is played by Sierra Boggess — best known as Broadway's original Little Mermaid — who reveals a lovely vibrato but a surprising lack of stage presence; as for the other students, Alexandra Silber is sweetly endearing as the self-professed 'fiery' soprano who, poor thing, doesn't have a look, and Garrett Sorenson is splendid as the cocky tenor doing Cavaradossi's aria from Tosca.

There are very few shows in which the set earns more applause than its top-billed TV stars, but the breezy Broadway revival of the 1946 comedy Born Yesterday is one of them. John Lee Beatty has designed a radiant art deco gem of a hotel suite with gilded fixtures, glimmering onyx woodwork, ruby-red upholstery, and satiny sapphire walls. Topped off by fat swirls of curlicue chalk-white molding, it is - just as playwright Garson Kanin dictated in his stage directions - 'a masterpiece of offensive good taste.' No wonder it trumps Robert Sean Leonard's entrance. And, a few minutes later, Jim Belushi's entrance. But after Nina Arianda slinks her way down the center staircase, curtsies clumsily, and storms back up the steps, the set doesn't seem quite as glossy. As bubble-headed bottle blonde Billie Dawn - a role that won Judy Holliday an Oscar in 1950 - Arianda is giving a performance that could be called breakout, though breakout somehow seems insufficient.

There is some inspiration at work in Wonderland: It's not a bad idea to turn the Mad Hatter into a 6-foot-tall dominatrix in thigh-high boots (Kate Shindle); but beyond outfitting the villainess in fabulous footwear, Boyd doesn't seem to know what to do with her. And then there are some just plain puzzling concepts. Why is the Caterpillar (E. Clayton Cornelious) done up like the guy who carried around Diddy's umbrella? And how did they manage to make Dacal, who was so effervescently charming as ditzy hairdresser Carla in In the Heights, come off completely charmless as Alice? To quote the White Rabbit (Edward Staudenmayer), 'It's just sad.'

Bengal Tiger also marks the first Broadway outing for Joseph, whose previous works include the origami-themed Animals Out of Paper and the masochistic two-hander Gruesome Playground Injuries, which opened Off Broadway in February. He writes sharply and economically, and he certainly earns points for creating another original premise. I can't think of another Iraq-War play that involves a jungle animal eating a soldier's hand. However, I'm still waiting for one in which the soldiers are three-dimensional characters.

The acting could hardly be better. (While I'm loathe to make direct comparisons, personally I preferred this cast to the original production's.) Riley could have come right out of a Jane Austen novel; he's witty, dashing, and completely crushable (a very important plot point). Williams is wonderfully prickly and has terrific chemistry with both Crudup and Raúl Esparza, who plays Valentine, the eccentric mathematician descendant of Thomasina. Crudup — who made his Broadway debut as Septimus, then won a 2007 Tony in Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia — appears to be acting in overdrive; perhaps he's just excited to be in a Stoppard play without being stuck in the 19th century. But even with an over-the-top Crudup, it's still a pretty fantastic evening.

Even worse, there's no apparent bond between these supposed best friends. All that seems to connect them is Daisy's unfortunately named son, Boolie (played with ample square-jawed, Southern-fried charm by Boyd Gaines). Also completely lost in translation: Redgrave's Atlanta accent.

Margulies gets a lot of mileage out of the older-man-younger-woman situation — as Sarah says to Richard: 'I think it's sweet: You always wanted a little girl' — but he admirably makes Mandy more than just a pretty little punchline. In her stage debut, the doe-eyed Ricci holds her own with her three costars, theatrical heavyweights all. And in her second go at the role, Linney has zoomed in on little bits of warmth in the detached, screwed-up woman who lives her life, unapologetically, behind the lens.

Why, you ask, would Manhattan Theatre Club follow its premiere of Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still with a revival of Collected Stories — his crafty 1996 literary drama that's already been done twice in New York City? So we can hear Linda Lavin turn out two hours' worth of delicious bons mots like 'Life's too short for The New Yorker.' Lavin is relishing, but not milking, her role as a writer/professor/reluctant mentor; Deadwood's Sarah Paulson is ever-so-slightly (perhaps appropriately) grating as her sycophantic protégée.

Leon — who helmed Wilson’s final two works, Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf — has built a sturdy, buffed-to-a-sheen Fences, buoyed by a top-shelf supporting cast (Henderson is the quintessential Wilson interpreter) and Branford Marsalis’ beautiful bluesy between-scenes music. Pity that he’s glossed over the play’s doleful, poetic soul.

The concept of the Roundabout Theatre Company's new revue, Sondheim on Sondheim, sounds like an overambitious senior thesis: Interviews with the composer-lyricist (some vintage, some newly recorded) play on a wall of LCD screens on stage, while actors perform his greatest hits, plus a few oddities and obscurities. But it's actually quite clever. Sondheim doesn't open up to journalists on a regular basis, so watching him work at the computer, his black poodles curled at his feet, or peeking at old photos (baby Sondheim, preppy Sondheim, Sondheim with a Dorothy Hamill 'do) feels a little like you're having an intimate chat with the master himself.

There's a little too much talk of how paintings 'pulse' and a few of the assistant's background details seem unnecessarily maudlin. No doubt these were inserted to give his character depth, so he'd be more than just Rothko's sounding board. While the role may not be as well-drawn as Rothko's, Redmayne certainly knows what to do with it. But what would any work about a tortured artist be without a few rough patches? Art, as Steven Sondheim wrote in Sunday in the Park With George, isn't easy.

It's a tough sell: a rock musical about mental illness. One or two people losing their marbles is pretty much de rigeur in a play; where would Shakespeare, O'Neill, Williams, or Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) be without it? But composer Tom Kitt and lyricist-librettist Brian Yorkey chose to devote two hours and 20 minutes (and nearly 40 songs) to this generally unappealing subject; the result, in Next to Normal, is incongruously, sometimes agonizingly beautiful.

Without those terrific little pop tarts (as they're dubbed by a tourist character in the show), Hair would be little more than a trippy rock concert. It lacks a strong story line: Claude gets drafted, Claude goes to Vietnam, let the sun shine in. The sheer diversity of Galt MacDermot's music — folk, pop, R&B, acid rock — can be jarring, groundbreaking as it was in 1967. And the protracted Act 2 hallucination — featuring Abe Lincoln, Aretha Franklin, and a trio of homicidal nuns — will harsh anyone's buzz. Yet the antiwar message still resonates all too well, as do Gerome Ragni and James Rado's lyrics, Timothy Leary references notwithstanding. (Pity that so much is overamplified, because you want to hear the irreverent words of 'Sodomy' and 'Black Boys.')