Melissa Rose Bernardo — Theater Critic

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.')

It's tempting to reward this uneven but enjoyable revival — helmed by 91-year-old Laurents himself — solely for the bilingual innovation. But for 52 years, the Jets have had the upper hand over their Spanish-speaking rivals, the Sharks, in this musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet set among mid-'50s Manhattan street gangs. The Jets have more lines and more scenes; they get three songs of their own — one which exists solely to establish their superiority ('When you're a Jet you're the top cat in town'). They even had their own language: 'Daddy-O,' 'Cracko-jacko,' 'Buddy boy.' Now, Laurents and Miranda have leveled the playing field; by translating a few key scenes — our first encounter with Maria and Anita (the sensational Karen Olivo) in the bridal shop, the pre-'America' banter between the Puerto Rican guys and their girls — the Sharks have more presence. By letting them sing in Spanish, they reclaim their own language as well.