Michael Feingold

Some of this last shortcoming might stem from Maria Aitken's mostly apt-looking, but oddly off-kilter production. Faridany doesn't fit any of the clues the script gives Antonescu's wife; Kull and Siberry play effectively but without warmth. Grenier is expectably reliable; Hutchison has apparently been pushed toward caricature. Then there's Driver, one of the most arresting, and maddening, young actors around. His frequent moments of interest here are never sustained; the performance becomes a series of intermittent blurts, a sketch by an artist who doesn't know how to make his lines add up to form a picture. That's no way to hold the stage opposite Langella's canny, painstaking flamboyance.

Daly, a forceful, convincingly complex presence in the coaching scenes, seems uncertain and unfocussed in the reveries (where Stephen Wadsworth's scattershot staging doesn't help). The four colleagues who play her students and their accompanist do well. It's particularly reassuring to hear Sierra Boggess produce her lustrous upper register without the belting that made her Little Mermaid an earache-causer, proof that well-trained voices can withstand even Disney disasters.

Like any ordinary bad musical, Spider-Man offers some ancillary pleasures in between its lackluster songs and startlingly lame choreography. Some of George Tsypin's tilting-skyscraper sets are eye-tickling; the multi-authored book has two amusing bits involving the Green Goblin's struggle with electronic voicemail. As said Goblin, Patrick Page, his voice showing severe signs of wear, nonetheless seems to be having great fun. No doubt eight-year-olds with a few hundred bucks to spare will enjoy themselves. The rest of us can hope that somebody, celebrity or not, will shortly create a better musical.

Belushi paints all this with size and spirit, but also with sensitivity, a word you might not expect to find applied to the acting of such a role. Loud, crude, and ugly on the surface, this Harry Brock shows a flickering helplessness underneath. Just menacing enough to be genuinely scary, he never lets the hints of pathos soften him into a Damon Runyon cartoon gangster. Staunchly unlovable, he's also clearly a person who needs love, and we can all identify with that.

Lovers of literature and drama, who might be looking for something that goes a little beyond the simple truths stated above, will find that they've come to the wrong shop. I assume that Michael Morpurgo's 'young-adult' novel, from which Nick Stafford has carved the script for this elaborate spectacle, allots some time to grounding its events more fully in reality, but it's still essentially not much more than Lassie, Come Home with a horse instead of a dog, and World War I to heighten the tension. Sentimental animal stories tend to run true to form, and this one will surprise nobody: Boy gets horse, boy loses horse, but boy and horse find each other at the end, just in time for the Armistice bells to ring on cue.

Radcliffe is mainly earnest. He doesn't come off as someone trying to act earnest to get ahead but as someone who's just plain earnest. It's weird. But he's perfectly game and is to commended for continually trying to break out of his ascribed teen idol role. Alas, the big number 'I Believe In You' falters without any sense of unrequited self love to propel it. Ironically, Radcliffe looks terrified! But he does nicely on the song 'Rosemary' and scores every time he turns to the audience with a grin whenever he's gotten another promotion.

And Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Palace Theatre) does indeed entertain, though the result may make you, like me, feel that there is such a thing as too much entertainment. Priscilla’s producers, eager to please, have pulled out all the stops in the glitz department: No gown goes unglittered, while the titular bus, covered with tiny computerized beads, changes color so many times that you wonder why they bothered to include a scene in which the characters supposedly paint it.

Jeffrey Lane's script skims over the story's frenetic events hurriedly, following the screenplay rather than making theatrical capital from it; David Yazbek's songs, some of which have possibilities, seem eager to weave themselves into the context, like movie music, instead of rising to show-music heights. And, though I never imagined I'd write this sentence, Bartlett Sher's direction lacks clarity, and Christopher Gattelli's choreography lacks point.

Both Al Pacino's Shylock and Lily Rabe's Portia, sadly, seem less effective in their new context. Pacino, now more businesslike and less cringing, has lost the deepening fury that grew, last summer, beneath the cringe. Rabe, having just suffered the tragic loss of her mother, seemed forced and harsh; hopefully time will ease that. Meanwhile, it's still The Merchant of Venice, not a common sight on Broadway, and therefore worth having.

The songwriters and their librettist, David Thompson, sensed this sufficiently to frame the show with one such reverberation as if that could make the facile irony of the rest—the story is told as if by a blackface minstrel troupe—permissible. This stratagem fails because the juxtaposition defuses both gestures, just as the minstrel-style heartiness defuses the historical agony. You can sometimes please people by shocking them, but trying to please them and offend them at the same time achieves neither.

What unbalances David Esbjornson's sensitively shaped production is, improbably, Redgrave: Her painstakingly detailed quietude and delicacy as Daisy, carefully underplayed to fit what's probably a quite valid concept of the era's notion of ladylike gentility, put the character in a softer focus, reducing her power. And though Daisy can't drive the car, she must drive half the play. Instead, Redgrave's results, though never false, seem cautious and deferential. She leaves the way open for Jones, who builds from his own distinctive persona a spectacularly solid performance of Hoke, wholly different from Freeman's unforgettable work yet every bit as convincing. Even more surprisingly, Redgrave's reticence grants space for Gaines to render Daisy's son, Boolie—no more than a necessary functionary in earlier productions—as a figure of both three-dimensionality and significance.

Regrettably, Neil Pepe's production fuses no such feelings into the backstage fun. His actors, both accomplished individually, make no emotional connection; Santo Loquasto's settings make the rep theater they work in seem as vast and anonymous as the Met.

The many intellectual provocations crammed in the dense wordage of David Hirson's 1991 play La Bête (Music Box Theatre) include a warning of the danger of revivals: A play seen for a second time may seem less good. La Bête itself, luckily, defies the notion. Its problems, mainly structural, remain just what they were when it first turned up, for a too-brief Broadway run, in Richard Jones's unforgettable, dazzlingly eccentric production. Matthew Warchus's slightly squarer but decidedly funnier new rendering cannily mines Hirson's evening-long cascade of rhymed couplets for ambiguities, enriching the characters and playing to the script's strength, its verbal wit.

The clueless public is relevant here, since Bloody/Jackson is, or at least wants to be, political in substance. It presents its title character (Benjamin Walker) as a schmuck-hero, leading a populist movement to 'take this country back,' with guns if necessary, from the 'elite,' who think about things but never get anything done. As presented in Alex Timbers's script and Michael Friedman's songs, Jackson's populism looks a lot like the Tea Party: angry, greedy ignoramuses, petty and vicious toward anyone different, who view any attempt to deal with democracy's complex realities as an elitist conspiracy against the ordinary folk for whom they mistake themselves.

Even Jones suffers some directorial hindrances, like having to make her first entrance in a dress that virtually announces her profession. But she holds firm, sailing through the piece with spirit, playing discreetly past the eccentric limitations Hughes has imposed on everyone else. Mrs. Warren is not a refined lady. Shaw's choice for the role, in 1902, was the low-comedy star Fanny Brough; in the mid-'30s, Paramount approached him about buying the film rights for Mae West. Jones, hand on hip, sauntering good-humoredly through a rectory garden, suggests a West character with unexpected emotional depth; when she unpacks her bitter past to Vivie, a dark fierceness spills over the saucy surface. She makes every familiar moment in the role seem fresh. However misguided the surrounding performances, we can be grateful that Mrs. Warren has gained a new Cherry.

Touching predictable bases, Hall tells his story jumpily, as if more anxious to declare his sentimental allegiance for the old-left dogmas inherent in it than to make it dramatically pertinent today. Despite the glibly drawn characters, the all-English ensemble, under Max Roberts's crisp direction, performs with stirring conviction, particularly Christopher Connel as the most gifted of the lot, Deka Walmsley as a perpetually grouchy union official, and Ian Kelly as the group's uneasy mentor.

Some numbers, too, are just oddly matched to their singers, or flat-out oddly conceived. The evening is full of high points that evoke, as such a show must, the broad panoply of Sondheim's gifts. Leslie Kritzer, Norm Lewis, Euan Morton, and Tom Wopat all make significant contributions. For a climax, Cook sings 'Send in the Clowns.' By rights, there should be nothing to complain of. Yet the show feels puzzlingly lackluster, like a last-minute birthday gift originally purchased for somebody else. I guess you might say it's the thought that counts.

We never learn enough about this trio to care for them as individuals. And Green Day's songs, though sometimes effective in striking general attitudes, don't do much to make these guys seem contemporary quintessences, either. Only one song, the mournful 'When September Ends,' lingers in the mind. Mayer's design team blankets this thin slice of life in cascades of projections, always apt but predictable. His astute casting pays off: His three leads, who've all proven their skill in nonmusicals, give these straw figures solid presences. An elaborately choreographed flying effect, when Sands hallucinates in his hospital bed, ranks with the most inventive such stunts I've ever seen. I didn't come away cursing, or bored, or feeling that I'd wasted my time. But I also didn't feel satisfied. And I couldn't help savoring the irony of artists who critique the system by, literally, plugging into it. It's the influence of mass media, rock included, that keeps such non-hero types from becoming themselves. If only they'd joined a community theater group instead.

I was even sorrier while sitting through the shoddy revival of La Cage aux Folles (Longacre Theatre), Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's 1983 musical, in which a drag nightclub star and his club-owner hubby battle each other but unite to confront the right-wing parents of hubby's son's fiancée. The original production made the gay couple's Côte d'Azur nightclub the goofily glamorous place Herman's lyrics salute. Terry Johnson's new production, with misplaced Anglocentric cultural memory, reduces it to a tatty, skimpy pier-end revue where drag equals stereotype plus ineptitude. The familiar gestures pall almost instantly, the songs get trampled into incoherence, and Douglas Hodge's simpering, ad-libbing cliché of a drag diva shoots down any glimpse of emotional truth. Amazingly, in the midst of this rag heap, Kelsey Grammer pulls off a genuine star turn, investing the role of Hodge's spouse with easy charm and projecting his ballads with graceful feeling. He should keep classier company artistically.

So might the performances in The Addams Family (Lunt-Fontanne), where everybody works incredibly hard, though to painfully little effect. A couple of Andrew Lippa's songs, including the improbably Latin opening number, may survive, and a few of the book's more antique gags will undoubtedly long outlive it. But two-plus hours of hearing these creepy creatures blather about the joys of love, in purest Hallmark terms? Please. Even Nathan Lane's resourcefulness, Kevin Chamberlin's moonstruck charm, and Carolee Carmello's giddy vocal display can't reanimate this inert monstrosity.

Visual in the classic way of traditional farce, Lend Me a Tenor (Music Box) requires no review, only laughter. In this standard door-slamming mixup, about a bush-league opera company stuck with a corpsed-out guest star, the lines and events, unlike those in any other Ken Ludwig play I've ever encountered, all actually function coherently in context. Justin Bartha is fetchingly wistful in the lead, and Tony Shalhoub's bullying eyes, acting epics all over the stage, are a multimedia event in themselves.

John Logan's Red (Golden Theatre) is, simultaneously, as wonderfully astute and as dishearteningly naïve a piece of playwriting as I can recall. Much that's meaningful gets said, during this 95-minute study of the interactions between the painter Mark Rothko (Alfred Molina) and his new assistant (Eddie Redmayne), but meaning isn't drama, and the bulk of Red's dramatic substance is conveyed by Christopher Oram's sets and Neil Austin's lighting, which focus on several simulated Rothko canvases. They highlight the tense, tormented undercurrents of battle that churn through Rothko's late works; relatively little in the spoken text does so, despite the combative energy of Molina's performance.

Tightened and retouched since its Off-Broadway run last summer, Geoffrey Nauffts's Next Fall (Helen Hayes Theatre) presents a seemingly simple story that turns out to be crisscrossed with conflicting hidden agendas. The four-year relationship of Adam (Patrick Breen) and Luke (Patrick Heusinger), seen in flashback glimpses, runs up against a blank wall when Luke is concussed in a traffic accident and Adam, stressed out in the ICU waiting room, has to confront his lover's parents, divorced but both solidly born-again: tender, scatterbrained Arlene (Connie Ray) and ultra-right, ultra-self-righteous Butch (Cotter Smith). The expected Christian-unbeliever fight over pulling the plug on comatose Luke never exactly happens, and we only get a bare flicker of Adam's struggle for the right to have time alone with his dying love (evoking so many similar struggles from the worst part of the pre-'cocktail' AIDS era).

David Mamet's new play, Race (Barrymore Theatre), is all blunt truthfulness—some of which, this being a Mamet play, naturally turns out to conceal lies, or to mask deeper, darker truths. Played fast, under the author's direction, its 80 or so minutes feel like a speedy round of post-Shavian ping-pong. Debating whether or not to defend a rich man (Richard Thomas) accused of rape in what's apparently a clear-cut case with racially inflammatory content, a mixed-race pair of law partners (James Spader and David Alan Grier) and their female assistant (Kerry Washington) rattle around in their spacious office like video-game pieces powered by an unseen joystick, zinging Mamet's poison-dart lines at one another. The end is a Mamet end: Somebody lied, somebody betrayed the side, nobody wins.

For all the fierce enthusiasm that Ngaujah brings to the evening (presumably equaled by Kevin Mambo, who plays the strenuous role at selected performances), the end result still seems scattershot and disconnected, a scrapbook with high points rather than a theatrical event.