Michael Feingold

The new musical Memphis (Shubert Theatre) supplies an object lesson in something every practitioner of musical theater should learn—how to make good entertainment out of less than great material. As writing, Memphis is an uninspired trek over fairly familiar ground; as music, David Bryan's score is listenable and non-painful, but lacking any particular distinction. Even its design tends to look smoothly proficient rather than fresh, evoking prior Broadway musicals instead of the Southern riverbank city of its title.

N2N maps the road from this queasy drugged stability through crackup to a cautiously hopeful final picking up of the pieces. Unusual for a musical, this narrative has affinities to TV drama and to recent nonmusicals like Lisa Loomer's Distracted. But N2N, which has gone through some astute reworking since its debut at Off-Broadway's Second Stage in 2008, cannily employs musical-theater tactics to push its quirkily specific story up toward general meaning. It doesn't totally succeed at this, but does achieve several very big moments when the performer, the song, and the larger intent combine, forging the empathetic bond between audience and show that gives musicals a spark of transcendence.

The darkening touches that librettist-director Arthur Laurents has added seem natural rather than intrusive: the cops more nakedly bigoted than of old, the 'Somewhere' dream and the ending more overtly hopeless. With a story and score so widely familiar, putting much of the Boricuan song and speech into Spanish adds a salsa flavor instead of confusion.

God of Carnage is another of those Yasmina Reza plays that, translated by Christopher Hampton and directed by Matthew Warchus, have become a kind of commercial-theater tic since the team's big success with Art, which at the time looked like a fresh twist on boulevard entertainment. But now, after three or four trips through Reza's sensibility, we know the pattern too well. A premise that generalizes about human beings is started, a counter-premise contradicts it, an attempt at synthesis upsets the apple cart, and back and forth the dramatic ping-pong ball goes. Reza is clever—exceptionally clever, this time around—at inventing little distractions to conceal the pattern from those who don't cotton on quickly, but these sidebars never deepen the basic premise or materially advance the narrative. Human beings are either A or B or an ungainly combination of both, and for her, that's really all there is to it.

Lincoln Center Theater's revival of South Pacific, directed by Bartlett Sher, plumps for the work's seriousness, approaching it with quiet realism—almost cautiously, as if its romance might prove too fragile for our cynical time. But South Pacific has solidly built-in defenses against breakage, including the self-mocking lyrics in which Nellie ridicules her own romanticism. An additional pinch of that showbiz self-mockery wouldn't have hurt Sher's production, which at times seems too sedate.

Is my cultural autobiography so fascinating? No, but frankly, neither is Frankie Valli's. At least as assembled by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, the tale of how the Four Seasons came together, sold a lot of records, and subsequently fell apart because Bob Gaudio wanted to stay home and write songs, while Tommy DeVito racked up nasty gambling debts with the Mob, is no big deal—just another biopic immortalizing a minor celeb's quick rise and a bumpy fall, only in flesh-and-blood 3-D.