Peter Marks

The new 'If/Then' is sleeker, smarter and runs far more efficiently than last year's ungainlier model, the one that had its test-drive in Washington last fall. Its heart is bigger now, too, a design modification that assures a more exhilarating ride. But it's also true that the 'If/Then' that celebrated its official Broadway opening Sunday night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre had a number of flaws to address, and not all of them were eradicated in the months that this vehicle, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Next to Normal' team of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, was in the shop. The biggest issue was and is the show's narrative device, telling the story of a woman whose life goes in two directions, one focused on family, the other on career. It remains something of a conundrum, for the conceit comes across, even now, less as a scintillating invention than as an encumbrance...The bottom line: 'If/Then' is an enjoyable, beautifully sung, at times deeply touching experience, built on a structure that never completely works.

'Animated' doesn't begin to describe the frantic, screwball version of Disney's 'Aladdin' that opened Thursday night on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, with a bushel of new songs and a Genie who works so hard you wouldn't be stunned to find him continuing to grant wishes at the stage door. James Monroe Iglehart is the embodiment here of the role Robin Williams voiced in the 1992 movie, and schtick for schtick and wisecrack for wisecrack, the performance very much keeps to the hyper-caffeinated pace Williams set. If Tonys were given in the category of energy output, they'd award Iglehart three. He is in fact-and no surprise here-the most enjoyable ingredient of director Casey Nicholaw's production, which despite a lot of huffing and puffing and brandishing of scimitars exposes more of the material's rough patches than it does any happier conceits.

With the electrifying climax they've come up with for the new musical version of 'Rocky,' director Alex Timbers and his creative team reveal themselves to be true lords of the ring. It gives away nothing to describe the effect, because being in the Winter Garden Theatre...is the only way to appreciate completely its athletic panache and technical artistry...Although the performances by Karl and Margo Seibert, as his wallflower of girlfriend, Adrian, offer authentic moments of tenderness, they are let down by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens's surprisingly tin-eared score, and the frequently movie-parroting book by Thomas Meehan and Sylvester Stallone.

Portraying America's 36th chief executive, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in Robert Schenkkan's democratic procedural drama 'All the Way,' Cranston proves so effortlessly captivating that you could imagine pulling a lever for him - or even contributing generously to whatever campaign war chest he trots out. Well, maybe 'effortlessly' is the wrong word. Because Cranston, late of TV's habit-forming 'Breaking Bad,' works like the dickens to convey in his cagey, short-fused, eternally prowling LBJ a strength of will that reveals what a political leader needs to get big things done. It's a darn good thing, too, for without him, the three-hour production, which opened Thursday night at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre, might feel like something a little duller, along the lines of a talking textbook. Perhaps in the vast cavalcade of Washington events and personalities the play covers, there was not much room left for nuanced portraits. In any event, none of the personages filling out the story, from J. Edgar Hoover (Michael McKean) to George Wallace (Rob Campbell), from Ralph Abernathy (J. Bernard Calloway) to, yes, The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Aidem, again), come to feel as anything more than the audience for LBJ's one-man band. Fortunately for us, though, it's Cranston who is holding the baton.

As it is, the tale of a desolate Neapolitan immigrant - distracted from her cold Iowa marriage by a hunky visiting magazine photographer - comes across as rather shaky scaffolding, in a sometimes affecting adaptation of Robert James Waller's best-selling novel that opened Thursday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre...But the bony narrative does acquire rewarding flesh whenever O'Hara - veteran of 'The Pajama Game,' 'South Pacific' and 'The Light in the Piazza' - is given a chance to express, in a poignant lyric or hushed speech, the sensual awakening her Francesca Johnson experiences in the presence of the picture-taker, played by the smoldering Steven Pasquale.

With a delectably clever score by Tim Minchin and a slyly evocative book by Dennis Kelly, the musical, minted by the Royal Shakespeare Company and adapted from the story by Roald Dahl (of 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' fame), is distinguished by its wonderful look and a caliber of choreography for young people you rarely ever experience....if Milly Shapiro's accomplished, confident, well-sung Matilda sets the standard, then any one of this pint-size quartet will make you - and any other grown-up or child who happens to tag along - happy to be a ticket holder....It's as immersive and strangely moving - for adults, surely - as any new musical to come along in a while. Minchin, Kelly, Warchus and company have worked an incandescent sort of magic in turning a Broadway theater into a Dahl's house.

When it's good, 'Kinky Boots,' the new Broadway musical with the rocking Cyndi Lauper score, is sweetly, vivaciously, irresistibly good. And when it's not so good - well, let's not dwell for the moment on the not-so-good. The show, which opened Thursday night at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, is the sort of party for which you will be more than pleased to find yourself on the guest list.

At least in the new 'Cat,' the sense of menace activated by Hinds's Big Daddy provides a rationale for the mean-spiritedness spreading through his household like an oil slick. The husky-voiced Johansson, who won a Tony for her performance two years ago as the all-too-desirable dockworker's niece in Arthur Miller's 'A View From the Bridge,' holds her own here, managing a persuasive account of Maggie's quick wits and pragmatic focus. What's missing, though, is her drawing a bead on the character's insecurities, the desperation that compels Maggie to cling to a lie - and to a man who reviles her. (Walker, who played a rock star president in the irreverent-history musical 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,' lives up to his character's name here, imbuing Brick with a stony, one-note sullenness.)

“Annie,” the 1977 musical based on the 1920s “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip, returns to Broadway as if shipped to the Palace Theatre by a morale-boosting arm of FEMA. Infused with zip and charm by its sensational Annie, Noo-Yawk-tawkin’ Lilla Crawford, the show, slickly staged by James Lapine, tells you that any city or nation keeping faith with the future will rise again, come hell or high water...Coaxed by Lapine...Crawford exudes the beguiling clarity of a kid unbowed by the hard-knock life. Her Annie is as egalitarian as we’d like to believe our country, at its best, might be...Matching Crawford vowel for lazy New York vowel, the Australian Warlow proves to be an ideal Warbucks, the warmth of the performance rising scene by scene.

One must pay attention to a man even as inattentive as the loutishly bewildered Willy Loman, whom Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays so effectively in director Mike Nichols’s steel-girded Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” which officially opened Thursday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. In concert with Andrew Garfield’s embittered Biff, the drifting elder son of the defeat-racked Loman household, Hoffman finds a revealing new way into the psyche of a character Arthur Miller introduced 63 years ago as the damaged end-product of a system that leaves workers to sweep up after the ashes of their dashed hopes.

Dressed in jeans, gray vest and dark jacket, he’s inspirationally vigorous for an octogenarian. What he has to say is not quite as inspirational, and the way he freely associates all through the show, directed by Scott Faris, imbues the proceedings with a pronounced loopiness. ... Often, you get the sense in “Shatner’s World” that Shatner isn’t sure how seriously we take him, or how seriously to take himself. This makes the show a strange entry in the genre. For those not in the die-hard Trekkie category, the sensation might be that of feeling pinned in a corner at a dinner party by someone whose stories aren’t that funny.

The refined caliber of acting gives the playwright's words their satisfying potency. Griffiths and Sadoski excel as the alternately aggressive and defensive progeny of parents far more conservative than they. Keach, continuing in the path of the fine Lear he portrayed at Shakespeare Theatre Company, conveys the fading leonine strength of a prideful patriarch. And Channing's turn as a Nancy Reagan acolyte, stoic and seething at the very same time, is remarkable.

Jackson’s less than perfect casting is not the fatal wound to this two-character piece...What undermines “The Mountaintop” is a rather amateurish narrative twist that is apparently so pivotal to the evening’s reason-for-being that the show’s producers have asked reviewers not to reveal it. There can be no ethical offense in reporting that this contrivance is what terminally weakened my faith in the play or that most of the audience will not find the revelation especially surprising, either.

The weakling elements evident in Washington last spring have been resiliently bulked up...The creative team behind this production has made the calculation that old age ain’t so bad after all; it’s sort of a baby boomer’s vision of “Follies.” So if the evening doesn’t resonate with much aching authority, it’s packed with entertainment. These dames still know how to light up a stage. And there’s much more to savor in this treatment since it played a sold-out run in the Eisenhower Theater.

In Tyne Daly's striking turn as Maria Callas, it's not so much Callas's imperiousness that comes across, as the ferocity of her self-belief...[Master Class] is about 99 and 44/100 percent Callas, a proportion that works just fine with Daly cracking the whip.

What swings from the rafters, springs from the wings and bursts from the stage floor of the Foxwoods Theatre is a definite upgrade from the flailing behemoth on view in February, when I and a bunch of other reviewers, tired of the delays, took a gander at what director Julie Taymor had wrought. Still, in the story set to rock music by Bono and the Edge - of meek Peter Parker's acquisition of spidery agility and subsequent battle royal with the dastardly Green Goblin - this effects-driven musical is still situated a wide canyon's distance from good.

Rewardingly, too, “Jerusalem” is a large canvas, and under the resourceful guidance of director Ian Rickson, the cast of 16 — a veritable horde for a straight play on Broadway — adds to the evening’s vivid spectrum. In particular, John Gallagher Jr. and Mackenzie Crook, as two of the latter-day Lost Boys who glom onto Johnny for fellowship and a reliable high in the woods, imbue their characters with authentic feels for the insecurities of young men unsure of their identities. Alan David is splendid, too, playing a local eccentric who finds in Johnny a kindred lunatic spirit.

The story is so programmed to elicit tears that the theater should consider issuing waterproof Playbills. (The intermittent, ancient-sounding melodies, sung by Kate Pfaffl, Liam Robinson and the rest of the ensemble, resonate with the horses’ soulful bearings.) As family-pleasing entertainment goes, “War Horse” is as surefire as Broadway gets.

The star's cause is not bolstered much by director-choreographer Rob Ashford. His concept for the early '60s satire of American business - the story of a smarmily engaging young man who lies his way to the top - is to stylistically turn up the volume, saturating the stage in candy colors and frantic dances. As a result, the musical's digs at corporate life, at the overgrown bureaucracy and ingrown elitism, lose the whiff of sophistication that Frank Loesser's score emits.

'The Book of Mormon' expresses a giddy contempt for that innocence, in one of the most joyously acidic bundles Broadway has unwrapped in years. (Applause, too, for set designer Scott Pask's gloomy rendering of an African village.) The sin it takes such fond aim at - blind faith - is one that this musical suggests observes no religious bounds.

While many expert eyes and hands also lavish attention on the new revival of 'That Championship Season,' the results are not nearly as satisfying. The smart and incisive Gregory Mosher (Broadway's 'A View From the Bridge'; the Kennedy Center's 'The Glass Menagerie') has the directorial reins on this occasion, but he's unable to elevate the dramatic stakes of Jason Miller's dated, Pulitzer-winning play above the predictable terrain of a liquor-fueled confessional.

Your eye will never get weary in a visit to 'Women on the Verge,' but you're still likely to come out of the experience feeling shortchanged.

This may not be the game most ticket buyers to 'Lombardi' pay to see; the play allows them merely to bask in a sports hero's glow. If that's all you require from the experience, 'Lombardi' may be sufficient. For others, however, the predicaments of the big man in the spotlight aren't as involving as the smaller one who's clutching the notebook.

'The camera's there to record it; that's life,' explains Linney, who gives a persuasive account of a woman incapable of seeing a dividing line between herself and her work. It's a portrayal that, among other things, reaffirms one's faith in the essential work of the professional witness.

But it's a messy matter, the business of governing: Jackson's expansionist agenda, the musical tells us, mandated the brutal booting of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. So, too, does 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson' feel at times sort of scattered. Though the magnetic Benjamin Walker is an exhilarating force in the title role, some ensemble members come across as a bit green on an imposing Broadway stage. And intermittently, Michael Friedman's score and Alex Timbers's book can seem better suited to a night of college skits. Slickness is not a desirable attribute on this occasion, but a consistent polish is.