Peter Marks

Still, 'La Bête' is so raucously front-loaded, thanks to Rylance, that even though the rewards diminish as the 110-minute play unfolds, the piece manages to maintain a giddy afterglow. Entering with a mouthful of melon and a wildly miscalculated sense of self-importance, Rylance's Valere terrorizes Elomire and an actor in his company (Stephen Ouimette) with a monologue of a length to match the size of his ego.

How they come to express themselves on canvas at the urging of a local art professor (Ian Kelly) is a livelier dramatic springboard than what happens after their work is discovered by the press and some wealthy patrons. So the first half of this enjoyably acted piece, directed by Max Roberts, is the better one. Still, there is enough intriguing biography here to justify the production's having landed on these shores from its starting point in England's North.

Rice uses a variety of charming strategies to ward off the stuffier conceits of the period love story, much of it set just before World War II in the railway station where the furtive lovers meet. Actors and musicians perform Coward songs such as 'Mad About the Boy' and 'Always,' the latter written with Stu Barker; a band plays some numbers before the show, and others are woven into the plot. Onto Neil Murray's industrial set, meanwhile, a screen is occasionally lowered, so that flesh-and-blood actors can interact with their celluloid interlocutors, a technique used to similar effect in Woody Allen's sly movie comedy 'The Purple Rose of Cairo.'

The musicianship sells this entertainment. If the rockabilly rhythms of Perkins or the proto-rocker antics of Lewis don't set your heart to palpitating, then 'Million Dollar Quartet' will be lost on you. The calculation is that fans of early rock-and-roll and idolaters of Presley and Cash are of an age and economic level to fill the Nederlander's pews. And for them, the musical will feel at times like a throbbing worship service.

Oh Broadway, Broadway, Broadway. Don't you know, you never seem sadder or more imaginatively barren than when you're diving for commercial relevance in the dumpsters behind old TV shows and movies? 'The Addams Family' -- this year's answer to the question, How many talented people does it take to screw up a concept? -- marks a significant depressing of an ever-more-degraded standard. It's a new show that, despite its mechanized trickery, feels rickety beyond belief, the 2010 musical version of a series of magazine cartoons from the 1930s, '40s and '50s that became a '60s sitcom that became a '90s Hollywood franchise. What you might call a wholly pre-owned Broadway musical.

With the handiwork of Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler, however, he seems far less clued in. For this elegant Scandinavian roundel of amour, of foolish old lovers and foolish young lovers, of characters who couple for sex or for vanity or for an annuity, Nunn takes us on what feels like a cheap date. (The production's origin is London's Menier Chocolate Factory, supplier of the far superior 'Sunday in the Park With George' on Broadway in 2008.) The physical realm is especially grim: a few desultory walls, a few bland sticks of furniture; only David Farley's frocks, particularly for Zeta-Jones, attempt to bottle the sumptuousness that seems an essential aspect of 'Night Music.' Sure, the rage in musicals these days is to make them quasi-concerts, to bring down the scale and thereby underline what they are really about, the vitality of the words and music. Sometimes, though, the eye wants the stage itself to be a pretty face. You are reminded of this as you watch 'Night Music's' 'A Weekend in the Country,' one of the most satisfying Act 1 finales of all time, and you realize you have only the most physically impoverished notion of where these characters are, and where they are going.

Will Broadway have the smarts and taste to anoint 'Next to Normal' the best new musical of the year? Unveiled last year at off-Broadway's Second Stage, and polished in December to a smashing finish at Washington's Arena Stage, the show opened last night at the Booth Theatre as a prime example of the power of rock to tell heart-rending stories -- and of the value of reworking a musical until you get it right.

But even with its invigorated Tony, the production remains erratic. It has not adequately addressed an imbalance in the acting ranks that muffles one of the turbulent centers of the show: the trigger-happy hatred between the gangs, the white-ethnic Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks. To put it plainly, the Jets, those angry, sneering products of America's social breakdown, have been miscast. They come across in this version as if they were the kinds of classroom scamps who were candidates for detention rather than three-to-five in the state pen. Sure, it's a challenge, embodying a thug while singing Leonard Bernstein's satiny music and leaping gazelle-like to Jerome Robbins's balletic choreography. And yet, they don't for a minute allow us to believe that they could sow violence at the slightest provocation.