Rex Reed

The unparalleled star power of Sally Bowles, the untalented and poverty-plagued good-time girl who sings and sleeps her way through the Berlin underground and charms pre-war Germany at any cost, is a dream that refuses to come alive in the woefully miscast Gayle Rankin. The greatest Sally in history is still Julie Harris in the black-and-white British film I Am a Camera (1955), from the play of the same name by John Van Druten, stunningly based on the autobiographical Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. The most famous Sally will probably always be Liza Minnelli, who won an Oscar for the Technicolor movie by Bob Fosse. And the worst Sally is Gayle Rankin. With none of the glamour Julie Harris brought to the role and not a shred of Liza Minnelli’s vulnerability or poignancy, she hams it up all over the stage, massacring the songs and dedicating herself to the idea that no song is worth singing unless it can also be screamed. “Mein Herr” is now yelled with the fury of Medea killing her children, and both of the show’s enduring ballads, “Cabaret” and “Maybe This Time,” are all but incomprehensible. Clifford Bradshaw, the American character based on Isherwood, is now a boring bespectacled somebody played by someone named Ato Blankston-Wood, and if you can stand him, you can have him.

Few things in show business are as genuinely, indestructibly, and reliably close to perfect as Some Like it Hot—every time it comes out of the starting gate it leaves audiences cheering. Billy Wilder’s historic 1959 film has been anointed one of the ten greatest comedy classics of all time in every poll taken by both real people and movie critics alike. Sugar, Gower Champion’s 1972 Broadway musical adaptation, produced by David Merrick with an amiable score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, starring luscious Elaine Joyce, funny Tony Roberts, and the sensational Robert Morse, ran for more than a year. Now here it is again, dusted off slightly to reflect contemporary values and trends, but still following the same basic plot outline—ready to pack in new sold-out audiences as long as they remember how to laugh and applaud and scream like mad. At a time when so much trash crowds New York marquees passing itself off as entertainment, the new Some Like it Hot at the Shubert Theatre is a star-spangled, toe-tapping, show-stopping lollapalooza!

The production recreates the heart and humor of the Ziegfeld Follies and the razzle-dazzle of Broadway in the 1920s in all of its rude comedy and gaudy glory. Mr. Fierstein adds an edge to the story without diminishing any of its values. New songs have been borrowed from the movie version and other sources, moved around in different acts and inserted for emphasis, and sometimes the whole thing moves too fast to digest. One minute Fanny is the awkward girl from Henry Street in Brooklyn, the next minute she's auditioning for Ziegfeld, and before the applause wears down, she's doing the pregnant bride bit that catapulted her to super-stardom, startling her mother (a sour Jane Lynch) and her poker-playing friends. On the rare occasion when the pace slows, there are luscious, leggy show girls to keep you enthralled, a swirl of spectacular tap dancers led by Jared Grimes to keep your pulse racing, and barrels of confetti that fall on your head like Technicolor rain. The show is three hours long, but Ms. Feldstein makes the minutes fly by with such pleasure that you wish it would never end. And she is bolstered every step of the way by the first completely drop-dead lover-husband version of gambler-racketeer Nick Arnstein in the history of Funny Girl. The dashing, glamorous Ramin Karimloo, so wonderful in Anastasia, is also the first Nick who can sing, dance and render an audience stricken with such awe that new numbers had to be added to enhance his role and showcase his varied talents appropriately. He makes Fanny's fairy tale romanticism breathe with the realism that all things are possible. If this isn't a star in the making, then justice no longer exists in the American theater.

Scott Ellis' grounded staging spotlights and underlines the conflicting emotional subtexts in Richard Greenberg's profound script, in a production of Take Me Out that is an alternately tense, funny, and heartrending toast to America's favorite pastime.

For reasons that make no sense whatsoever, the landmark 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein production that marked the beginning of a new era in American musicals has now been cheapened and vulgarized at New York's Circle in the Square Theatre in a 'modernized' version designed to appeal to kids who have never heard of Oklahoma! and ignorant ticket buyers who hate musicals in general and avoid anything categorized as 'old-fashioned' in particular.

Oh, the agony of it all. Wolves howl. Snow falls. Grenades explode. Guns blare. Vodka flows. Bodies fall. Marching boots stomp. Depressed and dying lovers search the Russian steppes for each other in vain, mournfully moaning lyrics that make no sense. Cue the violins, sawing away on atonal melodies nobody can remember. And somewhere, between one world war, one revolution, one civil war, one Red Army, one White Army, the fall of the Germans and the arrival of the Communists, an ambitious saga of tedium unfolds on the stage of the Broadway Theatre called Doctor Zhivago. You can hardly hear it for the snoring...The musical, clumsily directed by Des McAnuff...also sprawls, in all the wrong directions. Zhivago, imported from London, is somebody called Tam Mutu, who sports a strong voice like a bus-and-truck Alfred Drake, and with zero charisma...He leaves the details of stealing the show to Paul Alexander Nolan, who plays a villain with a handsome, lethal bravado that makes you understand why Lara fell for him in the first place.

Rocky is a smash hit that shows no sign of slowing down...The rich and serviceable score is by the Tony winning songwriters Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (Ragtime). [Andy Karl is] the biggest thing since Hugh Jackman, and as Rocky Balboa...he is very much the center of Rocky. He sings with power and persuasion--and surprisingly in tune. He dances in and out of the ring with complex precision. He looks like a movie star. He's virile, he's in command of the stage, he's a one-man hormone explosion. He has charisma, a camera-ready physique from the cover of Today's Health, and the kind of body language that leaves the audience transfixed from beginning to end. If Rocky ever ends, watch out for more big things from this guy. He is merely sensational.

For a good example of just how rare Rosemary Harris's patrician yet persuasive ability can be in holding a restless audience spellbound in an otherwise painful and pedestrian play, all you have to do is get through the Roundabout revival of The Road to Mecca...The play is too talky for its own good, and not all of the talk resonates until that final scene, when so many revelations pour out of all three characters that audience assimilation is frustrating. For the most part, the acting still soars.