Richard Zoglin

David's first Broadway play...runs barely two hours, but it seems padded out, overpopulated (18 characters -- enough for a Shakespeare history play!), and funny only in spurts. It's great to see David, the star and creator of the popular HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, taking a crack at Broadway. But for all the audience's indulgent laughter and the obligatory standing ovation at the end, one can't help but detect a certain, well, lack of enthusiasm...On Curb Your Enthusiasm...David proved himself a master of structure: weaving three or four storylines each week into a neat, 30-minute operetta of comic angst. With a two-act play to fill up, David has made everything bigger...Onstage, David is bigger too. His whiny voice and perplexed expressions are perfectly sized for the small screen. Here he has to project his trademark shrug to the back of the mezzanine -- hunching up his shoulders and stretching his arms so wide he looks like a seagull coming in for a landing at Kennedy Airport...for a comedy writer who practically reinvented the TV sitcom, it's surprising to see how clumsy and old-fashioned David's playwriting is.

The real miracle, though, is not Matilda, but Matilda, the wondrous new musical from London that has just arrived on Broadway. It would be easy to call it the best British musical since Billy Elliot, but that, I'm afraid, would be underselling it. You have to go back to The Lion King to find a show with as much invention, spirit and genre-redefining verve. After plugging through years of slick but workmanlike musicals, crowd-pleasing song cycles and formulaic spirit-lifters (latest example: Kinky Boots), Matilda seems to clear away the deadwood and announce a fresh start for the Broadway musical.

Part of the pleasure of War Horse is seeing the impossible-to-stage made plausible in the most economical and inventive ways: great battles evoked simply by a blinding flash of light, a roar of a cannon, or an interlude of slow motion or stop-action. And the cast is nearly perfect. (My highest praise is that I assumed I was seeing the British production transplanted to New York City; only later did I realize that it has been recast with American actors.) Is War Horse too sentimental? Perhaps. But there's not a moment in its compact two and a half hours when I wasn't fully engaged, moved and inspired by the theatrical imagination on display. And thrilled by a landmark theater event.

Directed by his pal Jerry Seinfeld, Long Story Short has no production values to speak of (though a Google-maps-style geographical slide show provides a nice visual accent) and doesn't exactly prove that stand-up comedy belongs on Broadway. But until something better comes along, it's state-of-the-art.

Best of all is a surprisingly engaging score by David Yazbek (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), who deploys a variety of Latin rhythms to make everything from patter songs to wistful laments stand out from the generic-Broadway crowd.

Susan Stroman (The Producers) has put together a talented cast that conveys the wrenching human drama while kicking up a storm in a series of jaunty, ragtime-flavored musical numbers. In the end, it's a show that leaves you disturbed, entertained and just a little bit prouder of Broadway.

The Pitmen Painters is the sort of play that the British turn out regularly, but that has trouble getting arrested on these shores: a straightforward, almost artless docudrama, grounded in true-life events and contemporary issues, wearing its sociopolitical message on its sleeve.

There's so much inventiveness in this import from Britain's Kneehigh Theatre that I feel like a grump having to report that the show itself is something of a disappointment.

The Roundabout Theater's new production of Shaw's notorious early play, about a daughter who discovers that her upbringing has been financed by her mother's business of ill repute, is not terrible, just uninvolving.

Between the buffoonish antics (Jackson foes like John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay played as cartoon twits) and almost total lack of dramatic fluidity (key events like Jackson's loss of the 1924 presidential election through backroom Senate dealing are simply announced by a narrator), the revisionism just looks like a lame high school prank.

The fly in this Molierian ointment, for me, was Mark Rylance, the British actor who hams it up unmercifully as the crude thespian — playing him as some sort of drugged out surfer dude, rushing through the ends of lines as if to apologize for Hirson's mannered rhyme scheme. Naturally, he's won critical raves. Happily, he doesn't ruin Matthew Warchus' enjoyable, sprightly-but-somber production.

Eric Simonson's play is told through the eyes of a Look magazine reporter who spent a week with Lombardi during the 1965 season, providing an excuse for lots of irrelevant talk about editors and deadlines, but almost no useful insights into Lombardi (played, just adequately, by former Wonder Years star Dan Lauria), aside from the fact that he apparently yelled a lot. Instead, we waste a lot of time with Lombardi's wife (Judith Light) and three Packer stars — Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor and Dave Robinson — who don't act as though they could tell the difference between a safety blitz and a safety razor.