Robert Feldberg

Franco is not terrible; he's an intelligent actor. But his George reveals no shadings of feeling, or internal life. It's a performance that just evaporates. Only Norton, a canny veteran, manages to suggest the poignancy of his trapped character. When one of the other men in the bunkhouse takes Candy's old, deaf dog outside to euthanize her, Candy sits shaken and silent, waiting - along with everyone in the audience - for what seems like minutes, for the sound of the inevitable shot that will tell him the deed is done. It's the only suspenseful moment in an otherwise very long evening.

Under the direction of Lonny Price, the evening is a stinging portrait of a great artist's failed life. But even with deep admiration for McDonald's potent acting, the evening feels out of balance. The details of Holiday's story are already well-known, so it doesn't have the allure of revelation. (The same material was covered last year in the off-Broadway bio-musical 'Lady Day.') What the production does offer that's fresh, exciting and irresistibly entertaining is McDonald singing Holiday. Too bad the vivid evening wasn't more strongly tilted in that direction.

'Bullets Over Broadway' is Stroman's second bite of the apple this season. In October, she directed and choreographed 'Big Fish,' a musical about the evolving relationship of a father and son. It wasn't the right show for her fizzy style. With 'Bullets Over Broadway,' she's gotten a perfect match. And the result couldn't be more joyful.

There are the times when Eno's wordplay in his 95-minute work becomes excessive - a writer's weakness for rambling through the potentials of language - but the production succeeds in creating its own distinctive atmosphere, of laughter amid great sadness.

And Washington, despite his fine work, doesn't reach down to reveal the shattering impact on Walter of his dream's destruction. The one performer who allows us inside is Okonedo, a British actress making a superb New York stage debut. Using all the details of the actor's art - small gestures, slight changes in expression - she somehow reveals Ruth's soul. And that makes her longing to establish the family in its own home the most affecting dream of all.

'If/Then' has its moments, but it is a letdown after Kitt and Yorkey's electrifying achievement with 'Next to Normal.' All you can say is that creating a great original musical is very hard and complicated and sometimes things just don't work out.

Directed by Sheryl Kaller, the play has a rather clumsy construction, with pretexts continuously popping up for characters to leave the room - they answer the front door, go to the bathroom, give Bud his bath - so that the remaining pair can have their private conversations. 'Mothers and Sons,' which runs just 90 minutes, is best experienced as a kind of marker in social history, an expression of pride in progress, dignity and growing power.

You can pick holes in it - yes, it's terribly sentimental, and illogical - but its grand conception and parade of timeless songs sweep everything else away. The fine new production, I'm happy to say, doesn't sponge on the show's reputation.

Large but agile, Iglehart then leads the singing and dancing in 'Friend Like Me,' a wonderfully over-the-top moment of celebration. Casey Nicholaw hasn't directed the show very nimbly, but his choreography for this number is invigorating. 'Aladdin' ends with the hero and Jasmine floating through the night sky on a magic carpet. It's a lovely image, but too little, too late.

With persuasive stage realism, the men take turns pounding one another bloody. But there's little sense of the actual drama of a long, close boxing match, with its ebb and flow, strategy and tactics and the fighters' desperate will to win.Though losing a split decision, Rocky achieves his goal of going the distance. It's a triumph that, theatrically speaking, is pretty hollow.

'The Bridges of Madison County' had only one path to artistic success: Its two lovers had to gain the empathy - a tear, a lump in the throat - of the audience. Mission, I would definitely say, accomplished.

First there was football, with the mediocre 'Lombardi.' Then came basketball, with the bad 'Magic/Bird,' and now baseball, with the worse 'Bronx Bombers' (presented with 'special producing partners' the Yankees and Major League Baseball). Wake me when they get to horseshoes.

What makes much of this entertaining, even if it's dramatic folderol, is a combination of Shanley's winning affection for his characters, committed portrayals by a quartet of fine actors, under the spirited direction of Doug Hughes, and lots of jokes that are funny when delivered with a brogue.

Thanks to Hall's haunted characterization, though, the essence of the play, the sense of an individual plowed over by the inexorable surge of society, never fades. We don't feel sympathy for the Young Woman's crime, nor are we meant to, but it's impossible not to be touched by her futile struggle to find her place in the world.

The show's book, by Douglas McGrath, registers mostly as a series of interruptions. While not exactly amateurish, it aims very low, settling for the tried and trite. ('You know what's so funny about life? Sometimes it goes the way you want and sometimes it doesn't.') A big boost comes, though, from the warmly natural portrayal of King by Jesse Mueller, who also possesses a lovely, supple singing voice.

The show's book, by Douglas McGrath, registers mostly as a series of interruptions. While not exactly amateurish, it aims very low, settling for the tried and trite. ('You know what's so funny about life? Sometimes it goes the way you want and sometimes it doesn't.') A big boost comes, though, from the warmly natural portrayal of King by Jesse Mueller, who also possesses a lovely, supple singing voice.

In the second act, Hirst and Spooner engage in a long, amusing dialogue about the people they knew back in college, raising the question of whether, in fact, they've been previously acquainted. Or is Hirst engaging in an elaborate joke? The play ends sedately, with Hirst's toast, 'I'll drink to that.'

n the classic 'Godot,' the scruffy hobos Vladimir (Stewart) and Estragon (McKellen) loiter by the roadside, waiting for Mr. Godot, who never comes. They wait and wait, bicker, make up, pass the time with vaudeville routines, like passing bowler hats back and forth; and offhandedly contemplate hanging themselves from the lone tree on the bleak landscape. Each day goes on the same as every other day.

A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder' is a musical wild card, a distant relative to 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' perhaps, but entirely its own thing. It's fresh, and it's tremendously entertaining.

When Crystal comes onstage, he begins with an edge: Audiences like him. They've been responding for years to his quick wit and aura of wholesomeness tinged with a bit of boyish naughtiness. To his great credit, he doesn't coast on his credentials. In '700 Sundays,' he delivers the full measure of his talent.

As a comedy, 'Twelfth Night' more logically lends itself to interaction and horseplay, but here, too, Rylance finds a way to go the extra yard as Olivia, who goes in an instant from mourning her dead brother to swooning over the handsome Cesario, not realizing he's the disguised Viola.

While this is the most amusing 'Richard' I've ever seen, it's important to emphasize that it's not a burlesque. It's Shakespeare's play, as Rylance and director Tim Carroll conceive it.

Called 'Cotton Club Parade,' it was initially a collaboration between the Jazz at Lincoln Center program and the New York City Center, and was performed at the City Center for brief runs in 2011 and 2012. The emergent 'After Midnight' is not your typical Broadway musical. But, taken on its own terms, it's thoroughly entertaining.

No one ever thinks of Pinter as a chronicler of romance. But this is the most devastating, clear-eyed examination of the arc of a love affair as I've seen

'The Snow Geese,' which opened Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, has a refreshingly unusual setting: a hunting lodge near Syracuse in 1917. What happens there is, unfortunately, much less tantalizing, despite the presence of such A-list actors as Mary-Louise Parker, Danny Burstein and Victoria Clark.The author Sharr White zeroes in on a family's life at a moment when everything i