Robert Hofler — Theater Critic

But my patience for being toyed with ran out at the top of Act 2 when Hyde Pierce sings “The Nightmare Song” from “Iolanthe.” I had no idea what was going on until the musical skidded into familiar turf with “A Paradox,” which is clearly from “Pirates.” It helps that Karimloo, Monsoon and Barasch sing the classic song with great panache. The show ends with “He Is an Englishman” from “HMS Pinafore,” which has been retitled “We’re All From Someplace Else” to make it an ode to immigrants. Good will does not always translate into good entertainment.

Trefry’s stage play is a muddled, pedestrian prequel... What’s on stage at the Marquis resembles a jukebox musical comedy with lots of shock effects haphazardly thrown in.

Whatever its deficiencies, Floyd Collins delivers a mighty central character that musically, if not dramatically, is the male equivalent of Rose in Gypsy. Jordan’s magnificent work here is one for the record books, one of the all-time great musical performances. Don’t miss it... The Broadway debut of Floyd Collins makes a good case for the musical without being a revelation... Landau’s book doesn’t really take off until the second act... Her staging calls out the crass American commercialism by giving us a crass Broadway circus-style production number... It is unfortunate that someone with a fresher take wasn’t engaged for this major revival.

“John Proctor” is written in short snippets of scenes, often the crutch of a novice playwright. Danya Taymor’s direction looks to punch up all these scene changes with flashy interludes that offer blinding shots of lightning (by Natasha Katz), ominous “Carmina Burana”-esque music (by Palmer Hefferan) and a black-lit classroom set (by Amp and Teresa L. Williams) that jiggles. It’s all about as subtle as Taymor’s direction of her cast, Ebert excluded.

The second act of ‘Smash’ hinges on which actress will end up playing Marilyn on opening night. Frankly, we don’t care, because the show is loaded with many songs for each of them to sing. Too many. In the second act, the female empowerment anthems become numbing, since each is delivered as a showstopper. How many times can a show be stopped before it actually stops?

“Becoming Eve” happens to be a very funny play, some of the best moments coming in the cultural mashup between Schiff’s Hasidic rabbi and Uranowitz’s “transdenominational Renewal” rabbi, whom the father at one point calls Judas. The timing between these two great actors is vintage vaudeville.

Yet another Stephen Sondheim revue is playing on Broadway. This one is called Old Friends, and it opened Tuesday at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre after engagements in London and Los Angeles. This is the sixth Sondheim revue to open on Broadway. In recent decades, legendary composers from George Gershwin to Richard Rodgers have not received this kind of attention. Hands down, the three best moments in Old Friends come when five wonderful singers (Jacob Dickey, Jasmine Forsberg, Kyle Selig, Maria Wirries and Daniel Yearwood) deliver a memorable Tonight Quintet from West Side Story. The two other great moments belong to Lea Salonga, who brings down the house twice, first with Somewhere from West Side Story and then Everything’s Coming Up Roses from Gypsy. Salonga presents a great Rose, and what adds to the excitement is how different Rose is from the roles that made Salonga a star: Kim in Miss Saigon, Fantine in Les Miz and the singing voice of Jasmine in the film Aladdin. If there were any justice, Cameron Mackintosh, who devised this Sondheim revue, would have instructed Matthew Bourne, who directs, to include Rose’s Turn for Salonga to finish off the evening.

Foster and lyricist Susan Birkenhead load ‘Boop!’ with so many anthems they appear to be auditioning for some new ‘I Love NY’ ad campaign. As for Foster’s tunes, you will leave the Broadhurst humming them, because you’ve heard them all before, whether it is caterwauling gospel or anemic jazz or the ubiquitous female power ballad.

The show’s toxicity has apparently affected at least one of its performers. Jonas and Warren are both strong singers, but Warren possesses the better voice. And she doesn’t mind proving that fact. Warren hangs on to high notes, and her fan base is prone to rewarding her with vocal outbursts and applause while she distorts the musical line. In her final duet with Jonas, at the preview I attended, Warren held a high note long after he concluded his. That’s grounds for divorce in the musical theater.

At times, however, Patrick Marber’s direction doesn’t trust Mamet’s extreme language to do the job and he lets his actors go way over the top in their attacks on each other. Some of this overacting may be the result of playing the Palace Theatre, a 1,600-plus-seat venue that’s too large for such an intimate play. Then again, the audience loves these big performances, and several of these acting outbursts are rewarded with applause, which only further acts to dissipate the real drama.

Williams’ adaptation follows Wilde’s original story more closely than the 1945 MGM movie starring George Sanders as Lord Henry and Hurd Hatfield as Dorian. Hatfield does something unexpected in that horror classic: His face throughout remains a tabula rasa. The actor lets the painting do all the acting. Snook takes a very different approach. She eschews the blond curls halfway through the show to don a slick pompadour that’s closer to what Glynis Johns sports in “The Chapman Report.” Snook also goes full-throttle to tear up the stage, even though there isn’t much scenery to put through her acting shredder.

Gyllenhaal delivers the most engaging Iago I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some pretty good Iagos: Christopher Plummer with Jones and Daniel Craig with Oyelowo. Gyllenhaal’s performance fuels the show, and when his Iago takes a needed break after getting Cassio wounded and Roderigo murdered, this “Othello” never quite regains either its focus or its propulsive momentum.

Robert Hastie provides the frenzied “Mincemeat” direction. It forced someone behind me to whisper halfway through Act 1, “This is exhausting.” Nothing kills a laugh faster than seeing actors sweat.

Buena Vista Social Club is the story of survival through the preservation of what artists do best, not only for them but for a whole island and its culture.

Simon Stephens’ adaptation here resembles a Cliffs Notes version of Uncle Vanya where several pages have been torn out, most of those featuring the title character now gone.

Through the course of this three-hour play, she is all these people plus a few more, and Richardson Jackson achieves these many mercurial changes by simply adjusting the temperature of her voice. Hers is a masterful performance.

Of course, this all-or-nothing approach only works if you have great actors, and O’Brien has assembled the best ensemble now performing on the New York stage. What is especially satisfying is that Billy Crudup and Lily Rabe are that unique mix of oil and water that produces combustible moments on stage. Crudup’s Pastor Manders is a busy, petty man who changes his moral convictions faster than a Republican senator. Where Crudup is giftedly mannered, Rabe takes the opposite approach to portray Helena Alving, a woman who has dedicated her life to protecting a son, Oswald (Levon Hawke), from a dissolute husband, the deceased Captain Alving. Rabe turns Helena into the drama’s black hole. Her every utterance, glance, and gesture is a master class in minimalism. Yet, her gravitas sucks the other characters’ life force into her quietly, fiercely swirling orbit.

Menzel’s latest Broadway venture, another original musical, is even more adventurous. In “Redwood,” which opened Thursday at the Nederland Theatre, her character Jesse climbs a tree to escape the traumatic memories of her adult son’s death. As the title makes clear, it’s not just any old tree but a majestic redwood that grows in northern California, and, before the show is over, Stella — Jesse names the tree Stella — is threatened by wild fire. Beyond the word “adventurous,” one might also throw out “indulgent” to describe “Redwood.”

On the page, these female characters could not be more different. On stage in the vivid performances delivered under Lileana Blain-Cruz’s very showy direction, they sometimes border on caricatures from vastly different melodramas. When one of them makes a major pronouncement, and there are a flood of them, Blain-Cruz lets go with storm effects (lighting by Jiyoun Chang, sound by Palmer Hefferan) in case anyone is dozing off.

Marco Pennette’s book gives Hilty all the grand-dame one-liners, but it’s Simard who gets the more unexpected laughs with delightful line readings that take a second or two to register. The sharp dialogue is in perfect tune with Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s lyrics, and that duo’s music, which is merely serviceable, manages not to get in the way of the characters and the story, which Pennette has made far less convoluted than its source material.

“Babe” runs only 85 minutes. Goldberg packs into her play both too much and not enough. Beyond Abigail’s variable health, there’s something too simplistic in the equation that female equals brilliant, male equals dumb. Is it possible that both Gus and Abigail are equally good at their job, but the one has all the power, fame and money? Then again, that novel idea might take another 10 or 15 minutes of stage time.

“S.M.F.” lives up to that title. The play delivers far fewer laughs than a decent production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But what it lacks in genuine wit – many of O’Hara’s zingers land flat — this s–t show compensates with sheer outrageousness as the phone calls quickly turn X-rated. O’Hara skewers white privilege and the pathetic sex fantasies it unleashes. In the process, he creates a super-stud character that borrows a lot from Mandingo.

The good news is that Mayer is in top form with his latest Broadway entry. The new musical “Swept Away” opened Tuesday at the Longacre Theatre, and it helps immeasurably that this divisive director is working with great material here. In its first half, the musical recalls the grandeur of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Billy Budd.” Then Rachel Hauck’s set capsizes – the ship really flips over! – and the musical turns into an intimate chamber piece with its four survivors starving and slowly spinning around in the middle of the sea.

That ghastly waking nightmare will give you some idea of what it’s like to sit through the new musical “Tammy Faye,” which opened Thursday at the Palace Theatre after its world premiere last year in London. Just as TV Evangelists suck up to their right-wing audience, the makers of “Tammy Faye” pander to feminists and “the gays.” Jake Shears’ puerile lyrics to Elton John’s weak country-Western tunes encourage women to take control of their life by using those “credit cards.” Much worse and more pervasive are the many ways James Graham’s book turns the title character into a gay icon somewhere to the left of Lady Gaga. We’re expected to find Tammy Faye sympathetic, even though she begs for money from poor people so she can look like a hideously dressed drag queen. Costumes are by Katrina Lindsay; Luc Verschueren designed the hair, wigs and make-up.

“Maybe Happy Ending” opens Tuesday at the Belasco Theatre, and it is downright peaceful, as well as charming and beautiful and poignant. The irony of over-amplification is that while one can be swept away by the sheer sound, if not bludgeoned, that loudness makes it often impossible to decipher lyrics. The lyrics by Hue Park and Will Aronson for “Maybe Happy Ending” are both simple and very smart, and adding to their allure is that they’re written for two characters that are not people.