Scott Brown

The play's a series of battles that don't quite add up to a war, possibly because the real enemy-Monolithic Whiteness-doesn't make an honest appearance. The show's less strenuously riveting moments, as opposed to the drowsy-making courtroom speeches, are also its best. I especially enjoyed the elliptical, only half-intelligible conversations between Jake and his mentor, disbarred, sleepily devious Lucien Wilbanks (Tom Skerritt), a progressive sot who enjoys regular regressions into Margaritaville. Skerritt is so relaxed, you can barely understand his cottony mouthfuls of dialogue, but he's a loose, disarming present in a highly staged, totally controlled environment. In A Time To Kill, every familiar beat arrives right on time-but Skerritt's always just a little late. I appreciated the spontaneity, intentional or not.

Don't expect much in the way of personal revelation or public misbehavior. Apart from sucking on a bottle of Southern Comfort, this Janis is quite composed and sedate between songs. She tells charming stories about housecleaning, her family, her favorite 45s. Johnson's script has been carefully policed by the Joplin estate, which consists of Janis's siblings-thus, it's long on stories about her siblings and short on just about everything else. If an alien landed in the theater, seeking knowledge of Janis Joplin, its report to the mother ship would describe a mild, genial hippie redneck whose onstage routine included the occasional nip of hooch-basically Ron White in combat boots and batik, with a song in his heart...Davies's Janis, it must be said, is nothing short of extraordinary in the pipes department: She shreds her larynx like a woman possessed and still has more to give. It's a close but not Xeroxed impression, and in the narrow interstices between impersonation and performance, she injects real feeling and nuance. This is especially astonishing given the deadwood she must deliver. But just when you can't take another anemic anecdote or whitewashed Wiki stub, she lets loose her 'Cry Baby,' her 'Me and Bobby McGee,' and all is forgiven.

If the pattern holds, and we get one Menagerie a decade, this will be a high point. I'm not sure what the two-thousand-teens did to earn this beautiful oubliette of a production (the aughts got Christian Slater in a leather jacket), but let's just say the next decade has its work cut out: This is a grand and true illusion, not just to be lauded and gawked at-though you will, and that's appropriate-but studied. Watch the hands. Be led and misled by them. Remember it differently this time.

In the absence of all suspense - though not of pacing, which is fairly fleet, almost brisk - the show is taken over by spotlight supporting roles, most notably Jayne Houdyshell, who steals the show as Juliet's nurse. Houdyshell is, of course, a brilliant stage performer, but when the Nurse runs off with yourR&J, chances are it wasn't secured properly in the first place. Mercutio's another matter: As the only brilliant person in this rather dull crew of partisans, prigs and puppy-lovers - and thus the only crazy person, as well - he's designed to walk away with the whole shootin' match. Christian Camargo doesn't disappoint: A skinny-jeaned, leather-jacketed apparition, he's like some Billyburg poseur driven mad by the dawning recognition of his waning powers of bullshit. As a verbal duelist, Camargo's the very butcher of a silk button - he speaks in short stabbing motions, milks nothing, hits everything, jumps back before he's worn out his welcome.

he necessary gigantism of a Broadway production (even the relatively intimate Circle in the Square has an arena-like feeling) presents us with a question Soul Doctor isn't prepared to answer: Was this hippie rabbi a rock star?A guru? A teacher who did his best work in small kum-ba-yah minyanim? The man, the mensch, and the myth are never parsed with anything approaching curiosity. This is a singalong, steeped in deep fondness, which one can either meet or miss. The show doesn't insist, doesn't specify-only obsessively informs.

The songs (by Alan Zachary and ­Michael Weiner, of the upcoming Secondhand Lions) are pleasant, often energetic Broadpop bonbons with better-than-­average lyrics, but apart from Gay Bestie's oft-repeated 'Bailout Song' (performed with flair by Kristoffer Cusick), they won't haunt your dreams or even your cab ride home. They do have a balls-out confidence when it comes to avoiding daintiness, and there's wit, warmth, and charm in sufficient abundance to keep us engaged for 90 minutes...The creative team's real achievement begins and ends with casting. It isn't so much that Levi and Rodriguez exceed the rather restricted types they're playing; it's how they keep making us forget that they're playing types. In those moments, you're watching chemistry, not math, and the show's inherent agreeableness and take-me-I'm-yours-I'll-do cuteness come oozing through.

Beane's book is good-humored and well-tempered, and it stops just short of attempting too much. Why bother with a Chomsky exegesis here? Cinderella may not be an infinitely interpretable text-Beane's always on the razor's edge of ridiculousness-but every age is entitled to its own stock fantasies. Rodgers & Hammerstein's (and Beane's and Brokaw's) Cinderella is as solidly entertaining a commercial proposition as they come, featuring one of Broadway's finest ensembles and what might be its couple of the year: Just a couple of regular folks, the soul-searching blue-blood and the enchanted-orphan, trying to get along, and getting along rather well indeed.

Even now, audiences are lining up to see Scarlett Johansson challenge the structural integrity of her slip as Maggie the Cat, Tennessee Williams's most bodacious creation: ambitious, lubricious, sex-starved, and ovulating. Your hundred-clams'-worth seems all but guaranteed. And yet the scene-stealer of the evening turns out to be a $5 bath towel. It's worn by Benjamin Walker, who plays Maggie's beautiful, inert husband Brick, broken plantation scion, shattered ex-gridiron star, and now celibate sot, still mourning the suicide of his 'friend' and teammate Skipper.

That's a lot of traffic, stylistically, and performances that don't match seem not to collide so much as move through each other, like ghosts. That's not to say the energies never align...As it stands, this Picnic is an ad hoc smorgasbord, where not all dishes are guaranteed to palate in perfect harmony. Not everything goes down smoothly, and one wonders if a bit more salt might've tied the whole thing together.

Metcalf supplies the gravitation that holds it all together, even as her immense centrifugal energy is, simultaneously, working to fling it all apart. Her physical and spiritual transformation over the course of this brief, intense story is total. I greatly enjoyed The Other Place in its original Off Broadway incarnation, but I wondered if Joe Mantello's exquisite, bounded-in-a-nutshell production would scale up to Broadway. It does, I'm thrilled to report, and a great deal of the credit is due Metcalf herself, who's found several clever ways-near-subliminal physicalization, megaphonic emotional projection-to turn a delicate chamber performance into a great ringing cry from the darkness, suitable for an amphitheater.

Sher’s found a nice beachhead beyond the squabbles between irony and its discontents: It’s a place where the tune calls the piper, not to other way around. To paraphrase the Coen-ization of Odets: You’re gonna be hearing about this show. And I don’t mean a postcard.

David Mamet's austerity program isn't working. Despite a careerlong crusade to streamline theater by sandblasting away its airy effeminacies (like acting and emoting), his latest, The Anarchist, still feels strangely gassy, even at a Spanxed 80 minutes. This despite the best efforts of the author—who’s also the director—to dehydrate a life-and-death battle of wills into a stylized white paper.

Truth be told, nothing feels entirely necessary in The Performers. Why is Mandrew named Mandrew? Straight male porn stars don’t have names like “Mandrew.” (Jackson has a prime physique more in line with the requirements of gay porn, but Read, beyond one intriguing little feint near the top of the show, doesn’t go There, or anywhere near There.) So Mandrew is Mandrew because and only because “Mandrew” is funny to say — at least, the first sixteen times. And The Performers is acceptably funny, too, if you disconnect most of your brain, including the part connected to your genitals. Believe me, you won’t need ’em: Light disdain and affectionate superiority toward cartoon sex dolls with crotches Barbie-smooth is all that’s required of you. Sex comedy — even in gelded, rom-com form — probably ought to pump something carnal out of the subconscious. Read, it seems, is too busy drilling for corn.

Drood, ultimately, is not a complete show so much as an expandable playspace, and with performers of this caliber, an evening of yeasty, nudge-nudge-wink-wink British good humor is more or less guaranteed. The show-within-the-show may drone a bit, but the show-around-the-show sparkles.

The real measure of any Annie is the chemistry between its Annie and its Warbucks, and here, the Lapine reboot succeeds—though not, perhaps, in the way fans of the original, the ’82 movie, the ’97 revival, or the ’99 TV movie remember. Lilla Crawford does not love the spotlight the way we collectively recall Andrea McArdle's loving it; for those of us whose Ür-Annie was the movie version’s Aileen Quinn, there’s none of her solar-powered Raphaelite beneficence. Crawford’s adorable, of course, and sings flawlessly in that trademark Annie timbre, i.e. somewhere between a spirit-bowl and a bandsaw. (An on-key bandsaw! I mean all of this as praise: That’s how Annie’s gotta sing, gosh durnit!)

There's unmarriageable and then there's unmarriageable: The Catherine Sloper of Henry James's Washington Square is an 1850s heiress of 'plain, dull, gentle countenance' who 'devoted her pocket money to the purchase of cream cakes' and is 'decidedly not clever.' The Catherine Sloper of Ruth and Augustus Goetz's 1947 play The Heiress (which is merely 'suggested' by Washington Square) is a bright young thing buried under a bushel of insecurities, crippled by an awkward fashion sense and near-cataleptic social anxiety. (In William Wyler's film version, Olivia de Havilland was slapped with a pair of Mike Dukakis eyebrows to uglify her into premature spinsterhood.)

Hodge is an enormous talent, and he does excellent work, but it does sometimes look like work.

Miraculously, then, Grace is highly watchable; where it slumps as a play, it soars as a competent consumer good. Director Dexter Bullard (Bug, Mistakes Were Made) knows how to spotlight the standout beats and, for the most part, minimize the water-treading and showboating. Wright is, for the most part, a canny entertainer and an expert stirrer-of-shit: He can pass power, offense, and attack back and forth between characters like nobody’s business, and he has a particular knack for swiftly decompensating males.

Chaplin seems to be dragging some ghostly vestiges of its road self. (Under another title, Limelight, it underwhelmed at La Jolla Playhouse.) The first act relies heavily on a creaky film conceit. (We’re supposed to be on a bare soundstage, watching Chaplin’s film of his own life — though the only meaningful sign of this is a recurring slate boy, calling out scene changes.) This frame feels entirely unnecessary; worse, it means the actors have to wear unevenly applied “silent-film” greasepaint.

I braced, I flinched, and then, to my surprise and delight ... I applauded. Repeatedly. Bring It On certainly gives fierce face, but it also backs up that glittering grill with just enough sinew and substance — musical, physical and textual — to put it in trophy contention as a worthy, weightless delight, a guilty pleasure you needn't feel too guilty about.

On its third director and its second book, the slightly road-worn Leap of Faith vaults over a chasm of skepticism—and stops precisely three quarters of the way across. It’s not a terrible show—Elmer Gantry-meets-The Music Man is certainly a winning stage-musical conceit—but it's a persistently confused one, in tone, content, and mood. Ostensibly a straightforward inspirational dramedy (sporting a straightforward set of smoothly toothsome Alan Menken tunes, sprightly recyclings of his trademark pop yearnings and gospel pastiche), the show aims to be hiply clued-in and folksily naïve all at once. The result is a sermon in song that’s rousing enough, but also instantly evanescent: Believers and unbelievers alike are welcomed (nay, bullied) to clap along, and they’ll leave baptized in freshets of energetically manipulative pop-Broadway melody, but the effect evaporates fast. Leap feels like the not-awful, not-wonderful product of a long series of compromises.

Alsop helped cajole and bully first John Kennedy, then Lyndon Johnson, deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War. Did this shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude have anything to do with his carefully concealed (yet widely whispered-about) homosexuality? Or with KGB threats to publish evidence of his “degeneracy”? Or just his unshakably aristocratic worldview? (“We don’t give two shits what they want to read! We tell them what they need to know!”) In The Columnist, playwright David Auburn engages these questions ever so gingerly, ultimately giving Alsop a bit too wide a berth. He wants the man wreathed in mystery—a great dying-WASP tragedy—but he also wants to convey a Britannica’s worth of specific didja-know historical info: The dialogue is smart and sharp enough, but The Columnist, in toto, feels both didactically chalky and oddly evasive.

As the perma-sozzled, dimwitted, oft-married heir Jimmy Winter, Broderick—having been delivered to his marks by the tide of Marshall’s choreography and staging—proceeds to nail his gags dead-on, make it tipsily through his big dance with his towboy bootlegger love-interest Billie Bendix (Kelli O’Hara), and warble George-and-Ira’s melodies with pleasant Muppetry. Who could ask for anything more?

I call Stewart (a former Eurythmic) and veteran popsmith Ballard “composers,” but “producers” is closer to the spirit of the thing: This is really not music but production, which is keeping with Ghost’s gestalt: It’s the most impressively overproduced entity on Broadway, and there’s no small thrill in witnessing the technical prowess on display, even when it batters your retinas like timpani on Orff night, drowning out everything else.

It can’t conceal what it is: an animatronic Epcot pavilion seemingly designed and operated by the NBA. Edited together like a highlight reel (complete with a Coldplay song), Magic/Bird steers us gently but firmly from 1979 — when Bird and Johnson ignited their long contretemps in the NCAA Championship Game — to the early nineties, when both their careers came crashing to a close.