Scott Brown

London went mad for Roger, an Argentine native of winningly diminutive size. Her elfin apoplexies and unique vocal interpretation were met with English bouquets. But personally, I found her performance almost too good a fit with Rice’s jagged, herky-jerky lyrics: She is memorable in part because she is irritating.

After a brief twenty-year incubation period, Newsies is finally onstage where it belongs, in a Jeff Calhoun-directed production that’s as gloriously square as it is automatically ingratiating. ... Harvey Fierstein’s book, fleet and witty for the most part, does contain a few tiresomely repeated beats, especially when it comes to Jack’s character. ... Newcomer Kara Lindsay, as plucky reporter and romantic foil Katherine Plummer, commits double-hard to the well-worn spunky-gal trope and comes out of it with a winning performance.

Barely scripted, often free-associative, and held together with video clips so queasy-fuzzy Shat might well have bought them on Canal Street en route to the theater, Shatner’s World is a unique end-user Broadway experience. For non-Trekkers, I’d put it somewhere between attending the Charlie Sheen Comedy Tour and getting trapped in a basement with an eccentric grandparent who has recently discovered YouTube. For the faithful—those who thrill visibly at every out-of-focus glimpse of the Gorn—Shatner’s World is much more. It is nothing less than Beowulf’s final battle, the mortal bellow of a supernovan ego in the face of Death.

The problems begin on the page. For nearly all of Act 1, we hear almost exclusively from Elsa (Gugino), a progressive schoolteacher who’s driven hundreds of miles nonstop from Cape Town into the bush to check on her godmotherly old friend, an introverted Afrikaaner called Miss Helen (Harris). Helen’s a sweet old crank with a long-dead husband, a pushy drop-in pastor named Marius (Dale), and a sculpture garden full of her handmade folk-art oddities, all pointed east.

But that's exactly what makes this Porgy so powerful: It's a show about leaving Catfish Row, about making the great leap from the smothering bosom of the old South into the dark void of the twentieth century. When Porgy took his first shuddering steps into that abyss, I felt a tide behind me: An audience absolutely rapt, ravished by two hours of one of the greatest scores ever written for the American theater, wanting nothing more than to follow that crooked figure into the black. Goat or no goat, that's tragedy at its most triumphant.

Into Broadway's bleak midwinter comes a bright orange ray of summer nonsense: Lysistrata Jones — an agreeable, disposable, Off Broadway musical goof on Aristophanes by the creators of Xanadu — has been carted uptown from the Gym at Judson and deposited in the Walter Kerr. Weightless, harmless, wittily witless, and surprisingly sexless (for a show about women holding out on their menfolk, this time in a college-basketball milieu), the show transforms an ancient Greek sex comedy into a modern American abstinence skit, stripping away generations of antiwar or proto-feminist interpretations and replacing them with indifferent yo-go girls.

Diamond is accustomed to writing in a far more experimental, more formally frisky vein, but she displays an abiding affection for and proficiency in the art of verbal fencing. Too often, though, Taylor, Kimber, and the LeVay men (the play’s thinnest characters) seem to be floating in a fine mist of wit and writerly flash, while the play itself lapses into the old tricks of cheap melodrama.

Gross is the evening's highlight, with his flawless lacquer of disdain broken only by eruptions of mania. (His third-act face-off with Day's fusty, fuming Victor is particularly zippy and unpredictable.) He's in close touch with the anarchist, the sociopath and the romantic struggling to burst from Elyot's crisp English outer-chrysalid. Cattrall is all poise and perfect timing as Amanda, Elyot's double and opposite-number.

Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway, a one-man show where branding and bonhomie fuse in a martini shaker of old-fashioned showmanship, and the Troy McClure absurdity would overwhelm us if the man were one iota less impressive. By the end of the night, you're ready to buy just about anything off Hugh: Amway, The Brooklyn Bridge, Berlusconi futures. SNIKT! You're sold. It's nearly impossible to emerge from the Jackman corona with anything other than the impression that you've just spent an evening not just with great talent but also with a great pal.

The music's been given a once-over, as well, with sometimes radically tricked-out new undercarriages: Gone is the granola folk of 'God Save the People,' replaced by an almost- reggae lilt; 'We Beseech Thee''s gospel revival has been canned in favor of neo-country (and is now performed on, gulp, trampolines). And yet, for all that's changed, it's still much the same spell. 'Bless the Lord' is still the first number to bring down the house (especially as performed by the redoubtable Lindsay Mendez), and incandescent individual performances (Telly Leung's magnificent 'All Good Gifts,' for example) elevate songs that might, in less expert hands, show their age.

Like all the great desert tribes of antiquity, Palm Springs Republicans deserve their own sacred text. (For the purposes of this review, Prop 13 and 'My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan' don't count.) Jon Robin Baitz, a gay liberal humanist, has delivered them a doozy with 'Other Desert Cities,' his off-Broadway hit, which has now ripened admirably on Broadway. Power, passion, and superbly crafted palaver stippled with blowdarts of wit-this is what Baitz ('The Substance of Fire,' TV's 'Brothers and Sisters') does best. He's written his favorite sort of story, a simple tale of parents and children and blame ... in which the legacy of the Old American Century and the unsteady prospect of a new one just happen to be at stake.

Thunderclaps shake the theater; the deluge outside the window is practically Biblical. But for all the Abrahamic ominousness, not too much actually transpires, emotionally or counterhistorically, in The Mountaintop, Katori Hall’s giddy and insouciant yet strangely weightless fantasy about the last night of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Samuel L. Jackson)...Hall loses her resolve and retreats into magic and omen.

Basil lacks his father's diamond-tipped ruthlessness; he's 'soft,' a condition he tells his saucy American girlfriend Carol (Virginia Kull, doing her best as a one-woman exposition service) that his father equates with being 'queer.' This notion is then borne out, rather literally, in a highly entertaining but largely ridiculous game of insinuation and sexual leverage, in which Antonescu lures a potential merger target, Herries (Zach Grenier), to Basil's grungy Village apartment, and convinces his closeted guest that he's among kindred spirits — indeed, that Basil himself might be “un petit pederaste,” if the price is right. This should be appalling, but, as directed by Tricycle Theatre's Maria Aitken, it's mostly just amusing — the best leg of the show, in fact. Grenier and Langella share a fascinating pas de deux, a battle of body language that's a treat to see. As Antonescu's majordomo Sven, the right-hand man who's expert at pretending not to know what the left hand is doing, Michael Siberry proves himself, once again, the Roundabout's secret weapon and sine qua non. (In just three syllables — perhaps the most spectacularly insincere 'I'm sorry' ever uttered on any stage or in any medium — Siberry sums up the mendacity of the entire politico-financial apparatus he serves. When does this guy get his own miscalculated Roundabout revival?)

Sondheim himself, in Finishing the Hat, has called the show 'crippled by its size, ambition and mysteriousness, and thus always worth the effort of experimentation.' Director Eric Schaeffer has opted mostly to steer the ship, not re-install the keel, and, as far as I can tell (which, to be honest, isn’t very far), he and choreographer Warren Carlyle have preserved the spirit of Michael Bennett’s original hoofery...Follies is the disease and the cure in one package: I'd advise you to catch it.

Problem is, in Wadsworth’s Class, the world just doesn’t feel that dangerous. And while Daly, with her clipped, rabbit-punching rhythms and deep reserves of phlegm, is often wickedly funny (“Does anyone know what time it is? I have a beauty parlor appointment after this”) and unspeakably poignant (“Never move on your applause. It shortens it”), I sometimes felt her playing less the tragic has-been than the self-deluded never-was. For the true diva, maybe there’s not much difference. And maybe that’s why I have trouble caring.

Spider-Man — to beat my running metaphor into the ground and then leave it for dead — is like that good-and-crazy friend with a highly entertaining substance-abuse problem, the one who goes off and gets clean, and comes back a different and diminished person: With his manias and overmuchness reined in, you suddenly realize how very little you ever had to offer one another. With Taymor gone, and the ruins of her monstrous Lovecraftian vision overrun by Lilliputians, there's simply nothing to see here, other than the sort of 'stunt spectacular' that wouldn't look out of place amid a backdrop of roller coasters and toddler vomit. It's a vast emptiness, void even of its animating madness. It shuffles and smiles and subsides, like a good inmate, its hummingbird heartbeat slowed to a crawl. Put your head to Spidey's chest, and all you'll hear is the dull smack of a damp wad of cash hitting the boards.

Flo herself is a Strong Sassy Lady so plainly traced from type, you can practically see the outline perforations. Leavel bears up and sings well, but there's little to rescue here. The real Flo Greenberg was, in her own words, 'a white woman who was in a black business and who couldn't carry a tune.' Whereas the stage version sings her heart out - only, whoops! There's nothing in it.

A bunker mentality pervades director David Cromer’s muffled new production of The House of Blue Leaves, and it’s not just because scenic artist Scott Pask’s grim vision of Vietnam-era Jackson Heights looks disturbingly like a duplex in Terror Era Kabul. This latest remount of John Guare’s satiric late-sixties philippic against the twin forces of fame and power — and the squalidly “aspirational” peasantry that both sustains and is sustained by those forces — feels strangely hunkered down in itself, even as geysers of absurdity (a trio of ravenous nuns, a gift-wrapped bomb intended for the visiting Pope) erupt willy-nilly in the dingy Queens living room of aspiring songwriter/discontented zookeeper Artie Shaughnessy (Ben Stiller). Like its principal characters, House feels, for all its determination, caged in its own dreamworld.

And then there's Arianda, the play's animating ambrosia and, without a doubt, the most exciting find of the Broadway season. To my regret, I missed her in last season's Venus in Fur, but seeing her now, I understand the already radiant reputation this absurdly talented performer has quickly and justly earned. Channeling just a dram of Judy Holliday's legendary performance-her original Billie's strangled Betty Boop soprano, her ditzy-like-a-fox scene pivots-Arianda takes the physical comedy further, but never too far: Whether she's trying to outrun the train of her peignoir or pouring herself a brimming water glass of gin, she invests everything she touches with comic energy.

Only the glorious bag-of-bones Mackenzie Crook, playing an aging forever-hometown boy in a tragic hoodie, even gets close to getting close to Rylance's Rooster. But even he can't hold Rylance's eyeline for long....the show is testament to the ever-­expanding voice and vision of Butterworth, whose mighty verbal broadsword just freakin' sings.

Miller’s an enormous presence, and what she lacks in character detail (there’s precious little to build on in Douglas Carter Beane’s very funny, very thin book) she generally makes up in brass and goodwill. Be warned: This is a show that’s not afraid to do a rappin’ granny number (the same rappin’ granny number, in fact, from The Wedding Singer). If that sort of thing doesn’t put a hitch in your rosary, you’ll likely get religion at Sister Act.

As the show's bathos emissions rise and rise to thyroid-killing levels...[the show] would be in a church basement or the sanctuary of some some mega-tabernacle. Which is where High, minus a few dozen of Turner's f-bombs and all references to sodomy, might be heading soon, too, and maybe where it was meant to be all along.

Wonderland is the worst kind of nonsense, the sort that attempts little and achieves less. Turgid with its own emptiness, this unctuously charmless show is proof that nothing from nothing somehow equals less than nothing. Its clone-songs, pop-cultured in the shallowest of Top 40 petri dishes, are all one-touch samples of erstwhile hits, most of them (weirdly) from the nineties. (Boy bands? Marc Anthony? No 'ironic' cutaway or wink is too dated for this show-even by Broadway's forgiving standards. It sounds piped-in from Hell's very own lite-FM station.)

There are many wonders in the Brit import War Horse - the most intense and epic children's entertainment ever mounted on Broadway, and certainly the greatest achievement in large-scale mainstream puppetry since The Lion King...I've heard many people comment that, within minutes, they forgot Joey was a puppet: They saw a real horse. I did, too, but with an unfortunate corollary sensation. The more horselike the puppet became, the more puppetlike I found the human actors.

In a good Guirgis play (and my favorite is The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, overstuffed and Wiki-stubbed as it was), there’s always some glimmering, bobbing moral buoy that recedes but never vanishes as the bumptious, hair-trigger characters kick up waves of slangy chaos. Here, as Jackie faces off against a bottomless pit of moral relativism (“What are we, Europeans or some shit?”), the buoy goes under and, for the most part, stays there. But the play really doesn’t have the heft to earn the death of hope, nor does it have the stones or the seriousness to declare hope officially dead. Motherf**ker mainly concerns itself with a lot of big, mordant laughs (with Yul Vazquez, as Jackie’s slightly Aspie ex-sex-addict cousin Julio, walking away with the show’s chewy center). Jabbing exchanges like “I coulda fucked your wife the other night!” / “Shit, I coulda fucked your girl the other day — and I did!” land solidly in the audience’s breadbasket, yet overall, the play feels jumpy and scant. Anna D. Shapiro hops from laugh to laugh at such a workmanlike tempo, the characters sometimes feel on the verge of urban blue-collar caricature. Despite the monumental pain they feel, these people lack the savor we hear in Guirgis’s best stuff.