Scott Brown — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.