Scott Brown — Theater Critic

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.

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.

Butz is, predictably, the first to bring down the house, pushing an otherwise undistinguished patter-gospel number ('Don't Break the Rules') to impressively incensed heights. By the time the orchestra goes silent and things get dark for swingin' Frank, their relationship feels a lot more earned than I'd ever expected. Maybe I got conned. If so, I didn't mind.

This Reno, and maybe Foster herself, isn't afraid to be a tad uncomfortable playing something she's not: She's not made of brass and doesn't try to be, and she doesn't feel compelled to kick every burnished quip through the goalposts. (Though her delivery is unerringly solid: she's a Swiss watch with a swing hand.)

In Joseph’s play, death is no release, just an invitation to endless, one-sided parlay with the Infinite. And nobody does one-sided parlay like Robin Williams, who gives a remarkably continent, almost minimalist performance. He’s star casting done right, where the mere presence of the celebrity performs an estranging effect, goading us with something familiar yet out of place. Who let that guy out of his cage? (Next up: Mel Gibson in The Hairy Ape, please.)

What Radcliffe and Ashford pull off in this surprisingly succulent production is a fairly exhilarating demonstration of how a well-run musical, like a well-run company, adapts itself to the peculiar talents of its personnel, and not the other way around. With Ashford's flair, Radcliffe's dogged discipline and great good humor, and a deep bench of performing talent, How to Succeed-written as a poke at at the gray-flannel innards of a mid-century business behemoth-moves with the fleet feet and bright-eyed buoyancy of a startup. Its satiric DNA may be rooted in the Sterling Cooper era, but the energy here is present-tense, urgent and undeniable.

The Book of Mormon, arriving after months of hype, somehow delivers even more than its ridiculously felicitous advance buzz promised: It's an often uproarious, spiritually up-tempo satire not just of Mormonism, and not just religion in general, but of (no kidding) Occidental civilization itself, in all its well-intentioned, self-mythologizing, autoerotically entitled glory.

A lip sync of a lip sync of a lip sync, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical arrives on Broadway in a flurry of pink feathers, delivering more or less exactly what you’d expect of a jukebox musical about three drag queens' braving the spangle-resistant Australian outback in a beat-up tour bus. (The show is based on the similarly titled 1994 feel-good movie starring Terence Stamp.) We’re treated, in other words, to a high-speed Automat of toweringly tasteless costumes, camp levels so dangerously high you’ll be finding stray sequins in the dryer for years to come, and a set list — sorry, a score — stuffed to its glittery gills with karaoke yester-hits: There are so many showstoppers, in fact, that I occasionally wondered when it was actually going to start. (Can anyone in the Western world survive another 'I Will Survive'? The Act One finale suggests that we can, and must.)

A lip sync of a lip sync of a lip sync, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical arrives on Broadway in a flurry of pink feathers, delivering more or less exactly what you’d expect of a jukebox musical about three drag queens' braving the spangle-resistant Australian outback in a beat-up tour bus. (The show is based on the similarly titled 1994 feel-good movie starring Terence Stamp.) We’re treated, in other words, to a high-speed Automat of toweringly tasteless costumes, camp levels so dangerously high you’ll be finding stray sequins in the dryer for years to come, and a set list — sorry, a score — stuffed to its glittery gills with karaoke yester-hits: There are so many showstoppers, in fact, that I occasionally wondered when it was actually going to start. (Can anyone in the Western world survive another 'I Will Survive'? The Act One finale suggests that we can, and must.)

Sex hangs over Arcadia like a fine English fog, and personally, I’d have preferred it even thicker. Nothing sets off Stoppard’s crystalline intellect like a nice, rude intrusion of carnality and folly. But Leveaux has directed his cast members to turn inward, and perhaps that’s ultimately the better choice. I admit to being a little flummoxed by Crudup’s Bernard; he’s playing a character more or less alien to American audiences, the flibbertigibbet rake, and he bridges the gap with doses of downcast American irony and tics that sometimes come close to clowning. But his approach won me over by Act Two, when Bernard’s limitations as a person and a character come into fuller view. Ditto Williams’ chilly Hannah and Powley’s avid child-prodigy Thomasina — they seem immovable in their typologies until late in the play, when the clockwork clicks into place.

The five-man squad onstage in That Championship Season is a not unimpressive bunch, a Hollywood casting director’s “dream team” of sorts: If not quite the Jordan-Magic-Bird miracle of the ’92 Olympics, they’re certainly within a halfcourt shot of the 2000 Carter-Hardaway-Garnett incarnation. Kiefer Sutherland, Chris Noth, Jason Patric, the comedian Jim Gaffigan, and the great Brian Cox have united to resuscitate Jason Miller’s brined-in-testosterone 1972 Pulitzer-winner, a vicious little Watergate-era object lesson in bonding and betrayal, bad leaders and blind followers, feet of clay and hearts of stone. It’s the anti-Lombardi. N.B.: That doesn’t make it good.

It’s a given that we don’t talk about class in this country, so it’s hardly surprising that we don’t see a lot of plays about it. (We don’t see many plays, period, but that’s a different, if related, matter.) David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People — the latest in his Rabbit Hole realism phase — isn’t exactly an Odetsian war cry. But simply by broaching the subject of haves and have-nots, it will make a stir: Prepare for overpraise for “bravery” and abuse for not going further, for ending on a note perilously close to magical complacency. Whatever. Good People is a fine, small, heartfelt work that shadowboxes with social darkness in a safely lit room, floating on a vast sea of unsaid things.

Each jewel of wit is polished apple-bright, and every performer is playing in the same key. Forget literary interpretation, forget clenched internal acting: There's great damned musicianship here, and the joy of sheer comic virtuosity. For this we must thank, again, Brian Bedford, who pulls off actor-director double duty with uncommon grace.

By the time Cornet and Jefferson have their dialogue (one of only a handful of true, respectful exchanges between two characters on an equal intellectual footing), we're deep in the second act. Guare resorts to some very literal and op-ed-ish maneuvers in an attempt to guide us out of the hedge maze he's created. Cornet himself might've been the unifying force, but even he isn't unified. 'I do not live in factions,' he protests, when Jefferson churlishly brings up his mixed-race parentage. Yet Cornet, like the play, is a nacreous combine, lovely and unwieldy, easy to display but hard to manipulate. That's A Free Man of Color: It's not a map, or even an atlas, but a huge, misshapen, distracted globe, one that even a theatrical Tamburlaine like Guare can't quite figure out how to bestride. That doesn't mean it isn't exhilarating to match him try.

But a lot of smaller pieces have been smashed in the move; key moments, including the once-haunting conclusion, dangle mystifyingly. Numrich's new Lorenzo is a gentler bloke than Bill Heck's more loutish version. His relationship with Jessica now plays as the tender unsteadiness of newlyweds, not as the frightening transactional rape Sullivan staged at the Delacorte. This has a devastating effect on the play's epilogue, which was written as an eleventh-hour return to light-comedy, but which Sullivan has reinterpreted as an ominous coda, full of fatal regrets that can't be bought off or kissed away. The creepy pathology at the heart of Lorenzo and Jessica's unhappy union was the key to making this slant work. Without it, we're simply watching a bunch of sighing young yuppies, aridly dissatisfied, sitting around a reflecting pool--hell, we might as well adjourn to the local Marriott.

Amen! The Pee-Wee Herman Show is a candy land parade of familiar faces, memes of Christmas Past, and play-along-at-home sketches: Jambi the Genie grants a wish! Pterri the Pterodactyl flies in for a visit! Conky the Robot spits out 'the secret word'! Lick it, and you'll uncover coat after coat of sweet meta-ness, with one great, governing joke at its chewy-center: Pee-Wee Herman (comedian Paul Reubens) is a child in a grownup's body--and now, that grownup is All Grown Up.

There's no wall to be seen in Long Story Short, aside from the Great One. ('Work was China's drug. The one thing they couldn't figure out was how to stop working. That's why the Great Wall is so long. I'm sure it started off as just a wall. The next biggest wall in the world is fourteen feet long. Any other place, a contractor gets to that length and says, 'You don't need more than that, do you?') Quinn and Seinfeld try hard to banish the spectre of Caroline's from the intimate Helen Hayes (where the comic's first Broadway outing, Colin Quinn: Irish Wake, played over a decade ago).