Scott Brown

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.)

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).

The Scottsboro Boys isn't a precision-guided social endoscopy: It's a single, stunning blow to the temple. And on its own discomfiting, blunt-force terms, it's utterly successful.

Apart from Gaines, we're treated to two very famous voices, and very little else. John Lee Beatty's scenic design is a sepia box, a few sticks of furniture and a staircase: Video projections of historical moments through the decades fill the substantial void for anyone who might decide, mid-play, he'd rather be home, Netflix-ing the film version. And when the lights are at general-wash, the whole thing looks strangely scuffed and ugly, a cross between a half-vacated college dorm and one of the nicer basements from the Saw series. I felt like I was watching a hastily organized radio play, and half expected a station-break from the Guy's All-Star Shoe Band.

Lauria does little to scrape off the bronze and find the man inside. And why should he? Neither Simonson's script nor director Thomas Kail seems to be asking him to. Lauria's merely called upon to roar and rant and aphorize, and occasionally double over in pain, a nod to the colon cancer brewing in his gut. (Clutching a protuberant belly and vowing never to let some doctor put a scope 'up there': It's the male-melodrama equivalent of the tragic cough into the blood-speckled hankie.) Occasionally, Lauria prowls the outer boundaries of the man's son-of-immigrants insecurities, but there's precious little time for detail work between barking fits, and these declamations are clearly where he's put the bulk of his preparation.

With all due respect to his excellent co-stars, David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, and the fine ensemble that embroiders the show's frilly edges, Rylance is clearly the show's raison d'être. His performance as the irresistibly loathsome street clown Valere - a lowbrow bête noire visited upon the tidy playwright Elomire (Pierce) - is the grand prize at the bottom of a box of confetti.

But then, who’d be suicidal enough to want to get between Stewart and an audience? No one gets at the tragic dignity of a powerful man in irresistible decline quite like Stewart (and here I direct your attention, without shame, not only to his work in Macbeth and The Ride Down Mount Morgan, but to his towering, tumbling, still-unequaled performance in the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation). “Sound!” he declares, triumphantly and foolishly, “The crown prince of phenomena!” Embarking on a long and ultimately nonsensical digression about how sounds and smells emanate from the innermost self, Stewart’s Robert witlessly reveals himself a gaseous and empty person, vulnerable to the slightest pinprick. But Stewart himself is a creature of such remarkable vitality, it’s a little hard to buy him as a guy at the end of his powers.

It’s the individual personalities who sparkle here, and make Pitmen more than just a good-hearted, Geordie-accented lecture series. Christopher Connel turns in a deceptively modest performance as Oliver Kilbourn, the group member most torn between life in the mine and the promise of weightlessness offered by the beckoning art world. David Whitaker, as dim, avid Jimmy, brings unexpected depths to a mostly comic role. (He’s tasked with the perhaps inevitable “Titian”/”Bless you” gag and reacts to modern art with the classic “How much did you pay for it?”)

When mother and daughter must ultimately test each other’s moral mettle, we find that these two are not only from different worlds but also from slightly different productions: Two vivid, idiosyncratic performances collide here, dampening each other into gray noise. Even as great geysers of Acting were expended, I can't say I felt a single human emotion roll over me, beyond a high indistinct agitation. Both look incredibly relieved when they get to turn away from each other and disappear into some vast Shavian speech. Yes, Kitty and Vivie are each other’s nemeses, but we should feel their kinship as much as their existential incongruity. That piquant dissonance never materializes. Lost in themselves, and mewed in by Pask’s maze, Jones and Hawkins never find each other, not even long enough to land a punch. Under the tears and the histrionics, they seem to mean nothing to each other. Thus, we’re treated to the tidy geometric outline of Shaw's social critique, but without the stochastic human fierceness of his dramatic art. And that feels like a bit of a hedge, doesn’t it?

To pin down precisely what Brief Encounter is (a para-cinematic mock-expressionistic play with music? A self-conscious post-Luhrmann meta-movie-musical onstage?) would quickly exhaust the Earth’s dwindling supply of hyphens. I’ll settle for “cabinet of wonders,” which seems to get at the false-bottomed delights of this sui generis theatrical event from director Emma Rice and her eager-to-please Kneehigh Theatre troupe. Ferried more or less intact across the East River from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Studio 54, Brief is built atop filmmaker David Lean’s dour postwar chiaroscuro of the same name, about an impossible affair carried on by two married, decent, highly un-Byronic souls. (The 1945 film was based on Noel Coward’s star-crossed stage melodrama Still Life, and Rice has restored some of Coward’s original dialogue.)

With those doleful eyes, that wide permafrost smile set at a perpetual three-minutes-to-irony, and a crinkly mezzo that slingshots from brassy to bruised, Sherie Rene Scott (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Aida) has steadily established herself as New York’s leading comic divette. Does that mean we care about her life? Scott, smartly, assumes we don’t. In Everyday Rapture, a self-deconstructing micro-revue tracing her transformation from Kansas Mennonite to “Broadway semi-star,” Scott uses the blimp-hangar that is the American Airlines Theatre as an echo chamber for her wit, backed by her “Mennonettes” and an eclectic set list that ranges from Judy Garland to Tom Waits to, yes, an erotic Mr. Rogers tribute medley. Tom Kitt’s typically brilliant arrangements are half the reason for showing up; the other half is Scott, whose lambent ease with the absurd (cleverly refined by director Michael Mayer and book co-writer Dick Scanlan) makes Everyday much more than just another maudlin auto-cabaret.

Unlike the company whose storied fall it chronicles, Enron clearly telegraphs its intention to defraud the consumer: 'When we tell you [this] story, you should know it could never be exactly what happened. But we're gonna put it together and sell it to you as the truth.' This proviso is delivered by a lawyer, who adds: 'I could tell you how the world works, but I don't have the time, and you don't have the money.' That gets broad laughs—and broad laughs are what's for sale here. Subtlety is not a commodity that Lucy Prebble's fast, flashy, feckless Epcot ride of a play is trading in: If twelve-gauge potshots at the likes of Schwarzenegger and Lehman Brothers are your taste, you won't be disappointed.

Davis, with every wary sidelong look, firm demurral, and careful burst of laughter, perfects and completes Washington’s already tremendous performance. Her approach to Rose turns the trope of the dutiful black mother on end, and suggests a world inside her domestic redoubt that even the play can only begin to imagine. Leon may have missed a few opportunities to coax a bit more vulnerability out of Washington; one climactic second-act scene in particular falls badly askew as a result, suggesting grotesque comedy where none is called for. But Davis finds a way to supply it on the side. It’s tremendous work from a rightly revered actress of uncommon subtlety. Playing wife to a god, of any size, is no small thing.