Stephanie Zacharek

But the real value of Collected Stories lies in the challenge it presents its two terrific actors, who spend the play parrying and sparring and cuffing each other, first with mother-and-cub affection and later with venomous resentment. Both Lavin and Paulson—under the direction of Lynne Meadow—give their all to the contest, and by the play's end, you can see what it costs them. Lavin plays this grand-dame writer as a down-to-earth diva. She may be sharply critical of her young disciple, but she's not inhumane. And in a confessional and vulnerable moment, when she shares the details of a youthful affair, her demeanor suddenly turns charmingly, disarmingly girlish.

T hanks to Mad Men fever, the time is right for a revival of Neil Simon, Burt Bacharach, and Hal David's 1968 musical Promises, Promises, itself based on Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment. But there's nothing opportunistic about this production, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford: He and his cast revel in the show's modest but potent charms instead of attacking the material with superior everything-was-so-corny-back-then winks and nudges. It treats Bacharach’s melodies as the buoyant, intricate structures that they are, not just weird curios from another age. Set in 1962 Manhattan, the show is pleasingly retro without being a kitsch comic book: Even its Eames-a-go-go sets (by Scott Pask), as colorful and fun as they are, speak more of cocktail-cabinet sophistication than yard-sale tackiness.

Fans of fifties rock and roll tend to love it not just reasonably but feverishly, and with good reason: To listen to the recordings made by Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records is to hear the future being born, heralded by jangly guitars, the thump-thump of a stand-up bass, and a piano with the jittery nerves of a brand-new dad. Million Dollar Quartet, a show poised delicately at the halfway point between a musical and a revue, distills that revolutionary spirit and splashes it out as a dazzling, raucous spectacle.

Even a mediocre Frank Sinatra song—if there is such a thing—needs no adornment. If it’s not such a good idea to go around dancing about architecture, isn’t dancing about Sinatra just as bad a sin? It should be. But there’s nothing superfluous about Come Fly Away, choreographed and directed by Twyla Tharp, a show that teases new secrets out of songs many of us feel we already know intimately—suddenly, it seems as if there have always been dances inside “Moonlight Becomes You” and “Summer Wind,” crying to get out.

Next Fall comes on a little too strong only in the second half, when it begins to belabor some of its points: The conflicts caused by Adam’s refusal to adopt Luke’s earnest, unshakable beliefs begin to feel falsely exaggerated. But the show’s breezy, convivial tone, even in the face of some big life-or-death questions, wins the day. Adam and Luke may not be legally married, but then, living in sin can be its own state of grace.

Rock of Ages, which was written by Chris D'Arienzo and directed by Kristin Hanggi, and which played Off Broadway last year, is too full of self-conscious winks, nudges, and wine-cooler jokes to be much fun. There's energy onstage, all right, but it's unfocused and muddled. The dancers—the show's choreography is by Kelly Devine—wriggle about in epaulette-shouldered leather jackets and neon animal-print Spandex, trying to conjure the big-haired ghosts of a lost era. They only end up looking cheap and desperate. This is no way to get your rocks off.

But even though Laurents has taken some steps to modernize the book—chiefly by enlisting Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights) to translate some of the dialogue and two of the songs into Spanish, ostensibly to impart a more realistic vibe to the proceedings—the show too often comes off as perfunctory, a cursory sprucing up of a touchstone that may have been better off left dusty and authentic. And in the end, the play’s dramatic power has nothing to do with contemporary relevance and everything to do with the songs and Robbins’s choreography. In fact, this production exposes too baldly the central flaw of the libretto: Tony and Maria, the Romeo and Juliet stand-ins (played here by Matt Cavenaugh and Josefina Scaglione), may be nice kids, but they’re also the show’s least interesting characters; Tony, in particular, is something of a drip.