Terry Teachout

The Manhattan Theatre Club has found a recipe for success: Produce pretentiously titled British two-handers about odd couples who meet cute. Nick Payne's 'Constellations,' which went over big last season, filled the bill to overflowing, and so does 'Heisenberg,' the latest play from Simon Stephens, who scored even bigger with his stage version of 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.'

[It] is less a show than a cash machine, a cynical repurposing of the beloved 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire film that exists solely to make as much money as possible for the Roundabout Theatre Company. It's slick, synthetic and soulless, a musical full of robotic jokes and devoid of genuine romance.

The first half of George C. Wolfe's 'Shuffle Along' is to 2016 what 'Hamilton' was to 2015: It's the musical you've got to see, even if you've got to hock your Maserati to pay for the ticket. The cast, led by Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, is as charismatic as you'd expect, and Savion Glover's near-nonstop choreography explodes off the stage with the unrelenting impact of a flamethrower. But then comes intermission, and what had looked like a masterpiece goes flat and stays that way.

The immensely likable Mr. Ferguson doesn't quite have the vocal flexibility necessary to impersonate so widely varied a gallery of characters, and so the tour-de-force aspect of 'Fully Committed' isn't fully realized. Even so, his acting crackles with physical energy and comic life, and it won't take long for you to shelve your doubts and buy into his performance. The play itself is a piece of very well-made fluff, a solo farce whose principal subject is the bottomless vanity of the restaurant's customers (and chef) and in which the laughter is pretty close to nonstop. If it's light entertainment you crave, you're in luck.

'American Psycho' is slick, sleek and empty, a one-joke show that drowns its message, such as it is, in red sauce and fake emotion...The book sticks fairly faithfully to Mr. Ellis's original ground plan. Es Devlin's projection-intensive minimalist sets are 100% white, silver and gray, and Duncan Sheik, lately of 'Spring Awakening,' has written a score consisting almost exclusively of faux-'80s techno-pop songs with parodistic lyrics...Mr. Walker, who was memorably charismatic in 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,' plays Bateman as a ripped hipster with a plummy radio-announcer voice, which is just right. Ms. Damiano is good, too-you'll actually feel for her character's plight, unlikely as it may sound-and everybody else in the cast does just what they're supposed to do, which usually means being as irritating as possible. Some of Mr. Sheik's songs are quite harmonically fresh...

It's amazing how much damage Ivo van Hove, the most pretentious stage director of our time, can do to a good play when he puts his mind to it...now he's attacked 'The Crucible' with a steamroller, turning Miller's 1953 history play about the Salem witch trials into a slow-moving study in extreme tedium. Directorial miscalculations abound, starting with the setting, a two-story-high classroom/prison designed by Jan Versweyveld in whose vast gray expanses the actors roam around ineffectually...Bill Camp, Sophie Okonedo and Brenda Wehle manage to make strong impressions in spite of everything -- but Ciarán Hinds and Saoirse Ronan give Johnny-One-Note performances that are as paralyzingly minimal as Philip Glass's incidental music.

Steve Martin is, among many other things, a good banjo player who writes not-so-great plays. Now he's branched out by writing a really bad bluegrass-pop musical. In 'Bright Star,' directed by Walter Bobbie, Mr. Martin and Edie Brickell, a singer-songwriter with whom he has made two albums, tell the story of a painfully earnest young writer from the hills of North Carolina (A.J. Shively) who comes home from World War II and sells a painfully earnest short story to a prestigious Asheville quarterly edited by an unhappy woman (Carmen Cusack) with a terrible secret -- or, rather, a Terrible Secret, this being the kind of show that is constructed exclusively out of uppercase clichés. The best thing about 'Bright Star' is the music, which is bland and undramatic but competently wrought. The plot is trite, the dialogue humorless and stiff, the lyrics stupefyingly banal...The cast and onstage band work hard and Mr. Bobbie does his best to breathe life into 'Bright Star,' but if Mr. Martin's name weren't on the marquee, it wouldn't have gotten anywhere near Broadway.

Perfection needs no commentary, so I'll make it short and sweet: The Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of 'She Loves Me' is ideal. The show itself, a 1963 stage version of 'The Shop Around the Corner,' Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 romcom about two perfume-store clerks who love each other but don't know it, is the most romantic of all Broadway musicals. Scott Ellis's fleet, warmhearted staging and Warren Carlyle's witty dances do complete justice to Joe Masteroff's charming book and the delicious Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick score: Every number pays off and every laugh lands with a bang.

David Harrower's 'Blackbird,' a pruriently manipulative tale of pedophilia that made a lot of noise off Broadway in 2007, has finally made it to Broadway in a big-stage revival closely similar to the small-scaled production that I reviewed in this space nine years ago...It's a have-it-both-ways shocker that seeks to make us sympathize (but not really!) with a man (Mr. Daniels) who molested a 12-year-old girl (Ms. Williams)...

This revival is as glorious as 'Wolf Hall' was dull, not least because it features Tracee Chimo, the most gifted young comic actor to hit Broadway in recent memory...The secret ingredient of his production is that Mr. Herrin has gone to similar lengths to ensure that every member of the cast plays for truth, not laughs -- which makes you laugh twice as hard. This brings us to the miraculous Ms. Chimo, who plays Poppy, the mousy assistant stage manager of 'Nothing On,' who's been sleeping with the director of the show (Campbell Scott) on the sly. Her performance is so heartbreakingly true to life that it would make you cry were you to see it in isolation. In the context of 'Noises Off,' though, it's funny almost beyond belief...Complaints? I've got none. This show is flawless.

Speaking of commodity musicals, 'The Color Purple,' first seen on Broadway 10 years ago, is now being revived there in a brand-new production directed by John Doyle and imported from the Menier Chocolate Factory, one of London's trendiest venues. Any way you stage it, the musical version of the film version of Alice Walker's novel is an exercise in treacly feel-good sentimentality, but Mr. Doyle's scaled-down, ruthlessly cut version makes the best possible case for 'The Color Purple.' He has turned it into a concert-style let-us-tell-you-a-story show whose only set pieces are wooden chairs and woven baskets, in the process stripping away all the whiz-bang aspects of Gary Griffin's 2005 staging, which now appear in retrospect to have obscured the virtues (such as they are) of 'The Color Purple.'

The actors walk around barefoot for no apparent reason, accompanied by snippets of the Fauré Requiem that are played on an endless loop, with a drum tapping at maddeningly metronomic intervals to signify...what? Only, it seems, that Mr. Van Hove is so determined to put his personal stamp on 'A View From the Bridge' that he doesn't seem to care whether any of his over-familiar avant-garde tricks are organically related to the script. Instead, they're poured over it like a rancid sauce. What I find most puzzling about Mr. Van Hove's method is that when you scrape away the sauce of self-regard, what you find underneath...is a staging that gets to the point of Miller's play with near-naturalistic directness. Not only does he move actors around fluidly, but he also knows how to pick them: Mark Strong is simple and forceful as Eddie Carbone...Unfortunately, [Van Hove] neither trusts them nor the play, which is pretentious in its own way...but can be shatteringly effective when done well.

Broadway's latest greatest-hits album, 'On Your Feet!: The Story of Emilio and Gloria Estefan,' is what the subtitle promises...Alexander Dinelaris's book is heavy on the Hollywoodian clichés, but it has its charming moments, too, and every other aspect of the production, directed by Jerry Mitchell, is slick and satisfying, starting with the smoking-hot choreography of Sergio Trujillo and the tear-it-up onstage band. Not only does Broadway debutante Ana Villafañe look, sing and dance like Ms. Estefan, but she acts well enough to make me want to see her in more challenging fare. Yes, I know, it's just a jukebox musical, but I liked 'On Your Feet!' In fact, I liked it a lot -- and I think you might, too.

Any way you gnaw it, though, 'Thérèse Raquin' is a dreary hambone that once was shocking but is now quaint, and Helen Edmundson...has done no better by Zola. The pacing is arthritic...As for Ms. Knightley, she gives the kind of flat, underprojected performance you'd expect from an untrained Broadway debutante with limited stage experience. Her deficiencies are underlined by the excellent acting of Gabriel Ebert and Matt Ryan, who respectively play Thérèse's husband and lover. Beowulf Boritt designed the easy-on-the-eye Monet-style set, while Josh Schmidt, America's finest composer of incidental music for the stage, fills the air with hauntingly cloudy harmonies. If only their talents had been joined in the service of a better script -- and a stronger star!

'Dames at Sea,' the ultra-campy 1966 musical about the you'll-come-back-a-star backstage movie musicals of the early '30s, has finally made it to Broadway. I'm not sure why, since the point of the show...is that it's a low-budget miniature send-up of the genre...though this gussied-up revival...is nothing if not charming. If you like high-velocity tap dancing, you'll see (and hear) plenty of it, and Mr. Skinner flings his tiny cast across the smallish stage of the 597-seat Helen Hayes Theatre with endless visual ingenuity, aided and abetted by Jonathan Tunick's flawless period-style orchestrations for the eight-piece band. So what's not to like? Nothing whatsoever -- but there isn't enough to love about 'Dames at Sea,' which may have seemed sufficiently witty a half-century ago but has long since been outclassed...

Ms. Arianda has returned to Broadway in a revival of Sam Shepard's 'Fool for Love' that originated at Massachusetts' Williamstown Theatre Festival. Directed by Daniel Aukin, it is fully worthy of her gifts, and the results are -- almost literally -- explosive. This show will make you sweat...Dane Laffrey, the set designer, has situated the action of the play in a shallow, low-ceilinged wooden box that forces Ms. Arianda and Mr. Rockwell to spend much of their time standing in profile to the audience. They look like a lanky pair of parentheses and act like two rabid dogs in heat. It's no knock on Mr. Rockwell, who delivers his big monologue with unemphatic but absorbing force, to point out that whenever Ms. Arianda is onstage, she's the one you look at and listen to. I wish she'd worked harder on her accent, but that doesn't matter too much: Every other part of her performance is scaldingly, unimpeachably real.

'Hamilton' is the best and most important Broadway musical of the past decade...there is nothing quaint about the deeply thoughtful way in which Mr. Miranda has interwoven the tension between Hamilton's personal ambition and sense of national mission with the parallel capacity of his fellow framers to balance realism with idealism. Check out, for instance, 'The Room Where It Happens,' the spectacular second-act production number in which Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr., who has star quality galore) schools the audience in how politicians get things done...the vaulting energy of Mr. Miranda's score sweeps all cavils aside, and Thomas Kail, Andy Blankenbuehler and David Korins, the director, choreographer and set designer, have successfully expanded the scale of the original production without making it top-heavy...The cast, led by Mr. Miranda in the title role, makes the same vibrant and youthful impression that it did downtown. Indeed, everybody in the show from the boss to the ushers exudes the confident air of show folk who know they've got themselves a hit.

New musicals that open in the summer tend to be ill-fated, and 'Amazing Grace,' which purports to tell the 'awe-inspiring true story' (so says the news release, anyway) of John Newton (Josh Young), the British slave trader turned abolitionist who wrote the words to the 1779 hymn, is unlikely to break that rule...On the credit side, the cast is superb-especially Chuck Cooper as Newton's twice-enslaved manservant-and Gabriel Barre's sumptuous staging not infrequently creates the illusion that there's more to 'Amazing Grace' than meets the ear...Whatever its weaknesses, this is one of the best-looking musicals to reach New York in recent seasons.

...it's a wholly derivative piece of work that has been knocked together from refurbished spare theatrical parts. Ms. D'Amour might just as well have called it 'The Hot L New Orleans, or, An Iceman Named Saroyan'...For all its shameless familiarity, the first act of 'Airline Highway' is perfectly watchable, even entertaining, albeit in large part because of the superior acting of the cast, with special honors going to Mr. Freeman, Ms. Neff and Ms. White (the last of whom is incapable of giving a bad performance). Not so the second act, in which Ms. D'Amour pulls out the Tennessee Williams stop and makes her characters emit boozy soliloquies in which they vouch for their own authenticity...

'The Visit' is a cynical tragicomedy whose score is as gorgeous as its heart is hard...Kander's soaring, waltz-scented love songs are harmonized in an off-center manner subtly suggestive of dirty work at the crossroads...As for Ms. Rivera, who sounds like a cross between Hermione Gingold and Rex Harrison and is made up to resemble a walking mummy, she's all too terrifyingly believable as Claire...Mr. Rees, by contrast, is rather too ingratiating, and Mr. McNally's jokey book softens the impact of the play...But 'The Visit' is horrifically potent in every other way...'The Visit' isn't for everyone. But Mr. Kander and his late, lamented partner never wrote a finer score, and...you'll thrill to their cruel tale of what men who dare to call themselves decent will do to one another if the price is right.

'Something Rotten!' is a Mel Brooks-style Elizabethan-era backstage spoof...Alas...Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick have blown it up to 21/2 half hours by inserting 15 mostly comic songs, none of whose lyrics are sharp enough to penetrate their targets...The cast is resolutely lively, and Casey Nicholaw has staged 'Something Rotten!' with enough punch to partially conceal the thinness of the material. Nevertheless, this one's for backward sophomores only.

At least one of the musicals that I see on Broadway each season leaves me shaking my head and muttering 'What were they thinking?' on the way out of the theater. 'Doctor Zhivago,' which purports to be adapted from Boris Pasternak's 1957 novel of Russian life before and after the October Revolution but in fact appears to be based on David Lean's 1965 film version of the book, is the worst kind of case in point. No doubt the creators thought it more respectable to claim direct descent from the book, but when you bill such a show as 'one of the most romantic stories of all time,' you're probably not much concerned with suggesting the tone and texture of a serious novel, least of all one that no less a critical heavyweight than Edmund Wilson declared to be 'one of the great events in man's literary and moral history.' Not so the stage version of 'Doctor Zhivago,' a slow-paced commodity musical suitable only for consumption by tone-deaf tweenagers.

'Living on Love'...is a sentimental farce that might recall one of the lesser efforts of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were it not for one minor problem: It isn't funny. Not even slightly so. Indeed, it's so unfunny as to make the viewer despair of ever laughing again, much as a starving man might despair of ever eating again...Ms. Marshall has directed 'Living on Love' as if it were a musical with an onionskin-thin book, nudging her cast toward clattery caricature...While it's quite possible that Ms. Fleming can act, she definitely can't act like a temperamental diva, perhaps because she's known throughout the world of opera for her niceness. Whatever the reason, her performance is as amiable and bland as a hot cup of Ovaltine before bedtime.

I doubt I'll see a better production of 'The King and I' in my lifetime. Mr. Watanabe gets out from Brynner's long shadow by giving a performance that is gleefully playful, regally commanding and wholly his own...Kelli O'Hara leaves nothing whatsoever to be desired as Anna. Firm but not priggish, touching but never sentimental, she stands up to Mr. Watanabe like a redwood to a tornado...The supporting cast is sterling, and Mr. Sher's detailed character work repays close study: Every part, right down to the smallest of the children, is endowed with strong and clear individuality...Ted Sperling's 28-piece pit band plays Robert Russell Bennett's original 1951 orchestrations, which glitter and shine. Indeed, I'm not sure I've ever heard a Broadway score played in the theater with such finesse.

'It Shoulda Been You' is a plastic statuette for the tourist trade, a nice-Jewish-girl-marries-nice-Catholic-boy musical farce that is by turns desperately unfunny and relentlessly preachy. Brian Hargrove's been-there-done-that plot (Tyne Daly's Jewish mom is a monster of tactlessness, Harriet Harris's Catholic mom a boozehound) was already a cliché a half-century ago, and today its whiskery stereotypes are a millimeter away from being actively offensive. As for Barbara Anselmi's music, it sounds like a medley of discarded theme songs from the pilots of failed '70s sitcoms. The cast, fortunately, is excellent...David Hyde Pierce's staging is sufficiently adroit to make you long to see what he'd do with a real musical. This isn't it.