Terry Teachout — Theater Critic

'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.

I haven't read either of Ms. Mantel's much-praised novels, nor am I a scholar of 16th-century England. I can, however, assure you that Mr. Poulton's 51/2 -hour stage version of 'Wolf Hall,' unlike Bolt's immaculately crafted, endlessly quotable play, is competent but dullish, a procession of short, choppy scenes in which nobody ever says anything more memorable than 'Bring up the bodies!' The acting is as devoid of sparkle as the script, with Mr. Miles giving us a flat and uncharismatic Cromwell and Nathaniel Parker's King Henry sounding way too much like Peter O'Toole.

I haven't read either of Ms. Mantel's much-praised novels, nor am I a scholar of 16th-century England. I can, however, assure you that Mr. Poulton's 51/2 -hour stage version of 'Wolf Hall,' unlike Bolt's immaculately crafted, endlessly quotable play, is competent but dullish, a procession of short, choppy scenes in which nobody ever says anything more memorable than 'Bring up the bodies!' The acting is as devoid of sparkle as the script, with Mr. Miles giving us a flat and uncharismatic Cromwell and Nathaniel Parker's King Henry sounding way too much like Peter O'Toole.

I was struck by how poorly 'The Heidi Chronicles' had aged when I saw the Berkshire Theatre Festival's excellent 2006 production, and the new Broadway revival, directed by Pam MacKinnon and starring Elisabeth Moss, soon to be formerly of 'Mad Men,' fails to make a compelling case for taking Wasserstein's best-remembered play any more seriously today...Ms. MacKinnon's staging is as flabby as the long-winded script, and the chirpy, cherry Ms. Moss is no more convincing as a feminist academic than she was playing Madonna's part in the 2008 Broadway revival of 'Speed-the-Plow.' Of the supporting actors, Tracee Chimo assumes four widely varied roles with switchblade-sharp comic definition. Sheshould have been cast as Heidi.

'Fish in the Dark,' which Larry David wrote as a vehicle for himself, is more in the nature of a well-remunerated personal appearance than an actual play. A thimbleweight comedy about two bickering brothers (played by Mr. David and Ben Shenkman) brought together by the death of their father, it consists of several thousand jokes, most of which involve somebody saying something inappropriate...On stage, Mr. David is a self-caricature of a self-caricature. I've never seen anybody look less comfortable or more physically awkward in a starring role on Broadway. It isn't a comic effect, either: He clearly doesn't know what to do with himself up there other than fling his long arms around randomly.

Funny? You bet, and Mr. Brown has crunched the dramatic exposition of the film into a fast-moving sequence of musical numbers whose sterling craftsmanship is marvelous to behold, starting with one of the smartest list songs to hit Broadway in decades: 'She likes hockey. No, I swear! / She likes guys with thinning hair! / And I love Betsy!' What's more, Ms. O'Malley, a stunningly sharp-witted stage performer whose talent has heretofore been squandered on second-banana parts, proves herself more than equal to the challenge of a starring role. She's almost reason enough to see 'Honeymoon in Vegas,' and Gary Griffin's on-the-button staging and Anna Louizos's deluxe sets display her to ideal advantage.

At its best, it's thought-provoking and sometimes challenging, but it takes a long time to get moving, and I wonder whether modern-day audiences will be willing to wait for it...While the notion that well-to-do WASPs are dead inside is perhaps the least little bit overfamiliar, this is still a fairly promising setup for a theater-of-the-absurd comedy...'A Delicate Balance' comes across like a dramatically static rewrite of 'Virginia Woolf' with rather less drinking and much less cursing...Pam MacKinnon, who staged last year's outstanding Broadway revival of 'Virginia Woolf,' is Mr. Albee's preferred director, so we can assume that this direct, unmannered production is what the author had in mind...Ms. Close's performance is quiet, tasteful and underprojected, not surprising for an actor who has been absent from the stage for so long. Mr. Lithgow, by contrast, is in extraordinary form, by turns tightly inhibited and almost shockingly anguished.

Could it be that the production is getting in the way of the actors? Mr. Gold is an intelligent, imaginative interventionist who at his frequent best sheds sharp raking light on the plays that he stages. Here, though, his 'innovations,' such as they are, have the meretricious smack of arbitrary cleverness, and one of them, the use of the same kind of unusually wide and shallow set that he favored in his Roundabout revivals of 'Look Back in Anger' and 'Picnic,' doesn't work at all. Instead of the up-close intimacy that was the hallmark of Mr. Halberstam's staging, we are given a flattened-out, frieze-like visual perspective on a play that is notable for the layered complexity of the relationships that it portrays.

This is a genuinely provocative premise for an issue-driven play, and Mr. Akhtar deserves much credit for grappling honestly and forthrightly with what in other hands could easily have become a mealy-mouthed exercise in can't-we-all-get-along difference-splitting. Unfortunately, his dramaturgy isn't as impressive as his nerve. Not only do his characters spend far too much of the evening making speeches to one another, but every 'surprise' is telegraphed so far in advance of its eventual arrival that you find yourself getting actively impatient for the reveals. It doesn't help that the climax of 'Disgraced' is a get-the-guests dinner party that starts off with competitive upper-middle-class brand-dropping in the manner of Tom Wolfe (much is made of the fact that Amir wears $600 Charvet shirts to the office) and builds up to a full-scale brawl in which the participants, having downed a couple of drinks too many, rip off their masks of comfy tolerance and reveal themselves to be....wait for it...BIGOTS!

You will note the total absence of grudging qualifications. That's because I haven't any: This show is that good. To be sure, 'On the Town' is one of the Broadway musicals that I love best, and I've been hoping to see a strong New York revival ever since New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse gave it the deluxe treatment in 2009. That production could have worked on Broadway, too, but Barrington Stage's version was equally fine, and now that it's here, I urge you to see it as soon as you possibly can. With Broadway increasingly dominated by rubber-stamp commodity musicals, less familiar shows are a tough box-office sell, but 'A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder' managed to ring the gong through sheer excellence last season. If there's any justice at all, so will 'On the Town.'

To single out Ms. Steele and Mr. Lange is not, however, to suggest that their colleagues are less than excellent. They are, in fact, uniformly superior, and Daniel Sullivan has staged the play with an ungimmicky simplicity that allows each one to shine in turn-but it is the author who makes them real. If 'The Country House' is a backstage drama by virtue of its setting, its actual subject is how the members of a close family can hurt one another without meaning to do so. You needn't have done time on the far side of the proscenium to know all about that, to recognize how fully Mr. Margulies understands it or to appreciate the seasoned skill with which he has turned that hurt into the stuff of a truly affecting play.

One reason why 'Love Letters' is so frequently produced is that it's written in such a way as to facilitate both come-and-go celebrity casting and bargain-basement staging. Not only is there no set, but the actors sit together at a table and read from scripts instead of memorizing their lines. But the enduring success of 'Love Letters' is far more than a mere matter of logistical convenience. It's one of Mr. Gurney's best plays, a tender study of thwarted love: Melissa is a scatty upper-class rebel, Andy is a stuffy upper-middle-class striver, and as they read a lifetime's worth of letters out loud, you come to know them so well that their parallel sorrows seem as familiar as your own.

I don't share in the general enthusiasm for Mr. Cumming's overcooked performance, which pales in intensity when compared to the diamond-hard detachment that Joel Grey, who created the role in the original stage production, brought to Bob Fosse's extraordinary 1972 film version, from which Messrs. Mendes and Marshall borrowed a thing or three. But Michelle Williams plays Sally Bowles, the shopworn diva of the Kit Kat Club, with a poignant blend of vulnerability and desperation, while Linda Emond and Danny Burstein are as good as it gets as Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz, the couple whose middle-age romance serves as a backdrop to Sally's doomed affair with the bisexual Clifford Bradshaw (played with just the right amount of small-town naiveté by Bill Heck). While I like 'Cabaret' better when it's done on a smaller scale with shabbier décor, the way that Rhode Island's Trinity Repertory Company did it in 2009, this staging is fabulously good in its fancier way.

Eric Coble breaks the U.S. record for clichés per minute in 'The Velocity of Autumn,' his new cranky-codger two-character comedy...Not even the best efforts of Estelle Parsons and Stephen Spinella can justify this stupefying exercise in déjà vu, which wears out its welcome in five minutes flat, followed by 85 minutes of soul-shriveling tedium.

The result is a thrillingly well-staged play that runs for two hours and 40 minutes but feels much shorter. Not only is 'Act One' light on its theatrical feet, but it has the open-hearted impact of a melodrama -- one that has the advantage of being true. Part of what makes 'Act One' so potent is that Mr. Lapine disdains all irony in describing Mr. Hart's rise to fame. His was an old-fashioned American-dream-come-true tale, and it doesn't embarrass Mr. Lapine in the least to dish it up on a pageantlike scale reminiscent of the spectacular stage version of 'Nicholas Nickleby.'

How good can a jukebox musical be? As good as 'Bullets Over Broadway,' Woody Allen's new stage version of his 1994 film, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman ('The Producers'). The book is funny, the staging inventive, the cast outstanding, the sets and costumes satisfyingly slick. All that's missing is a purpose-written score, in place of which we get period-true arrangements of pop songs of the 1920s and '30s. Does that matter? It did to me-a lot-but I doubt that many other people will boggle over the absence of original songs from 'Bullets Over Broadway.' Except for a flabby finale, it has the sweet scent of a box-office smash.

How good can a jukebox musical be? As good as 'Bullets Over Broadway,' Woody Allen's new stage version of his 1994 film, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman ('The Producers'). The book is funny, the staging inventive, the cast outstanding, the sets and costumes satisfyingly slick. All that's missing is a purpose-written score, in place of which we get period-true arrangements of pop songs of the 1920s and '30s. Does that matter? It did to me-a lot-but I doubt that many other people will boggle over the absence of original songs from 'Bullets Over Broadway.' Except for a flabby finale, it has the sweet scent of a box-office smash.

Mr. Leon is an inspired craftsman who creates the illusion that he's merely staying out of the way of a good script. What he does, of course, isn't nearly that simple, but you'll never catch yourself noticing this or that clever touch. All that's visible is the finished product, a piece of storytelling as plain and true and beautiful as a well-laid brick wall...Mr. Washington, though he looks good, also looks his years, so much so that the script has been quietly and pointlessly altered to make him say he's 40, not 35. (He doesn't look 40, either.) Why does this matter? Because 'A Raisin in the Sun' is a naturalistic kitchen-sink drama played out on a you-are-there Chicago tenement set designed by Mark Thompson that's so faded and worn that you can almost see through the wallpaper. It's supposed to look real.

Billing notwithstanding, the real star of 'Aladdin' is James Monroe Iglehart, who plays the guy in the lamp, a part that was voiced in the movie by Robin Williams at his most frenetic. Mr. Iglehart is just as energetic, though his approach is different: His Genie is a hopped-up cross between Fats Waller and Cab Calloway. (Not surprisingly, he looks stupendous in an aquamarine zoot suit.) 'Friend Like Me,' his big first-act number, comes within a cat's whisker of stopping the show. The trouble is that nothing else in the first act can touch it. Adam Jacobs and Courtney Reed, who play Aladdin and his princess, are pretty but bland, and the temperature doesn't start rising again until the magic-carpet ride, which comes after intermission and is the slickest thing to hit Broadway since the flying car in 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.' From then on, 'Aladdin' becomes fun and stays that way.

The stage version, directed with immense panache and soaring physicality by Alex Timbers ('Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson'), is very nearly as good [as the movie], an unpretentious slice of honest entertainment whose rock-'em-sock-'em finale will set the snobbiest of theatergoers to cheering in spite of themselves...Mr. Timbers's staging and Christopher Barreca's scenic design are the stuff Tony nominations are made of. The neon-and-graffiti mean streets of South Philly are portrayed with grim verisimilitude, but the glitz starts to fly as the climactic fight scene draws nearer, and the fight itself is a total-immersion, spare-no-expense stage spectacle. Since Steven Hoggett and Kelly Devine are jointly credited with the show's choreography, I assume that they deserve much credit for the potency of this scene, which is a rich and masterly synthesis of movement, music and design. So yes, 'Rocky' is a straight-down-the-center commodity musical-but a damned fine one, maybe the best I've ever seen. A knockdown hit, in fact.

Robert Schenkkan's 'All the Way' is not LBJ's first stage appearance, but it's the first time that he's made it all the way to Broadway, and the presence of Bryan Cranston in the cast is the sole reason for his arrival here. New plays don't reach Broadway nowadays without a movie or television star, and Mr. Cranston, lately of 'Breaking Bad,' is (at least for the moment) the latter. Far more important, he's also a totally assured stage performer who plays Johnson as a gangly, lapel-snatching wheedler in whom self-pity and rage are twisted together too tightly to rip apart. Yes, it's a caricature, and a garish one at that, but Mr. Cranston makes you believe in what you're seeing and hearing...Bill Rauch has staged 'All the Way' with a fluid physical vitality that makes the script seem smoother than it is...As for Mr. Cranston, he's a knockout. May he return to Broadway soon-in a less earnest play.