Terry Teachout — Theater Critic

[O'Hara's] openhearted performance is as believably acted and immaculately sung as anything she's ever done...She's so fine, in fact, that she casts a shadow over Mr. Pasquale, an excellent singer who lacks the redeeming touch of mystery that Mr. Eastwood brought to the too-good-to-be-true role of Robert, the photographer (and who is a decade too young for the part)...Up to a point, Mr. Brown's warm, expansive score is an equally strong selling point for 'Bridges.' Parts of it are as musically exciting as anything heard on Broadway since Stephen Sondheim's glory days...But Mr. Brown is rather better at writing scenes than songs, and except for 'Another Life,' a sweetly folk-flavored ballad sung in a flashback by Robert's ex-wife (Whitney Bashor), none of the songs in 'The Bridges of Madison County' has a clear-cut, boldly shaped melodic profile-or, for that matter, a truly memorable lyric.

I had trouble with the first act, which never seemed to take wing, and though the second act was more involving, I felt at play's end that the last word had been spoken an hour and a half earlier by one of the unhappy characters: 'God knows what would happen if we ever stopped talking and actually did something around here.' Any show whose cast includes Danny Burstein, Victoria Clark and Mary-Louise Parker is worth seeing by definition, but 'The Snow Geese' failed to get me on board.

If you want to know how 'The Winslow Boy' should be played, look to either of the excellent film versions, which were directed by Anthony Asquith in 1948 and David Mamet (yes, that David Mamet) in 1999. Don't let that stop you from seeing this production, though, in which enough is right to obscure what's wrong. The actors, as I say, are exceptionally fine, especially Ms. Parry, the ever-satisfying Michael Cumpsty, and Alessandro Nivola, who is exceedingly well cast in the show-stopping role of Sir Robert Morton, a languidly haughty barrister who finds himself swept up in the Winslow case far more fully than he ever expected. Moreover, Peter McKintosh's set and costumes evoke with admirable accuracy the 'solid but not undecorated upper middle-class comfort' that Mr. Rattigan calls for in his stage directions...And Mr. Posner deserves high marks for not overplaying the possibility of a romance between Catherine and Sir Robert, a coarsening mistake of taste that is made in both film versions of 'The Winslow Boy.'

Would that Mr. Bloom's big entrance led to something interesting, but this 'R & J' is a slick, weightless assemblage of modern-dress trickery (Romeo wears a hoodie and jeans) whose conception is as stale as its been-there-seen-that décor and TV-movie music. From the low-impact knife fight to the brutally abridged tomb scene (what happened to Paris?), it proceeds systematically along its overfamiliar way, never missing a chance to be obvious. When the star-crossed lovers paw one another lasciviously at their first meeting, you can almost hear Mr. Leveaux assuring himself, 'That ought to thrill the kiddies.'

'First Date,' a small-cast, small-scale musical (seven actors, one set, 95 minutes, no intermission) that tells the story of a blind date from start to finish, feels at times as though it had been knocked together out of spare parts...This isn't to say that 'First Date' is bad. Truth to tell, it's pleasantly fluffy and not without charm, and were it playing in an off-Broadway house, it'd have a better chance of finding its natural audience, which I take to be hopeful millennials who bear the unhealed scars of the online dating wars...It helps, too, that Mr. Levi, a second-tier television star ('Chuck') who is making his Broadway debut, turns out to be a strikingly adept stage comedian who knows how to put the right spin on a good joke, while Ms. Rodriguez is a spunky sasspot with grade-A pipes.

Does it come off? Up to a point. The circus performers are sensational, but their antics overwhelm Mr. Walker's dances, which are in any case devoid of Mr. Fosse's sly wit. Patina Miller, lately of 'Sister Act,' is the Leading Player, a role created four decades ago by Ben Vereen, and her in-your-face performance sets the tone for Ms. Paulus's relentlessly aggressive staging, which is big, noisy and mostly humorless, a 'Pippin' that looks as if it had been born not in Cambridge but Las Vegas.

Ms. Shaw is, of course, a great actor-I have deeply etched memories of the avant-garde 'Medea' that she brought to Broadway in 2002-but she mostly settles for generalized mannerism in 'The Testament of Mary,' though her performance is both specific and memorable whenever she modulates out of the key of outrage and slips into something less obvious. (The quiet awe with which she describes the raising of Lazarus, for instance, is breathtaking.) As for Deborah Warner's portentous staging, it's a visually static catalog of stock postmodern effects that are already looking a bit quaint. If any of them surprise you, then you don't get out enough.

No matter who's doing it or where it's being done, 'Jekyll & Hyde' is still tuneless and tiresome, a musical for those who prefer power ballads to show tunes but find 'The Phantom of the Opera' too challenging. Moreover, this production has the extra-special disadvantage of starring Constantine Maroulis, lately of 'American Idol' and 'Rock of Ages.' Mr. Maroulis has absolutely no business playing a romantic lead in a Broadway musical. His singing is whiny and insipid, while his acting recalls what Somerset Maugham is supposed to have said when he visited the set of the 1941 film version of 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' and saw Spencer Tracy thrashing through a scene: 'Which one is he now?' The rest of the cast is dull, and the production, staged by Jeff Calhoun, looks as though it had been built to travel (hence the absence of stage blood, which keeps laundry bills low).

For all the fluency of its craftsmanship, 'Orphans' gives the impression of having been knocked together out of spare theatrical parts. Not only is its premise self-evidently derived from Harold Pinter's 'The Caretaker,' but Mr. Kessler has pinched other elements of the play from sources as diverse as 'The Glass Menagerie,' 'Our Town' and Sam Shepard's 'True West.' But it's still an exceptionally effective vehicle for three strong actors, and Mr. Baldwin is both strong and moving, playing Harold as if he were

Fortunately for the audience, a considerable number of Mr. Greenberg's quips are being cracked by Jessica Hecht and Judith Light, who do their damnedest. Unfortunately for the audience, that's not enough.

One of the most exciting things that a well-produced play can do is serve as a time machine, giving modern-day audiences a privileged glimpse of a corner of the lost world of the past. That's what Douglas Carter Beane does with 'The Nance,' a dead-serious comedy set in New York circa 1937.

The makers of 'Matilda' have done the impossible-triumphantly. They've taken Roald Dahl's popular children's novel and turned it into a big-budget musical that is true enough to the book to satisfy its youthful readers, yet sophisticated enough to delight childless adults who normally wouldn't be caught dead partaking of such kid stuff. It's smart, sweet, zany and stupendous fun.

Ms. Lauper, who is better known as a singer than a songwriter, has written the score of 'Kinky Boots' all by herself, and it sounds like it came off a boxed set called 'Cyndi: The Deservedly Forgotten Late-'80s B-Sides.' Jerry Mitchell, the director and choreographer, has done his best to make something out of nothing, but he is incapable of coaxing an interesting performance out of Mr. Sands, who is a good singer and a dull actor. Mr. Porter, more or less conversely, is a good actor and a just-about-adequate singer. Who cares? You won't.

Broadway has been sorely in need of a new musical that touches the heart without insulting the intelligence. Now it's got one. 'Hands on a Hardbody,' in which 10 cash-strapped Texans take part in an endurance contest whose winner will drive home a brand-new pickup truck, is a deeply felt, emotionally true portrait of recession-era American life. The show's unlikely-sounding premise-each of the contestants must keep one hand on the truck until they either give up or collapse-ends up being the occasion for an evening that is by turns festive and thought-provokingly dark. Think 'Once,' only with a much better score.

The world really didn't need yet another 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' least of all the one that just opened in New York. This is the third time in the past decade that Tennessee Williams's overripe, overwrought 1955 play about a grossly dysfunctional Southern couple (he's probably gay, she's definitely miserable) has been revived on Broadway. Like its predecessors, it's a belly-up disaster whose existence can be explained, if not justified, by the presence of a movie star in the cast.

I can't praise Lincoln Center Theater too strongly for daring to revive a near-forgotten, expensive-to-mount play like 'Golden Boy,' then giving it a production so unostentatiously true to the script that you'll scarcely spend any time at all being impressed by the excellence of its staging. All you'll see is the play, and you'll go home wondering why nobody ever told you how great 'Golden Boy' is.

This revival of 'Annie' is fabulous. Creatively staged by James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim's longtime collaborator, and smartly cast from top to bottom, it makes a convincing case for a musical widely regarded by cynical adults as suitable only for consumption by the very, very young. Even if you're a child-hating curmudgeon, you'll come home grinning in spite of yourself.

Sometimes a play that doesn't quite work can be more satisfying than a well-made piece of dramatic yard goods. It isn't hard to see what's wrong with Theresa Rebeck's 'Dead Accounts,' the story of a manic embezzler who takes the money and runs home to his mother—yet for all its manifest flaws, Ms. Rebeck's new play is seldom predictable and never boring, and her cast, led by Norbert Leo Butz, glitters like sapphires on black velvet. If it's perfection you want, go elsewhere, but you'll miss out on an exceedingly interesting night at the theater.

'The Heiress' is so fine a play that it is capable of making a strong impression even in a flawed production. That's what happens here. Ms. Ivey is a knockout, and Mr. Strathairn is always worth seeing, even when, as is the case this time around, he fumbles the interpretive ball. But anyone who knows Mr. Wyler's wonderful film version, or who was lucky enough to see 'The Heiress' on Broadway in 1995, will know—and regret—what is missing from this revival.

Mr. Hodge gets what 'Cyrano' is all about, and in its quiet moments his performance is deeply moving—but there aren't enough of them. Not only is Jamie Lloyd's staging as noisy as a concert by a band of jackhammers, but the Roundabout's production makes use of a boisterous new rhyming translation by Ranjit Bolt that updates the play's language to inconsistent effect. Mr. Bolt has salted Rostand's couplets with anachronistic colloquialisms like 'No can do' and 'I'll eat my hat,' and he lacks the easy virtuosity necessary to charge them with the sparkling flair that comes so naturally to Cyrano.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz's 'new version' of 'An Enemy of the People' is yet another attempt to update Henrik Ibsen's smug 1882 satire about a visionary doctor (Boyd Gaines) who becomes a pariah when he makes a discovery that threatens to gut the economy of the hypocritical small town in which he lives. (Yes, the doctor is a self-portrait of the playwright as genius.)

Jim Parsons, the star of 'The Big Bang Theory,' is playing Elwood, which says much—maybe everything—about why the Roundabout is doing 'Harvey.' Big guns from Hollywood, after all, are an even bigger part of what keeps Broadway afloat these days. It doesn't matter whether or not they know anything about stage acting: All they have to do to sell tickets by the shovelful is show up. Mr. Parsons, who has plenty of stage experience, does much more than that, but he's still giving the kind of affably superficial performance that you'd expect from a network sitcom star. Sure, it's unfair to compare him to one of the best screen actors of the 20th century, but it's also inevitable, and the gentle, wistful gravity that Mr. Stewart brought to the role is nowhere to be found in Mr. Parsons's once-over-lightly interpretation.

What 'Leap of Faith' lacks are sweat and heart, the absence of which will be bothersome only if you permit yourself to imagine how this well-oiled applause machine might have run had its creators taken the plot seriously. Real emotions, raw and hurtful, are at stake in 'Leap of Faith,' and on occasion they bob to the surface, as in the scene in which a frumpy, desperately unhappy woman (well played by Dierdre Friel) drops her wedding ring in the collection basket. Adam Guettel or Michael John LaChiusa would have made the whole show as gripping as that one short scene. Not so the makers of 'Leap of Faith,' who are, like Mr. Esparza, content to skate glamorously atop the surface of their characters' feelings. If that's good enough for you, then you won't be sorry you came.

Were I ever to teach a course in how to stage farce, I'd show a video of the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of 'Don't Dress for Dinner' so that my students would know what not to do...When done well, it's a hoot, but John Tillinger, the director, has made the amateurish mistake of encouraging his actors to troll aggressively for laughs instead of letting the situation generate them. Only Ms. Kayden resists the temptation to overegg the pudding, turning in a poker-faced performance that deserves to be remembered at Tony time. Everybody else, especially Mr. James, carries on like Cary Grant in 'Arsenic and Old Lace,' which is the quickest possible way to kill a farce stone dead.

One of the reasons we expect so much out of Broadway shows is that they cost so much to see. Nicky Silver's 'The Lyons,' which transferred to Broadway this week, is a clever little dysfunctional-family comedy that contains at least twice its fair share of laughs. Though it's more than a bit of a mess, 'The Lyons' has its moments, and Linda Lavin, the star, is in sensational form. Off Broadway, that amounted to a passable bargain—but is it really worth $126.50 to see an amusing but inconsistent show? All I can tell you is that despite its extreme unevenness, 'The Lyons' is never boring.