Terry Teachout

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.

The only part of 'One Man, Two Guvnors' that translates effortlessly into the universal language of lunacy is the last scene of the first act, a two-doors-and-one-staircase miniature farce adorned by the presence of Tom Edden, who plays an 87-year-old waiter of the utmost ineptitude. Since the program credits Cal McCrystal as the show's 'physical comedy director,' I assume that he is mainly responsible for the masterly staging of this bit, which reduced me to helpless howling. If you do see 'One Man, Two Guvnors,' be forewarned that it's downhill all the way after that.

Never having seen Harold Prince's much-admired original production of 'Evita,' I'm not in a position to compare it to this one, and in a way I'm glad. Despite the inadequacies of its nominal star, Mr. Grandage's 'Evita' is an impressive achievement that should be judged on its own merits, which are legion. Even if you don't like Andrew Lloyd Webber's music, it will hold your eye from curtain to curtain.

Tracie Bennett can sing like Judy Garland, more or less, and if you have any interest in hearing her do so, go see Peter Quilter's 'End of the Rainbow,' a play about the last pathetic months of the drug-sodden Garland's life, in which Ms. Bennett gives what amounts to a miniconcert of Judy's Greatest Hits. Be forewarned, however, that Mr. Quilter's script is heavy on bitchy one-liners and light on insight, and that Ms. Bennett's portrayal of Garland-at-the-End-of-Her-Rope is a heavily shellacked impersonation that slops over into shameless caricature.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, the star of Mike Nichols's revival of Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman,' is following in the well-remembered footsteps of Lee J. Cobb, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy, and it's a tribute to his talent that you won't feel inclined to compare him to any of his predecessors. ... The genius of Mr. Nichols's unostentatiously right staging of 'Death of a Salesman' is that each part of it is in harmony with Mr. Hoffman's plain, blunt acting. Like his star—and the rest of his perfectly chosen cast—Mr. Nichols has disappeared into the play itself. The result is a production that will be remembered by all who see it as the capstone of a career.

Unfortunately, Ms. Nixon's acting is part of what's wrong with the production, for she plays Vivian Bearing, the austere, loveless scholar of 17th-century poetry around whose terrible plight 'Wit' revolves, as though she were a precocious schoolgirl rather than a full-grown, forbiddingly chilly intellectual. Only when suffering strips away Vivian's defenses does Ms. Nixon come into her own, and by then it's too late for her to overcome the lightweight impression that she's already made.

One of the most exciting things that a playwright can do is to show you an unfamiliar way of life. A play that succeeds in doing so can be forgiven any number of theatrical sins. 'Stick Fly,' in which Lydia R. Diamond puts America's black upper class onstage, fills the bill on all counts. Yes, it's a mess, but a fascinating one, well directed by Kenny Leon and performed with total persuasiveness by his ensemble cast, and the best parts are so good that you'll be glad to forgive Ms. Diamond when she goes wrong.

'Bonnie & Clyde' isn't the worst musical to open on Broadway in the past decade. It isn't even the worst Frank Wildhorn musical to open on Broadway in the past decade. (That would be 'Dracula.') It is, however, quite sufficiently bad enough to qualify for the finals of this year's What-Were-They-Thinking Prize. Why would anyone not obviously deranged put money into a show with music by a composer whose last three Broadway outings tanked? And who thought it was a good idea to write a commodity musical whose title gives the impression that 'Bonnie & Clyde' is based (even though it isn't) on a 44-year-old movie that is no longer well remembered save by upper-middle-age baby boomers? Nor have Mr. Wildhorn and his feckless collaborators managed to beat these long odds: 'Bonnie & Clyde' is so enervatingly bland and insipid that you'll leave the theater asking yourself why you ever liked musicals in the first place.