Terry Teachout

Ms. Cattrall, to be sure, looks gorgeous, but she doesn't look 30, and the fact that the play has been recast to accommodate her age—Mr. Gross is 52—distorts it still further...Between Mr. Day's stiff-upper-lip Victor and Mr. Gross's urbanely exasperated Elyot, this 'Private Lives' is quite good enough to be worth seeing. But Ms. Cattrall's earthbound performance keeps it from taking wing, and a production of 'Private Lives' that fails to soar can't help but disappoint.

Jon Robin Baitz's 'Other Desert Cities,' which had a very successful run at Lincoln Center Theater last winter, has now transferred to Broadway, where it will surely do at least as well-and deservedly so. Though not without flaw, Mr. Baitz's latest play, a group portrait of a Reaganesque show-business family whose members are keeping secrets from one another, is for the most part both soundly made and emotionally persuasive, and Stockard Channing, Rachel Griffiths, Stacy Keach, Judith Light and Thomas Sadoski are as good a cast as anyone could hope for.

'Chinglish' is a one-joke show, the joke being that none of the Chinese characters, the translators very much included, can speak English well enough to make themselves fully understood to Daniel ('I appreciate the frank American style' becomes 'He enjoys your rudeness'). The second act is deeper in tone, enough so that you wish the first act had taken more chances. But Mr. Hwang wrings the most out of his one joke, and the results, if slight, are thoroughly satisfying.

It isn't hard to see why the producers of 'Relatively Speaking' thought it would be a smart idea to bring to Broadway a triple bill of one-act comedies by Woody Allen, Ethan Coen and Elaine May...The theory is impeccable, the results disastrous.

Even if you find 'The Mountaintop' too sticky to stomach, you'll admire the cut-to-the-chase directness with which Mr. Leon has staged it. David Gallo's hotel-room set undergoes a climactic transformation that is far more surprising than anything in Ms. Hall's script. Like Mr. Jackson's acting, the set would be worth paying to see if the play were good enough to be worth sitting through.

Rattigan wrote stronger plays than 'Man and Boy,' 'The Deep Blue Sea' and 'Separate Tables' in particular, and he would have been even better served had the Roundabout revived one of them instead. Nor does this production, save for Mr. Langella's ennobling presence and Ms. Aitken's shrewd cuts, make the best possible case for 'Man and Boy.' But it's still what the Brits call a rattling good show. If you don't know how able a playwright Terence Rattigan was, you can now find out what you've been missing.

Thomas Lynch, the set designer, turns the stage of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre into a ghostly opera house for the two monologues in which Callas recalls the splendors and miseries of her youth. This is a gratuitous touch-Ms. Daly sets the scene far more than adequately all by herself-but it's in keeping with the scenes themselves, which are too ripe for comfort. They work, though, as does the rest of 'Master Class,' which is completely successful on the level of intelligent entertainment.

And there you have it: $70 million and nearly nine years of effort, all squandered on a damp squib. To be sure, the people who came to last Saturday's sold-out press preview seemed to be enjoying themselves, though they saved their cheers for the flying, not the songs. No doubt 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' will continue to draw crowds, if only because it's been written about with such pendulum-like regularity. But it's neither good enough to get you excited nor bad enough to make you mad, and that will in all likelihood be its epitaph: Never in the history of Broadway has so much been spent to so little effect.

That's what is most irksome about 'Baby It's You!': It's a wasted opportunity to tell what really happened when a nice Jewish housewife took four nice black Jersey girls and made them very, very famous. I'd happily pay to read a book in which that story was told honestly and well—but I wouldn't pay a dime to see a musical that doesn't even try to do so, no matter how slick it sounds.

Much talent has been squandered on this stale confection, starting with that of Ms. Murphy, who switches from youth to old age and back again so deftly that you'll smile each time she does it. The cast is full of pros (it's always a joy to see Lewis J. Stadlen at work), and Andy Blankenbuehler, lately of 'In the Heights,' has staged the musical numbers with pleasing skill. If you have an unusually high tolerance for sentiment, you might find 'The People in the Picture' barely endurable.

Now that AIDS has become a chronic condition rather than a death sentence, Mr. Kramer's play must stand on its artistic merits, not its impassioned sincerity. How does it hold up? Better than I expected, but not as well as I'd hoped. Mr. Kramer portrays himself as a flawed but ultimately heroic figure...that he really did make a historic contribution to the fight against AIDS doesn't make the portrayal any easier to swallow without gagging.

The sound that you're hearing at the Cort Theatre these days is one of the rarest in the world: It's the collective purr of an audience falling in love with a brand-new face. Nina Arianda made a huge impression on everyone who saw her make her professional stage debut last year in the Off-Broadway premiere of David Ives's 'Venus in Fur.' Now she's playing the not-so-dumb-blonde in a Broadway revival of Garson Kanin's 'Born Yesterday,' the play that put Judy Holliday on the map in 1946 and is going to do the same thing for Ms. Arianda. Ms. Arianda is a charismatic comedienne who is as funny as she is sexy, and anyone capable of resisting her charms is both blind and deaf.

Ms. Falco is very definitely the star of this show, though her soft-spoken performance as Bananas Shaughnessy is anything but a star-turn: It is, rather, a still point of realism in the midst of mounting frenzy. Mr. Stiller, who played Artie's son in the last Broadway revival, is powerfully affecting as Artie this time around, while Ms. Leigh is crude, rude and shrill in exactly the right proportions.

Into every spring on Broadway a brand-new British play must fall. This year there are two, 'War Horse' and Jez Butterworth's 'Jerusalem,' and those Anglophiles who like their accents thick and their plays pretentious will prefer the latter to the former. Indeed, 'Jerusalem' is pretentious almost without limit, a three-hour save-our-England tract in which the uplift is slathered with a thick brown sauce composed of two parts coarse humor and one part pseudopoetry. In addition, 'Jerusalem' features a performance by Mark Rylance ('La Bête,' 'Boeing-Boeing') that is every bit as good as the critical buzz that accompanied its transfer from London's West End. Connoisseurs of great acting won't want to miss him—but those with normal attention spans will be hard pressed to make it to the finish line.

Was Kathleen Turner ever an actor? Maybe, but she's not one anymore. All she does nowadays is waddle onstage and hawk the self-parody that long ago became her stock in trade...'High' is playing next door to Stephen Adly Guirgis's 'The Motherf**ker With the Hat,' a comedy about addiction that is as bluntly funny and crisply written as 'High' is false and manipulative. If you're looking for a good time, be sure to pick the door on the right.

Anyone who fails to respond to 'War Horse' on the level of pure spectacle simply doesn't like theater...Unfortunately, there's a catch, and it, too, is big: 'War Horse' is the most shameless piece of tearjerking to hit Broadway since 'The Sound of Music.' If that doesn't stop you in your tracks, buy your tickets now. The fundamental flaw of 'War Horse' is that Nick Stafford, who wrote the script 'in association' (that's how the credit reads) with South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company, has taken a book that was written for children and tried to give it the expressive weight of a play for adults.

On the credit side is an unusually fine piece of acting by Norbert Leo Butz as Special Agent Carl Hanratty (played in the film by Tom Hanks). Tom Wopat, one of Broadway's finest singers, shows off his ever-reliable pipes as Frank's father, and Mr. Tveit is thoroughly likable as Frank. The most that can be said about Jack O'Brien's staging, alas, is that it's efficient, while Jerry Mitchell's choreography is as facelessly derivative as the songs. Best of all is Kerry Butler as Brenda Strong, Frank's hapless girlfriend. Ms. Butler has somehow contrived to give a performance glowing with truth in a show that's devoid of it.

Mr. Rock has never acted in a stage play, and his inexperience shows-he's a bit stiff at times-but you can see that he's well on his way to getting where he wants to go. His colleagues are stunningly good, especially Mr. Cannavale, who has the biggest part and makes the most of it...Don't let the stupid title put you off. If you do, you'll miss one of the best new plays to come to Broadway in ages.

Ms. Marshall, who did so well by 'The Pajama Game' and 'Wonderful Town,' takes a while to get going this time around, perhaps because the book is stale...'Anything Goes' has the air of a safe option, a risk-free show designed to take the minimum number of chances and please the maximum number of people. That it succeeds in the latter goal is mainly due to Ms. Foster (and, of course, Cole Porter). Her Reno Sweeney is definitely worth the price of two tickets.

Mr. Williams's performance is equally predictable, but it's not his fault, for he's playing the tiger as written: The script calls for a superficial Hollywood-style performance, and he obliges, sounding not unlike Bruce Willis playing the wisecracking baby in 'Look Who's Talking.' It doesn't help that his one-liners aren't sharp enough, though Mr. Williams does his best to make them snap...'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo' is still mediocre.

The professionals are back. Well into one of the dimmest Broadway seasons in recent memory, Rob Ashford has lit the lights with a smart and satisfying production of 'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,' the Frank Loesser-Abe Burrows musical that taught a generation of viperine office politicians how to stick a shiv into their bosses without leaving any fingerprints on the handle. Needless to say, it's Daniel Radcliffe, better known as Harry Potter, who's filling the seats, but it's Mr. Ashford who deserves most of the credit for the artistic success of this hard-charging, high-flying revival of a show whose gleaming craftsmanship is as self-evident today as when it opened on Broadway a half-century ago.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the naughty boys of 'South Park,' have teamed up with Robert Lopez, one of the co-creators of 'Avenue Q,' and the results of their collaboration are pretty much what you'd expect: slick and smutty. 'The Book of Mormon' is the first musical to open on Broadway since 'La Cage aux Folles' that has the smell of a send-in-the-tourists hit. Casey Nicholaw ('The Drowsy Chaperone') has staged the musical numbers with cheery energy, and the cast, especially Nikki M. James, is terrific. But don't let anybody try to tell you that 'The Book of Mormon' is suitable for anyone other than 12-year-old boys who have yet to graduate from fart jokes to 'Glee.' A couple of reasonably effective production numbers notwithstanding, it's flabby, amateurish and very, very safe.

Not only is 'Priscilla' a sequin-encrusted dragfest without a heart, but it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in the recent history of Broadway, a pointless musical version of a sweet little movie out of which something smart—and, yes, touching—might easily have been made. Instead we get human cupcakes.

Enough about 'Spider-Man' already—Tom Stoppard is back on Broadway! Only time will tell whether 'Arcadia' is Mr. Stoppard's masterpiece, but it isn't premature to call it one of the key English-language plays of the postwar era, and even in a staging that is less than satisfactory, it makes a rich and affecting impression. Now for the bad news: David Leveaux's revival of 'Arcadia,' which was originally mounted in London two years ago with a different cast, isn't much better than adequate. When you're talking about a high-profile revival of a great play, good enough won't cut it.

I won't say that a better playwright might not have been able to make something watchable out of this clichéd scenario, but what Miller made out of it in 1972 was pretty much what you'd have expected from a second-rate writer born in 1939 who had drunk deep from the well of the '60s and now proposed to inform his audiences that their parents' values were comprehensively corrupt. Hence the coach, a boorish, ill-educated stage-Irish blowhard who proudly displays pictures of Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Fightin' Joe McCarthy on his mantelpiece and salts his small talk with good old-fashioned ethnic slurs of the highest possible voltage, thereby alerting the audience to his lack of enlightenment. Hence, too, his 'boys,' all of whom are louts save for Tom, who clearly speaks for the author (and who is played in this revival by the author's son).