Terry Teachout — Theater Critic

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.

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.

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.

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.