Terry Teachout

The problem with 'Race' is that it's a bit too familiar. Specifically, it plays like a cross between Mr. Mamet's 'Oleanna' and his screenplay for 'The Verdict.' I can't say much more than that without giving away the 'surprises' sprinkled throughout the plot, in which two lawyers, one white (James Spader) and one black (David Alan Grier), decide whether to defend a famous millionaire (Richard Thomas) who is accused of raping a young black woman—a decision complicated by the fact that one of their employees (Kerry Washington) is also a young black woman. But those who know Mr. Mamet's work more than casually will likely be able to guess many of the directions in which he takes this conceit, and that's a big part of what's wrong with 'Race.'

The music and dancing are so good that if 'Fela!' had been a half-hour shorter, I wouldn't have been overly troubled by its shapelessness. Alas, it plays for 2½ hours, and by the time the festivities draw to a close, you'll feel as though you'd lingered too long at a Thanksgiving table piled high with goodies. Even so, 'Fela!' is tremendous fun, and anyone with curious ears and an eye for first-class dancing won't want to miss it.

I've seen dumber musicals than 'Memphis,' but not many and not by much. This noisy piece of claptrap, which has been rattling around the regional circuit for the past six years, turns the real-life story of Dewey Phillips, a Memphis disc jockey who fell in love with rhythm and blues in the '50s, into a ludicrous fantasy about a white DJ named Huey (Chad Kimball) who puts a black singer named Felicia (Montego Glover) on the radio, thereby driving the local racists crazy. Big surprise: All the black characters are noble hipsters and all the white characters (except for Huey) are redneck squares... If you care, the singing is sensational.

The idea isn't unpromising, but Mr. Yorkey's glib book and artless lyrics boil down to an evening-long whine of let-me-tell-you-all-about-how-I-feel narcissism: If you think that I just don't give a damn/Then you just don't know who I am. Mr. Kitt has contributed a well-crafted pop score, but his soft-edged music is so lacking in toughness and grit that you never feel any connection between the songs and the painful emotions that they purport to depict. The result is a prettified portrayal of mental illness, complete with an unconvincingly uplifting grand finale.

'Rock of Ages' is a moderately amusing jukebox musical whose ear-shredding score consists of a compilation of the greater and lesser hits of such noted arena rockers of the '80s as Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Foreigner, Journey, Styx and Twisted Sister, all of which I loathed when I first heard them on the radio a quarter-century ago. It would be the grossest of understatements to say that I expected nothing out of 'Rock of Ages,' so I'm pleased -- sort of -- to report that it could have been a whole lot worse.

The Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park revival of 'Hair' has moved to Broadway, restaged and recast but identical in spirit to the outdoor version that I saw in Central Park last August. The direction and choreography, by Diane Paulus and Karole Armitage, are as festive as ever, and the onstage band is still lava-hot, especially Bernard Purdie on drums. The show itself, alas, is also unchanged: The first act is lively but smug, the second act a hopelessly incoherent mess, and Galt MacDermot's once-revolutionary music now sounds like a medley of moldering AM-radio promos. As before, everyone in the cast strips, some to better effect than others. Senescent dopers need not hesitate, but everyone else should approach 'Hair' with extreme caution.

The conceit of 'God of Carnage' is that Ms. Reza's couples are cut from different bolts of the same cloth. The wives are self-righteous liberals who believe that good will can solve all problems, the husbands thuggish conservatives equally certain (as Mr. Daniels's character puts it) that violence is 'a law of life. . . . People struggle until they're dead.' The point of the play, insofar as it has one, is that the husbands are more or less right: No sooner do the wives start drinking than they shed their bourgeois inhibitions and come out swinging.

I give Arthur Laurents credit for wanting to make 'West Side Story' new -- especially given the fact that the Robbins-supervised 1980 Broadway revival, a carbon copy of the original production, wasn't very successful -- but no amount of tough-guy retouching can make 'West Side Story' into anything other than what it is, a starry-eyed group portrait of a bunch of basically nice kids who find themselves caught up in an unforgiving world of violence and hate. To pretend otherwise, as this staging mostly does, is to get wrong what Mr. Laurents and his collaborators got so gloriously right a half-century ago.

No doubt Stephen Daldry, who directed both the musical and the film on which it is based, deserves some of the credit for the high quality of their performances -- and the low quality of the show in which they're performing. I've seen my share of bad Broadway musicals, but I can't recall one that was quite so vulgar and bogus as 'Billy Elliot.'

Could it be that the multinational partnership of Disney-Mackintosh Inc. has smothered 'Mary Poppins' under a blanket of cash? I like how'd-they-do-that stage trickery as much as the next wide-eyed theatergoer, but there's something unsatisfyingly slick about the fantastic spectacle that Mr. Mackintosh and his British colleagues have shipped across the Atlantic. The 1964 film of 'Mary Poppins' was more than a little bit sticky around the edges, but it had heart, and it also had Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, and a brilliant supporting cast that included Hermione Baddeley, Jane Darwell, Glynis Johns, Elsa Lanchester and Ed Wynn. This 'Mary Poppins' has the best special effects that money can buy. I'd rather have heart.

Yet another jukebox musical has come to town, and this time I don’t feel like arguing—much. For reasons not obvious to me, “Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons” is not only giving pleasure to paying theatergoers (that part I get) but has also passed muster with certain critics who should know better. Contrary to anything you’ve read elsewhere, it’s nothing more than 32 songs performed on a cheap-looking set by a high-priced lounge band, strung together like dimestore pearls on the most vapid of all-tell-no-show books.