Terry Teachout — Theater Critic

Will they be able to keep the show open for another six months? I doubt it—and not just because they lack the name recognition necessary to galvanize the tourist trade. Much as I esteem both women, neither one of them is well cast.

The star of a show doesn't always get top billing. Denzel Washington is by far the biggest name associated with the first Broadway revival of August Wilson's 'Fences,' but my guess is that it's Viola Davis whose performance is going to stick with you. Not that Mr. Washington is anything less than solid, but Ms. Davis is something else again. I knew she was a remarkable artist—anyone who saw her in the Off-Broadway premiere of Lynn Nottage's 'Intimate Apparel' or the film version of John Patrick Shanley's 'Doubt' knows that—but what she's doing this time around goes straight into my scrapbook of stage performances from which you learn how brutally true to life great acting can be.

I haven't said anything about Rob Ashford's staging because there's not much to say other than that it's bland and unamusing. Rarely have so many jokes been stepped on so firmly. The only scene that takes off is the one in which Mr. Hayes picks up a drunken bimbo in a bar. The bimbo in question, fortunately, is Katie Finneran, who steals the show right out from under her famous colleagues. Ms. Finnernan received most of the applause during the curtain call at the preview I saw, and earned it. Also worthy of note is Scott Pask, whose elaborate set is a knowing sendup of corporate midcentury modernism (even the paintings on the walls of the offices of Consolidated Life are clever parodies of Arshile Gorky and Morris Louis). Mr. Pask and Ms. Finneran both deserve to be remembered when this year's Tonys are handed out. Saving their redeeming presences, 'Promises, Promises' is slick, pointless and forgettable.

I haven't said anything about Rob Ashford's staging because there's not much to say other than that it's bland and unamusing. Rarely have so many jokes been stepped on so firmly. The only scene that takes off is the one in which Mr. Hayes picks up a drunken bimbo in a bar. The bimbo in question, fortunately, is Katie Finneran, who steals the show right out from under her famous colleagues. Ms. Finnernan received most of the applause during the curtain call at the preview I saw, and earned it. Also worthy of note is Scott Pask, whose elaborate set is a knowing sendup of corporate midcentury modernism (even the paintings on the walls of the offices of Consolidated Life are clever parodies of Arshile Gorky and Morris Louis). Mr. Pask and Ms. Finneran both deserve to be remembered when this year's Tonys are handed out. Saving their redeeming presences, 'Promises, Promises' is slick, pointless and forgettable.

By stuffing their staging into a shabby-looking set roughly comparable in size to a second-rate nightclub, Terry Johnson and Tim Shortall, the director and set designer, have clipped away the tinsel and made it possible for the audience to focus on the relationship of Georges (Kelsey Grammer, still best known for 'Frasier') and Albin (Douglas Hodge). To be sure, the score is as banal and the jokes as grating as ever, but at least you can believe in what you're seeing, and Messrs. Grammer and Hodge are so engaging that the show's shortcomings recede into the distance. Mr. Grammer needs to work harder at singing in tune, but he knows how to put a song across, while Mr. Hodge's Cockneyfied Albin is so outrageous that you'll want to give him a great big hug.

All this being the case, 'American Idiot' rises or falls almost entirely on the strength of the songs themselves, and I regret to say that I found them to be brain-numbingly dull. Perhaps I might have felt differently if I were 14, but I was all but incapable of attending to the puerile maunderings of Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day's lyricist, of which the following specimens are representative: • 'Well maybe I am the faggot America / I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.' • 'Lost children with dirty faces today / No one really seems to care.' • 'Summer has come and passed / The innocent can never last.' As for the music, it reminded me of an amphetamine-crazed hamster running on a treadmill.

Any show in which Ms. Cook sings 'Loving You,' 'Take Me to the World' and 'Send in the Clowns' is by definition worth seeing, and some of the other performances, especially Mr. Wopat's 'Epiphany' and Leslie Kritzer's 'Now You Know,' are powerfully moving. Mr. Sondheim's recorded commentary, alas, is genial but less than illuminating—he never says anything that will surprise anyone who has followed his career at all closely—and I can't help but think that a show whose running time is well over 2½ hours might have profited had it been trimmed by someone not associated with the Sondheim cult.

Don't go to 'Million Dollar Quartet' looking for great acting. Three members of the front line are not professional actors (Mr. Guest is the ringer), and the book, by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux, is tissue-thin. This is the kind of show that goes flat whenever the characters stop singing and start talking. Fortunately, they do plenty of the former and not too terribly much of the latter, and Eric Schaeffer, the director, has staged the show so skillfully as to minimize the thespian shortcomings of its less experienced cast members.

Ken Ludwig writes comfy, low-stakes farces in which no one is embarrassed—at least not for long—and all of the characters live happily ever after. 'Lend Me a Tenor,' last seen on Broadway in 1990, is the quintessential example of Mr. Ludwig's easygoing comic approach, a farce about a production of Verdi's 'Otello' whose star (here played by Anthony LaPaglia) fails to show up for opening night. The plot is properly labyrinthine, the jokes reasonably clever, but never once do you thrill with sadistic glee as a pompous twit strolls heedlessly toward his well-deserved rendezvous with humiliation. If that's what you expect from a farce—and I do—you'll find 'Lend Me a Tenor' to be amiable but more then a few teeth short. If not, you'll like it just fine.

If you're a New Yorker with children, or if you're bringing the family to Manhattan this summer, you'll have to go to 'The Addams Family.' It won't kill you. You'll laugh a lot, though never during the unmemorable songs, which are supposed to be funny but aren't. You're more than likely to spend a considerable part of the evening wondering how much the set cost. And as you depart the theater, you'll probably catch yourself wondering whether it was really, truly worth it to take your kids to a goodish musical whose tickets are so expensive that you can buy an iPad for less than the price of four orchestra seats.

Alfred Molina, under normal circumstances a consummately fine actor, is here inexplicably reminiscent of Sgt. Bilko, while Eddie Redmayne plays his earnest young assistant with a dude-that's-soooo-cool slacker accent, a puzzling choice for a play set in the late '50s. As for the script, it consists of one high-art platitude after another ('To surmount the past, you must know the past'), most of them shouted by Mr. Molina. Even if the real-life Rothko talked this way, it doesn't make for good theater, nor does it tell you much of anything about the greatness of his paintings.

Twyla Tharp racked up a major disaster three seasons ago with 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' one of the lamest jukebox musicals ever to stagger onto Broadway. Not surprisingly, she's playing it very, very safe this time around: 'Come Fly Away' is a love-in-a-nightclub fantasy set to the ever-popular music of Frank Sinatra, whose recordings have previously accompanied three of Ms. Tharp's ballets. The songs are familiar, the dancers are pretty, the set is fancy and the band is hot. All that's missing from this recipe for success are a star and a few memorable onstage events.

The intentions of Geoffrey Nauffts's 'Next Fall,' a new play about a man (Patrick Breen) whose much younger lover (Patrick Heusinger) is dying, are palpably high-minded, and I suspect that many playgoers will think that this makes it worth seeing. Alas, 'Next Fall' is cliché-infested and cloyingly sentimental, and the fact that it has transferred to Broadway after a successful Off-Broadway run means only that you can fool some of the people most of the time.

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.

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.

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.