nytheatre Archive
1999-2000 Theatre Season Reviews

Susan Stroman ought to be ashamed of herself.

I say this not because Contact, the new "dance play" that she has directed, choreographed and, with John Weidman, co-conceived, is such a joyless, soulless mess (although it is). No, I say this because Stroman--arguably one of the most powerful women in theatre today--has here created a work of theatre that consistently demeans, debases, and denigrates women. Contact is vulgar, crass, and ugly; what it says about the interaction between the sexes is disgusting.

Consider "Swinging," the first of the three "parts" of Contact: A French aristocrat, his servant, and his ladyfriend are in a forest in 1767. She is on a swing, and as the apparatus carries her higher and higher off the ground she spreads her legs wide apart and otherwise contorts her body so that her lacy panties become the clear focus of attention for both men. Later she and the servant mime something like fornication on the swing. Inspired by Jean-Honoré Fragonard's painting The Swing, and set to a more contemporary piece of dance music that I did not recognize, this brief ballet is supposed to be artistic. It's not.

Or consider "Did You Move?", Contact's second "part." Here a woman, played by the talented Karen Ziemba, is shown to be in a loveless (maybe even terrifying) marriage to a vulgar pig of a husband whose rough demeanor and Italian heritage suggest (offensively, I might add) that he is some sort of minor Mafioso. They are in a restaurant in Queens in 1954; while he gets up to go to the buffet, she fantasizes dancing to the strains of various classical compositions. Soon her fantasy escalates into flirting and then making love to the restaurant's handsome maitre d'--and shooting her husband as he returns to the table with a dinner roll. 

Finally, consider the centerpiece of Contact, an hour-long drama about a suicidal advertising executive who finds relief in a swing dance club. Here, in a cramped room full of talented but rather grimly determined dancers, he encounters a mysterious Girl in a Yellow Dress. She's leggy, she's beautiful, she dances divinely; naturally she falls for him and they end up in a steamy pas de deux that concludes with his hand placed squarely on her posterior, lifting up her Yellow Dress and exposing her Yellow Panties for all the world to see.

The choreography for each of these three pieces is complicated and technically well-executed by Stroman's company. I'm sure that most of those involved believe they are creating something worthwhile and beautiful and on one level they are: this is an impressively-danced show.

But every show has content, and the messages that Contact telegraphs to its audience are consistently disturbing. Women are flung about by men with alarming regularity; they are portrayed almost exclusively as objects of sex and/or desire; they are also portrayed as powerless to resist the will of men (except by the most desperate of means--cf. Ziemba's murder fantasy). Costume designer William Ivey Long has dressed all of the women in Part Three in what amounts to little more than lingerie--stylish, admittedly, but nonetheless offensive.

There is plenty else that's wrong with Contact, ranging from the illogical and unmotivated plotting of the final story to myriad details that seem sloppily worked out: why, for example, does the Girl in the Yellow Dress carry a matching yellow handbag and smoke matching yellow cigarettes but nevertheless wear bone-colored shoes? And another thing: didn't anyone notice that the very intimate Newhouse Theatre is exactly the wrong size and shape for this show? From what should have been an excellent seat (second row, just left of center), I repeatedly had trouble seeing things on stage clearly. And one more thing: Scott Stauffer's sound design, which brims with ingeniously authentic effects throughout, is nevertheless consistently too loud (annoyingly so) during the musical selections (all of which, by the way, are recordings).

I've decided, though, to dwell on the appallingly misguided spin that Stroman and her collaborators have decided to place on a concept that, in other hands, might have succeeded. Dance can rejuvenate broken spirits--see Kat and the Kings if you don't believe that.  But I find nothing remotely redemptive--pleasant, even--about a macho fantasy about a rich white guy with two left feet who shows up in a dance club and wins the prettiest girl there because (a) he's so irresistible in spite of his flaws, or (b) he's obviously the richest guy there.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that Deborah Yates, who plays the Girl in the Yellow Dress, is a true find: she's quite lovely and she's an excellent dancer with real stage presence. And the fine actor Boyd Gaines, who stars opposite her as the ad executive, works hard in a role he's not particularly well-suited for. Among members of the ensemble, Jason Antoon, Seán Martin Hingston, and Scott Taylor are clear standouts. But--unfortunately for them--they have landed in a terrible show.

To catalog Mr. Hughes's various conjurations is to reduce them to something less than their magical selves. Nonetheless I will try to do him justice here somehow. During the hour running time of Necromance, Mr. Hughes levitates objects, swallows thirteen sewing needles, and makes various things (playing cards, someone's watch) disappear and then reappear in startling places. The piece de resistance of his act features the discovery of a particular card in a place you'd never expect to find it; I won't tell you where, but if you see the show you'll never forget it.

Mr. Hughes also, Marc Salem-like, reads minds, or seems to. At least I can tell you that he read mine--or he made me read his: he asked me to think of a number between 1 and 50 and then wrote down 48--my number--on a big piece of paper on stage for all to see.

Mr. Hughes performs all of this sleight-of-hand while indulging in a sly and engaging patter that is designed to disarm and distract even as it deconstructs the magician's art, ever so subtly. With none of the hard-boiled cynicism of, say, Penn and Teller, Mr. Hughes is nevertheless resolutely post-modern: he constantly reminds us how willing and eager we are to be fooled. And then he fools us.

Is this really magic? There has to be a trick; but I for one don't want to know what it is. I like the idea of believing.

The two main characters of When Words Fail... are Dan and Sarah, who meet while lunching in a park one afternoon and soon take up a tentative, sometimes rocky courtship. Dan is an awkward but well-meaning young man who is obsessed with keeping up and getting ahead; afraid of missing any new development or trend, he nevertheless always does. Sarah is in many ways his opposite--a true romantic, blessed with a kind of sixth sense that enables her to look deep into what surrounds her and feel its essence. They make an unlikely couple, perhaps, but they are bound by their pure, sensitive souls and their gawky outside-ness. Together they journey through the cockeyed urban American world of the '90s.

It is Mr. Dannenfelser's depiction of this world that makes When Words Fail... so remarkable. Take, for example, Dan's office-mate Ethan. You've met this guy: a supercharged, hyper-connected techno-geek, someone who experiences the world at a much faster baud rate than the rest of us. Beyond up-to-date and way beyond cool, Ethan is just Out There. He takes an immediate liking to Dan and invites him--in one breathless, comma-less sentence--to go out to a pimento restaurant, a luau where they roast the pig right at your table, and an all-you-can-eat crouton place. He interrupts himself to take a call on his cell phone, and then instructs his caller to send him a fax--not here, but to his car. Later, Ethan gets another call, from someone or something named Bumpy. He immediately pulls out his personal digital assistant and begins to take notes on the latest changes, additions, and deletions to what's in style. (Haven't you always suspected that that's how this actually happens?)

More than just edgily satiric, Ethan is the most brilliant comic creation to reach the New York stage since Alexa Vere de Vere in As Bees in Honey Drown. Particularly as performed by the hilarious Michael Puzzo, Ethan's monologues are triumphant little symphonies of absurdity: I laughed so hard that I drowned out almost as much as I heard. And take note: Mr. Puzzo and Mr. Dannenfelser have, in Ethan, encapsulated an emerging genus of humanity; some of our laughter is, I fear, that of sharp recognition.

When Words Fail... ventures out of the office, too, following Dan and Sarah to an art museum, a Starbucks-ish coffee shop, the planetarium, and elsewhere. Here Mr. Dannenfelser's inventiveness is matched by that of his director, Kevin Kittle, as they transform the playing space and the actors into artful, playful representations of these locations. In the art gallery, performers "play" the paintings in witty tableaux vivants; in the planetarium, we sit in total darkness until a fuzzy but steady light appears on a screen over our heads. In some scenes, actors (or curtains, or screens) hide parts of the action from us; in other scenes, unidentified characters pop up in unexplained places doing unexpected things. Vaguely dreamlike, or hallucinogenic, the style of When Words Fail... is designed to make us pay attention to what's happening right now; to strain, even, to comprehend. This is a play about stretching, about exerting, about connecting with the universe; Mr. Dannenfelser and Mr. Kittle ingeniously force us to do all of that and more.

When Words Fail... excels in every department. Mike Sears, who was terrific in last season's To Have and to Hold, is splendid as Dan, while Christy Marie Moore is almost ethereal as sensitive Sarah. Rhett Rossi has lots of fun as a self-help guru called Gunther, and he, the aforementioned Mr. Puzzo, and the rest of company (Marco Jo Clate, Jackie Kamm, Danielle Liccardo, and Mala Santouri) perform dozens of other roles as required with assurance and pep. The haunting lighting design is by Jim Hultquist.

The best thing about When Words Fail... is that it so successfully engages. This is a play that can't exist outside the theatre: it needs living actors and living audience members to come together and create it. Mr. Dannenfelser has deliberately crafted his play to be somewhat fuzzy and vague in places; to allow, I think, each of us to impose our own consciousness upon it. With Mr. Kittle, the actors, and his other collaborators, he has given us a vessel for our own hopes and fears about how to live in a world that is becoming more difficult to understand every day. And, in the simple but profound love discovered by Dan and Sarah, he has given us a recipe to survive and thrive. 

The most important thing to understand about Jimmy Porter is that although he is young—very young—he is as defeated by life as the oldest and saddest of lost souls. Jimmy has lost the capacity to believe in things, and as a result his lashings-out at the world and its occupants—what he does almost nonstop throughout Look Back in Anger, by the way—are only empty entertainments. He spends most of the first act firing ironic assaults at his best friend, his wife, her relatives, and the social and political establishment. His patter—for that’s what it feels like—is cool, cruel, and entirely impotent: it’s like a Letterman monologue, or a Dennis Miller rant: a kind of vigorous apathy, all bark with no real bite.

Near the end of the play, Jimmy says this:

I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and forties, when we were still kids. There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.

I guess it’s a bit of a relief to know that the alienation we live with today was around back in 1956, when Osborne wrote this seminal work.

Of course, the specific political and social context that Osborne was reacting to has changed immeasurably in 40-odd years; in the details, Jimmy’s world bears very little similarity to our own. What’s timeless is the desperation, the unfocused anger, the sadness, the waste: Jimmy’s heartbreaking cries for something real to hold onto—dignity for the tired, destitute old woman whom he regarded as a second mother, say, or the constancy of a wife—resonate because they so keenly reflect our own postmodern existence. The only difference is, we know there’s nothing real anymore; Jimmy, idealist that he is, vainly hopes something will turn up.

I’m not sure how much of what I’ve written here is really in Look Back in Anger, as Osborne wrote it; and how much comes from director Jo Bonney’s fine realization of it at Classic Stage. How much is derived from Reg Rogers’s brilliantly eccentric star turn as Jimmy? How much am I imposing on the play from my own quirky collection of issues and concerns? What’s great about this show is that it sets the heart and mind to racing—inward, mind you, trying to make sense of where we were in 1956 and where we are now.

Look Back in Anger is not a great play: its misogyny, for one thing, keeps it from being entirely plausible, as Osborne contrives to have the unlovable Jimmy loved by not one but two women, and competent, sensible, intelligent women at that. Alison, Jimmy’s upper-class wife, and Helena, her best friend who comes to live with them, are never more than two-dimensional dartboards for Jimmy’s punishing barbs. Enid Graham and Angelina Phillips work hard, but in vain, to make them something more.

The relationship between Jimmy and his best friend, Cliff, on the other hand, is perfectly realized by Mr. Rogers and James Joseph O’Neill. It’s really the only uncomplicated thing about Osborne’s hero: a steadfast loyalty to the rare and diminishing few who have been constant in his life.

When I read Look Back in Anger, the cadence of Jimmy’s vitriolic dialog sounds in my head like John Cleese’s, as Basil Fawlty; that harassed innkeeper from ‘70s British TV is the comic cousin to Osborne’s Angry Young Man. Mr. Rogers never sounds like this: in this extraordinary performance he has softened Jimmy; yet he has made him, simultaneously and paradoxically, much more savage. Listen to the way he garbles the ends of his sentences, and watch the way he thrashes restlessly about the tiny flat—he’s not so much a caged animal as a tamed one: defanged and declawed, he slashes angrily at his captors but to no avail. It’s a riveting study in powerlessness.

Classic Stage Company says its mission is to re-imagine the classics for contemporary American audiences. This production does exactly that, giving us a fresh and valuable look at a play we are too apt to dismiss as dated or irrelevant. By boldly and beautifully articulating the hollow, unfulfilled promise of the postwar generation, Look Back in Anger just may be the defining play of the second half of what we once called the American Century. As we reach the final months of that century, certainly the time is ripe for us to look back.

The answers are Dame Edna, Dame Edna, and, of course, Dame Edna. The Australian mega-star, who modestly tells us in her program bio that she is "probably the most popular and gifted woman in the world today," has never been one to shirk from telling it like it is. Now she’s telling it eight nights a week at what she refers to as the "intimate, tucked-away Boooothhh Theatre" (which is of course nothing of the kind, sitting snugly in the very center of the Theatre District just steps away from Times Square). Yes, Dame Edna is on Broadway, and furthermore she’s a hit—it’s looking like she’ll be with us for quite a long time.

This is positively a good thing: Dame Edna is spectacularly funny, and her more-or-less one-woman show entitled Dame Edna: The Royal Tour is deliciously entertaining. (For the record, two leggy "Edna-ettes" are also on hand, along with hard-working pianist/errand boy Andrew Ross, but it’s Dame Edna’s show from start to finish.) It’s probably the funniest show on Broadway right now; it’s certainly the most interactive. Dame Edna says she thinks of us not as an audience but as a focus group: the whole two-and-a-quarter hours, in fact, are given over mostly to chitchat with various folks in the front rows of the orchestra. She asks a lady to describe the color scheme of her bedroom; she quizzes a young mother about the babysitting arrangements she has made to enable her to attend this very show; she takes an informal survey regarding how the audience members traveled to the theatre today.

Yes, this is the show that cares; as the Dame reminds us, The Phantom of the Opera is certainly not going to ask us about our personal lives, but SHE WILL. And—here’s the point—she’s always ready to puncture our delicate egos, deservedly or not, with a well-placed barb or an ever-so-subtle jibe. "You remind me of myself," she tells one unsuspecting patron early in the show. "I used to try to make my own clothes, too." Dame Edna’s insults are broad and pointed and very, very funny; and they’re always delivered, as she will be the first to tell you, in a very caring and loving way. And lest you feel the least little bit offended by one of her remarks, take heart that you’re in very good company: Janet Reno and Queen Elizabeth and Mayor Guiliani, to drop just a few names, all come in for similar treatment during the course of Dame Edna’s show.

At this point, a note for the uninitiated might be in order. Dame Edna Everage, to give her full name, is the outrageous creation of a very bright Australian actor named Barry Humphries. Mr. Humphries first appeared as Edna some forty years ago, and although he has enjoyed considerable success in his own right, Edna’s fame and popularity eclipsed his long ago. At some point during her career, Mr. Humphries promoted Edna from simple Australian housewife to Dame and now to mega-star. She’s starred in her own shows on the West End and on television and she’s written a hilarious autobiography called My Gorgeous Life. Dame Edna is the ultimate manifestation of the Age of Celebrity, a woman who is famous simply because she says she is—and because she is utterly unwilling to entertain arguments to the contrary. Deflating the pretensions of more or less everyone in the universe while doggedly holding on to her own, Dame Edna is a brilliant satirical creation, with her own extraordinary longevity and popularity offering perhaps the most persuasive explanation of all about her iconic status.

Mr. Humphries is a great actor and a greater showman: he plays Dame Edna—and works the crowd at the Booth—masterfully. Note, though, that while some of the fun of this show is that it is, on many levels, an elaborate put-on, it is unequivocally NOT a drag show. And while the show is certainly gay-friendly—Dame Edna sings a song in Act Two that goes "I never thought that I would see so many/Friends of Kenny," a reference not only to her "artistic" son Ken but also to the gay code phrase "friend of Dorothy" of years past—it’s not especially pitched to gay sensibilities. (If anything the sensibility is old time British Music Hall.)

No, Dame Edna is for everyone, from the rather cowed-looking small boy she brought on stage with her at the beginning of her show the night I was in attendance, to the equally bewildered-looking senior citizen who was her last victim, made to dress up as the Queen Mother and rewarded with a garish pair of Joe Boxer shorts. Make at least one pilgrimage to the Dame and be prepared for anything to happen: this is truly interactive theatre, which makes it dangerous and exciting. And be ready to be a good sport. You will have a wonderful time.

Mr. Toland’s characters are instantly recognizable as the people with whom we pass our lives from nine to five. Take, for example, Carla, the awkward, shy woman of indeterminate age who steadfastly does all of her work and follows all the rules, yet never can figure out why everybody else seems to be having a better time. Or consider Pamela, the perky, upwardly mobile manager who troops around the cubicles with a painted-on smile and a clarion voice: a manager who has everything except irony. As portrayed by Andrea Alton and Christine Carroll, Carla and Pamela feel like old friends; in fact, I wondered if these two actresses had been spying on a couple of my co-workers.

Carla and Pamela say the same meaningless things that we all say in offices, and here’s where Mr. Toland proves himself such an apt dramatist, for he has captured the inanity of this small talk with remarkable fidelity. Getting the details of real life down so perfectly is no mean feat: Mr. Toland’s eye and ear for detail are extraordinary.

I haven’t told you the story yet; let me do so now. Our hero is Andrew Steeves, a gay man nearing his 30^th birthday, a struggling actor who has worked in this office for almost four years, someone whose chronic dissatisfaction with virtually everything in his life has brought him near the breaking point. Within two months, things go from bad to worse: the endless rounds of auditions are more and more fruitless, his boyfriend Brian has decided to dump him, and he’s getting decidedly mixed signals—which he consistently misreads—from his gay co-worker Paul.

Eventually Andrew implodes, as he must; as the title of the play suggests, Andrew solves his problems by re-booting himself. The journey toward this fresh start propels this play, and though it’s a sometimes rocky one with more fits and starts than might be absolutely necessary from a dramaturgical standpoint, it has the ring of truth. Mr. Toland’s characters tend not to behave the way we want them to, and so the blithe moments when we imagine we’re in a punchy contemporary satire or a gay romantic idyll eventually give way to a sort of measured, bittersweet reality. It brings us up a bit short, and it makes Andrew and his colleagues less heroic than we might like them to be. But in its way it’s as familiar and real as Pamela and Carla’s idle and empty chatter.

George Henderson stars as Andrew, and he has some terrific moments, notably a big second-act speech in which he suffers something like a nervous breakdown in the middle of an audition for a student film. Mr. Henderson tends toward archness, though, and this makes Andrew less sympathetic than he ought to be, especially in comparison with Peter Mugavero’s enormously appealing Paul. Jiffy Iuen plays Dana, a co-worker who has been promoted into management; she’s quite sympathetic in the play’s most difficult role. Carolyn Messina has two showy turns, first as a bizarre woman named Bonnie who is Andrew’s partner at an audition, and later as a nice, middle-aged lady named Eileen who comes to work in Andrew’s office. The aforementioned Andrea Alton and Christine Carroll round out the cast; Ms. Carroll, good as she is as Pamela, nearly steals the show in a brief cameo as the Reader from Hell at another of Andrew’s auditions: Eugene O’Neill has never sounded quite like this.

Ctrl + Alt + Delete is a fine first play: it’s not altogether satisfying, but it’s earnest, honest, funny, and entertaining. Mr. Toland is writing from the heart, and it shows. He should be encouraged to write again.

Some background: Shockheaded Peter is inspired by The Struwwelpeter, a collection of short stories written by a German doctor named Heinrich Hoffman in 1844 to amuse his young son. Dr. Hoffman’s sense of what would tickle a child’s fancy is rather different than, say, Dr. Seuss’s: the stories are outlandishly nasty and gruesome: unsettling little fables in which children who do not do what they are told meet frightening, violent deaths.

This is, to be sure, off-putting source material, but it turns out to be dazzlingly theatrical in the hands of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, who are the directors of Shockheaded Peter, and Julian Bleach, Anthony Cairns, Graeme Gilmour, Tamzin Griffin, and Jo Pocock, who created and perform it. Take, for example, the tale of Harriet, a little girl who fails to heed her mother’s warning not to play with matches and winds up engulfed in fire. It’s interpreted here with awesome ingenuity and economy, with Harriet’s plain monochrome skirt slowly but steadily subsumed by her petticoats—a riot of hot oranges, reds, and golds—until in the end she has disappeared entirely in their dancing flames.

Similarly spectacular is the story of Conrad, a little boy who won’t stop sucking his thumb, even though his mother tells him that the Scissors Man is going to snip it off with his shears. Conrad is rendered here as a big-eyed, oversized puppet, and the ominous black-clad Scissors Man indeed has his way with him, hacking off both pudgy thumbs and letting loose endlessly flowing billows of blood-red cloth. Poor Conrad doesn’t even get to rest in peace: it’s not long before a gigantic and genuinely frightful insect swoops down and devours him.

What’s amazing is that these truly gruesome morality tales become breathtaking, beautiful works of art in the hands of Shockheaded Peter’s creative team. Lasting little more than a minute or two, they inspire gasps of awe rather than horror, so sublimely lovely and original are they in their imagery. The puppetry, especially, is unfailingly impressive; the high point of the show, for me, is the story of The Man Who Loved to Shoot His Gun, rendered entirely as a puppet show. A sort of Victorian version of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, this tale features a relentless hunter and a shrewd hare who turns the tables on him. The puppets themselves don’t look all that extraordinary, but when powered by the nimble hands (and imaginations) of Mr.Gilmour and Mr. Pocock they spring to life. The moments when the hare races away from the hunter are—sorry—poetry in motion; they’re like miniature ballet-like riffs on the essence of speed.

Shockheaded Peter peaks so spellbindingly that its valleys and plateaus inevitably let us down; they also come far too frequently. In between each of the set pieces, and accompanying many of them as well, are musical numbers performed by a band called The Tiger Lillies. This avant-garde trio consists of Adrian Stout on bass, Adrian Huge on a remarkable assortment of drums and other percussion instruments, and leader Martyn Jacques on accordion. Mr. Jacques also sings, in a grating voice that lies somewhere between falsetto and shriek. The music sounds, unremittingly, like a recording of "Mack the Knife" played at 78rpm with a rusty needle; the lyrics are comprehensible only about fifty percent of the time. I won’t say that the songs don’t work in context, because they often do. But their device wears thin—quickly. This is not a cast album I would particularly want to own.

Also interrupting the proceedings at frequent and regular intervals is Julian Bleach, our garishly off-kilter host who, like a cross between the Emcee in Cabaret and Fagin in Oliver Twist, serves as our sardonic and slightly unsavory guide into the relentlessly bizarre world of Shockheaded Peter. Mr. Bleach pops up constantly in various guises to generally good effect, but like Mr. Jacques he wears out his welcome before the evening has quite ended.

As I’ve said, there is much here that is exciting, beautiful, and original; see Shockheaded Peter for its stylish, cutting-edge story-telling, so breathlessly theatrical that, at its best, it makes The Lion King look like Howdy Doody. But be prepared for a fair amount of downtime: Shockheaded Peter is disappointingly uneven. In the end, it peters out rather pitifully, squandering its final quarter hour on cheap theatrics—a particularly glaring miscalculation given the high level of sophistication of what precedes it.

The very first thing we see in the new musical Saturday Night Fever is the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which connects Brooklyn with Staten Island, stunningly rendered in chrome miniature by Robin Wagner against a background representing the alluring New York skyline. It’s a neat stage picture, but it quickly disappears, to be replaced by an impressionistic view of the homely Brooklyn neighborhood where the play’s hero, Tony Manero, lives. And then the back walls part and Tony himself appears, in a bright and familiar polyester suit, striking the pose that made John Travolta famous and disco, for a time, iconic. The Bee Gees’ hit "Stayin’ Alive" starts blaring through the theatre’s sound system and the teeming crowds of Tony’s neighborhood start dancing to its insistent, pulsing beat.

It’s a gutsy way to begin the stage version of one of the best-known films of the last couple of decades: the energy of this large but taut ensemble, propelled by an emphatic bass line, almost makes us forget the movie’s unforgettable opening sequence. Memories of the film—and in particular of its star—will haunt the show until the finale, but there are moments, when the stage is filled with the sights and sounds of authentic disco, that this Saturday Night Fever does achieve a level of excitement and spectacle that manages to temporarily subsume them. This is by no stretch of the imagination a great musical, but it’s never less than competent: for theatregoers who are fans of the film or newcomers to this material, Saturday Night Fever promises a good—but not great—time.

The best sequences take place inside 2001 Odyssey, a Brooklyn disco which has been designed here to the high-tech hilt by the wizardly Mr. Wagner, with a flashy mirror ball and an even flashier mirrored ceiling beyond that reflects, in neon Technicolor, the pulsating life on the dance floor. We get to hear several of the landmark tunes of the disco era in these scenes: "Night Fever," "Disco Inferno," "You Should Be Dancing," "Nights on Broadway," and "More Than a Woman" are all served up here. And if the choreography that Arlene Phillips has devised for each of them is mechanical and repetitive, the dancers themselves—numbering about two dozen or so—are talented and sexy and easy to look at. Engulfed by Mr. Wagner’s deco fantasy and glowing under Andrew Bridge’s intoxicating lights, they give off a good deal of much-needed electricity.

Most of the rest of the show, though, just lays there: in the book scenes around Tony’s neighborhood and—especially—in the sloppily integrated musical numbers, sparks never fly and theatrical magic is never made. Saturday Night Fever the film is character-driven, all about explosive desire inside a passionate, ambitious kid. But Saturday Night Fever the musical is plot-driven, attempting to juggle several tangled and clichéd storylines without ever showing us the soul of its hero. The disco soundtrack of the original was the backdrop for Tony Manero’s inner life; the same songs, uncomfortably morphed here into expository show tunes and ballads, feel limpid and trite.

Given the unenviable (impossible?) task of re-creating Travolta’s signature role is James Carpinello, who is handsome, sexy, and charismatic. On the dance floor, he is probably more realistic in the role than Travolta was: he moves like a kid from Brooklyn who thinks he might be good, which is to say that he lacks the natural grace and effortlessness of a professional dancer. As a result, despite undeniable stage presence and a real instinctual flair for acting this role, Mr. Carpinello is unsatisfying as Tony. He works enormously hard though: he is onstage for almost the entire show and solos or takes lead in no fewer than nine musical numbers, which would have been a heavy load for even, say, Ray Bolger or Tommy Tune.

As in the film, this is very much Tony’s show: Mr. Carpinello’s co-stars have little to do here. Orfeh, who plays Annette (the girl who loves Tony) sings rousingly (though indistinctly) but acts rather woodenly; Paige Price, as Stephanie (the girl who Tony loves) looks and dances great but comes up short in the vocal department. (Note that Ms. Price has been given a Barbra Streisand hit, "What Kind of Fool," for her only solo; like Mr. Carpinello, she’s got giant shoes to fill.) Bryan Batt is campily over-the-top as disco deejay Monty, but he never really gets a chance to shine in the role.

Savvily, the creators of Saturday Night Fever have tacked on a finale medley that brings the entire cast back on stage to shake it up to "Night Fever," which is certainly the catchiest tune in a score that we mostly know by heart. This tactic, though unsound from a dramatic perspective, is entirely effective: the show ends on a very up note, and the audience leaves happy and satisfied. I think nearly everyone who sees Saturday Night Fever is going to realize that this is not as finely-crafted a piece of work as it could be. But I don’t think most of them are going to care; this show delivers the songs and dances we expect, and sends us out of the theatre with the Bee Gees’ best insistently re-playing in our heads. 

Escape from Happiness takes place in the kitchen of an old, slightly rundown house in a not-so-classy section of a large city. It's home to Nora, a good-natured, slow-moving, fairly batty middle-aged woman; her daughter Gail, who is tough, sensible, and a little high-strung; Gail's husband Junior, an affable but rather dim fellow. Also living here is Tom, who is dying of some unspecified disease; Tom is, according to Nora, a stranger who looks exactly like (and coincidentally has the same name as) her husband, who deserted the family ten years ago after trying to burn down the house.

We first encounter this clan in the throes of crisis: Nora, Gail, and the baby have returned from a shopping trip, only to find Junior sprawled on the kitchen floor, battered and bleeding, the victim of some unnamed assailant or assailants. Soon a pair of police detectives have arrived to investigate Junior's beating, which they seem to think is connected with organized crime. Naturally concerned about this, Gail summons her two older sisters to the house for a family meeting, but finds it hard to focus these two self-centered women on the problem at hand: the middle sister, Mary Ann, has reached a "crossroads" in her life (something she does, apparently, every three months or so) and has left her husband and child; the eldest, Elizabeth, is preoccupied with her law practice and her crusade against police brutality. In the middle of all this, Mary Ann decides to announce to the family her discovery that Elizabeth is a lesbian.

As if things weren't complicated enough, Mary Ann and Elizabeth are also both struggling with deep-seated fear and anger (respectively) against Tom. A pair of bungling professional criminals keep showing up in the basement; as does a pair of incriminating garbage bags filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drugs. And the behavior of the two police detectives is both heavy-handed and mysterious.

Mr. Walker surprises us by sticking a fairly elaborate crime caper inside this wacky study of dysfunctionality. Amazingly, he ties up the many loose ends by the time the final curtain comes down, taking his characters and his audience in all sorts of improbable directions along the way. There's the scene where Elizabeth takes one of the criminals as a hostage, torturing him with foul language and abuse before leaving him alone with daffy Nora, whose incessant babble turns out to be the real torture. And there's the scene where the three sisters let loose and engage in a savage, prolonged catfight, while Nora complacently sits at the kitchen table playing solitaire. Plus many, many others--hysterical set pieces that carry this off-kilter world to its logical, if excessive, conclusions.

Through it all, though, a strong familial bond holds this warped bunch together; believe it or not, their love really is palpable. The contrived happy (well, happy-ish) ending at the end of this twisty, bumpy journey is exactly the right payoff for this gang of lovable lunatics.

Mr. Sunderlin's staging is just right: he has each of his eight actors behave as if he or she is the (perfectly sane) star of his or her own show; the non-stop, off-the-wall antics happen more or less organically as a result. There are some terrific performances on view here, notably Carolyn Popp's gentle, batty Nora, Elissa Groh's militantly explosive Elizabeth, and Ellen Daschbach's twilight zone-ish Mary Ann. (I loved the moment when Ms. Daschbach turns on Ms. Groh, feeling betrayed because Elizabeth has turned out not to be a lesbian after all.) Steve Brady and Michael Brandt (as the professional crooks) and Chris Lindsay-Abaire (as the more dangerous of the police detectives) provide fine support in smaller roles. But perhaps the best performance of all is that of Erik Van Wyck, as dopey, clueless Junior: observe the look that comes over his face when Elizabeth screams out details about her sexual proclivities in response to Mary Ann's baiting. He's dazed and confused--but very, very interested. Here and throughout, Mr.Van Wyck demonstrates superb comic flair and timing; he's very funny.

As is this play: Escape from Happiness at Vital Theatre Company is a delightful surprise, a playful, silly, slightly subversive family comedy that's as outrageous as it is good-natured. 

For them, Rosario needs grand, unfettered space; in Mr. Spangler’s remarkable set, which is a sort of 3-D model of Rosario’s view of the world, he gets it. Far off to the left is a dark, shadowy corner where his onetime girlfriend Vicky now lives with a hard-nosed New York City cop; near this metaphorical no-mans-land are a couple of chairs representing the office of Vicky’s doctor. Occupying centerstage is the big, opulent apartment of a rich gay white man named Morris: just a couple of expensive-looking pieces, actually, sprawled leisurely and indolently across the larger part of the stage, backed by some tall steel frames that represent the floor-to-ceiling windows of Morris’s living room. We don’t get to see the spectacular views of park or river that these windows undoubtedly command, however; this is Rosario’s world, and so the windows only look one way—in.

Vicky is pregnant. Rosario has focused all of his hopes and energies on fulfilling one goal: to give his unborn son everything that he never had. And he is prepared to do whatever he must to achieve this goal, including turning his back on his family, his heritage, and his most cherished values.

He finds an unexpected accomplice, and mentor, in Morris: from this man, who is materially wealthy beyond Rosario’s imagination but utterly bankrupt morally and emotionally, he learns that only ruthlessness and determination lead to success. In Morris’s world, denying and repressing one’s own essence is not hypocrisy but efficacy (witness his own secret and repressed homosexuality); the ends always justify the means in this savage philosophy. And so naïve Rosario comes to learn the workings of the American Dream from one of its masters.

Barefoot Boy with Shoes On shows us how dreams and nightmares collide on the margins of society: the lives of people like Rosario are so invisible to us in the great American middle class that we don’t recognize the power of urges like desperation and envy. It’s neither comfortable nor easy to sit through this play, but it’s finally completely affecting. What Mr. Sanchez does here—with poetic precision—is to allow us to see the world through someone else’s eyes. This is why Mr. Spangler’s set is such a triumph, by the way, because it encapsulates the author’s intention with such visceral impact.

Mr. Spangler’s is not the only artistic contribution, of course; Mr. Sanchez is splendidly served by Primary Stages’s production in every department. This includes Debra Stein’s simple but evocative costumes and Deborah Constantine’s subtle lighting; as well as the company of six actors, led by Nelson Vasquez in an impassioned and memorable turn as Rosario. At the helm of this production is Primary Stages’s artistic director Casey Childs; his work here is outstanding.

In the end, Mr. Sanchez leaves it for us to decide whether Rosario is a hero or not: what’s best about this play is its refusal to judge anyone in it. Like the contradictory image that gives the play its title, there is nothing straightforward about the world depicted in Barefoot Boy with Shoes On. As Rosario learns from Morris, after selling him one of his socks, it’s possible to have nothing and to have something at the same time. The trick is figuring out which is which.

The satirical barbs and diabolical absurdities that emanate from the deliriously twisted and fevered mind of Brian Parks are almost always funny: that's why his most recent play Goner, at The Present Company, is so much fun. Abetted by director (and apparent soulmate) John Clancy, and superbly served by a talented and skillful cast, Mr. Parks's hospital-themed comedy keeps us in stitches (pun intended). Whether resorting to the cheapest of shtick (naming one of his characters Dr. Hoyt Schermerhorn, for example, which is funny if, like Mr. Parks, you live in Brooklyn) or giving vent to poetic flights of fancy on the subject of excrement in its various forms, Mr. Parks is determined to make his audience sit up, take notice, and lose control of their faculties. Is it great art? Probably not. But the comedy quotient is so high in Goner that you're bound to find something in it that will amuse you. And it portends works, by a more mature version of Mr. Parks in the future, that may just qualify as the real thing.

The premise of Goner is that the president has been shot and has been sent to a hospital in Washington, D.C. for life-saving emergency surgery. Unfortunately, this particular hospital is run by a gang of incompetents, and their inability to help the president is exacerbated by the arrival on the scene of a pair of equally unqualified FBI agents. There's also a giant brain tumor roaming around, as well as a lab technician who wants to be a documentary filmmaker and a surgeon who wants to be a toy company entrepreneur.

As promising comically as this ridiculous scenario is, Goner actually spends very little time on it. Indeed, this is hardly a plot-driven affair: it's really a series of blackout sketches, some literally just a few seconds long, poking fun at hospitals, doctors, FBI agents, and politicians, and reminding us why we should never place any trust in any of them. In one vignette, a doctor looks down sadly at the two pieces of a sawed-in-half magician's assistant and says "I'm sorry, there was nothing we could do." In another, one FBI agent calmly and wordlessly ties the other's shoes, leading to the inevitable punchline "Thanks. I should figure that out someday." In still another, the ghost of Abraham Lincoln appears to the dying president and urges him to come to heaven because it's air-conditioned.

Goner would be nothing more than a modern-day Hellzapoppin' if Mr. Parks didn't come up with a substantial number of wonderfully original comic ideas. But he does, and that's why Goner is worth your time. He has his chief surgeon, for example, invent a new toy called "Chemotherapy Barbie" ("Pull a string on her back and she begs for morphine"). He has his would-be filmmaker rhapsodize about how her forthcoming movie (about African-Americans) will have real social value ("I uplifted a race today, and boy are my arms tired"). And he has the head of the hospital testify about his early specialty of post-modern medicine ("It's a school of thought that says the patient doesn't actually exist." "Do you still believe this?" "No, it totally undermines your ability to bill.").

Though often off-the-wall, sick, and/or tasteless, Mr. Parks's humor is nevertheless awe-inspiringly prodigious. And in this production of Goner, it's served up under the best possible circumstances. Director John Clancy keeps things going at warp-speed, which is precisely what's called for; he's also realized a lot of the visual jokes with great aplomb. Perhaps his happiest contribution to this collaboration is casting an ensemble of actors in Goner who seem to share his and Mr. Parks's wacky absurdist sensibility. All eight are excellent, but David Calvitto as hospital head Warren Wyandotte and Paul Urcioli as chief surgeon Ecorse Southgate are especially memorable. 

Stars in Your Eyes takes place in a small town called Milford, somewhere in America in 1962, at the dawn of the Space Age, before the twin catastrophes of Vietnam and Watergate soured our national mood so decisively. Here live Reginald Barclay (Mr. Lutken), an idealistic astronomy teacher at the local high school, and Charles Swanson (John Braden), his boss, the gruff but kindly principal, a widower. Here, too, live Helen Stevens (Heather MacRae), the opinionated and square-dealing proprietress of the town’s dance studio, and Annie Patterson (Ms. Walsh), her best friend, a teacher in the studio and single mother raising the teenage daughter of her best friend, who died a year ago. They’re an improbable quartet, to be sure; but they’re real and charming and we immediately begin rooting for these two as-yet unmatched couples to find each other.

They do, but not without complications; otherwise there’s no show. The main one is spoiled rich girl Leigh Hunt-Smith (Crista Moore), who is engaged to Reginald. Leigh orders him to take some dance lessons so that he won’t embarrass her at the wedding, which sets things nicely in motion. Reginald, meanwhile, is fighting to save the town’s astronomical observatory from closing down, a cause that eventually wins the support of Annie, Helen, and Charles.

The specifics of the plot are not what’s important here, however. What I like best about Stars in Your Eyes is the way Mr. Mayrelles uses his songs to effortlessly glide his characters through their courtships. These people talk about events that propel the action, but they sing about what they feel and what they want. By the end of the evening’s second musical number, "Somebody (More or Less) Like Me," we not only know everything we need to about Helen and Annie, we love them for it. And likewise in other songs, such as Charles’s "Another Day," Annie and Reginald’s duet "Stars in Your Eyes," and Reginald’s too-brief "Take Me to Heart," we really get under the skins of these people, and into their hearts. And they come into ours.

Mr. Mayrelles has also written two bona fide show-stoppers in this score. "Men!" (see photo at right), which comes right at the top of the second act, is a coy comic duet for Helen and Annie that demands a couple of additional verses for the deserved (but so far unaccorded) encore. And "Why Do We Dance?" is a lilting waltz performed by Helen and Reginald that leads into a charming dance that is the emotional highlight of the evening. (Mr. Mayrelles also answers the question posed in this song’s title with unexpected success; he’s no slouch in the lyric-writing department.)

Mr. Mayrelles’s material is undoubtedly enhanced by the terrific cast on hand for Stars in Your Eyes. I’ve already told you that in Mr. Lutken and Ms. Walsh he has an ideal leading man and lady; these two performers make Reginald and Annie vulnerable and smart and very real; they sing beautifully, too. John Braden plays Charles with simplicity and empathy; Crista Moore, in the largely comic role of Leigh, finds all the laughs without overselling. Heather MacRae is as miraculously invaluable here as she was as the "lesbian next door" in Falsettos, providing a warm, wise center to the proceedings (and singing effortlessly and enchantingly).

Gabriel Barre’s direction tends toward the pedestrian; he is hampered, perhaps, by the small size of the Cherry Lane’s stage. James Youmans’s spare unit set is appropriate, though occasionally cluttered. But Jennifer Paulson Lee’s choreography is lovely, and Pamela Scofield’s simple but elegant costumes are exactly right.

I alluded, at the beginning of this review, to some trouble spots: Stars in Your Eyes is not perfect, though I like it so well, I wish that it were. The principal problem is in the character of the Man in the Moon, popping up throughout the evening to narrate, move things along, and, deus-ex-machina-like, ensure the proper outcome. I don’t know why Mr. Mayrelles thinks he needs this device: Reginald and Annie and Charles and Helen seem to have no trouble finding their way to one another all by themselves. If anything, what’s called for is someone subtly omniscient (like El Gallo in The Fantasticks). But what we get, particularly in James Stovall’s vulgarly overblown performance, is a cross between Pippin’s Leading Player and Cabaret’s Emcee. It’s a serious misstep, one that I hope will be remedied if and when Mr. Mayrelles revises this promising work. (I’d love to see that happen; I’d love to see this show in a slightly snazzier production in a slightly larger venue, where its potential could be fully realized.)

Even so, Stars in Your Eyes is probably the finest new musical to arrive in New York this year; Mr. Mayrelles is certainly the most exciting new composer-lyricist to emerge in quite some time. So, in spite of its flaws, I say hooray for Stars in Your Eyes, and urge you to visit the Cherry Lane Theatre and give it a look and listen. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

No matter what else I have to say about the new Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate, let me assure you that it feels like a hit: audience response was very enthusiastic, and I'm sure that the critical response will generally be likewise. I have some reservations about this production, but I also have a real and sincere appreciation for its assets. They are, more or less in order of importance:

A truly glorious score by Cole Porter: "Why Can't You Behave?," "Wunderbar," "So In Love," "Were Thine That Special Face,"--all of which sound great --plus the incomparably witty lyrics of "Always True to You in My Fashion," "Where is the Life That Late I Led?" and "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" (I actually laughed out loud during this last number, even though I know all the words by heart).

A breakout performance by Michael Berresse: He plays Bill Calhoun (Lucentio in the Taming of the Shrew play-within-a-play). He's bursting with energy and personality, and he's an extraordinary dancer: watch him in "Tom, Dick, or Harry" and especially in his show-stopping second act solo "Bianca." He doesn't have enough to do here, but he will in his next show.

A solid, witty star turn by Brian Stokes Mitchell: He's ideally cast as the egomaniacal Fred Graham/Petruchio--commanding, dynamic, and gloriously, insufferably vain. He sings strongly and plays the comedy--high and low--with sophistication and panache.

The outstanding work of these three gentlemen offer sufficient reason for you to see Kiss Me, Kate (it's going to be tough to get tickets, though--at least for a while). Elsewhere, however, I find little to get excited about here. It turns out that the book-- which was indisputably state-of-the-art in terms of sophistication and structure back in 1948, when it was written--has not worn as well as one might have hoped. Worse, to compensate for its presumed creakiness, director Michael Blakemore has instructed his players to perform in the broadest of styles: every joke is punched up, every opportunity for a belly laugh is exploited. So when Amy Spanger as Lois Lane sings a famous line from "Always True to You in My Fashion" about a Harris Pat meaning a Paris hat, she shows us exactly where on her body Mr. Harris patted her. And when Marin Mazzie's shrew Kate abuses her Petruchio, she does so with a swift kick to the privates that sends him reeling.

In a very few instances, some liberties have been taken with the original script: they stand out, glaringly, as serious missteps. The character of Harrison Howell, Lilli Vanessi's fiancé, has been re-written to be a caricature of Douglas MacArthur (he is actually given the line "guns don't kill, people do"); he and Lilli are made to sing, rather foolishly, the interpolated "From This Moment On." And a dance sequence called "I Sing of Love" climaxes with four young women jumping barefoot into a vat of grapes, conjuring memories of a famous I Love Lucy episode but almost nothing else.

Indeed, all of the work of choreographer Kathleen Marshall is subpar: despite having a corps of excellent dancers and a host of breezy, jazzy songs, she has provided little that is interesting or original. And, curiously, veteran designers Robin Wagner (sets) and Martin Pakledinaz (costumes) have come up woefully short here, as if bereft of inspiration.

I am finally forced to conclude that whoever is in command lacks faith in the material, and it reduces this Kiss Me, Kate to the coarsened, homogenized level of much of what it's competing with on Broadway (e.g., Jekyll & Hyde, Annie Get Your Gun, Footloose). With Messrs. Berresse and Mitchell on hand, and with all those wonderful Cole Porter songs, Kiss Me, Kate can't help but be entertaining. But--at least to this observer--it's just not terribly good. 

It must, of course; but thankfully in this good-natured adaptation of Samson Raphaelson’s 1925 play, another energetic number is just around the corner: this piece, which began its life as a dour and mawkish melodrama, has been re-imagined here as a big-hearted backstage musical romance. As such, this Jazz Singer has more in common with, say, 42^nd Street than the very famous Al Jolson movie that shares its name. I suspect it would be interesting to see a production that adheres more faithfully to the original script of this old warhorse, but the present incarnation—adapted and directed by Mr. Sabellico for Jewish Repertory Theatre—almost certainly has Mr. Raphaelson’s original beat in terms of entertainment value. Despite some occasional lapses in continuity and logic, and in spite of the necessarily modest production values imposed by an institutional off-Broadway theatre, The Jazz Singer feels most decidedly like a hit.

The Jazz Singer tells the story of Jack Robin, né Jake Rabinowitz, a cantor’s son who longs to sing jazz and ragtime. Over his father’s vigorous objections, Jack leaves home and eventually lands a leading role on Broadway. On opening night, though, word comes that Jack’s father is dying and, for the first time in his career, cannot sing "Kol Nidre" at that night’s Yom Kippur service. Will Jack forsake his dream of stardom and replace his father at the synagogue?

Of course he will; and he will also—somehow or other—attain stardom anyway. This production of The Jazz Singer is no clearer than the movie was about how Jack manages to reconcile with his family and still take the entertainment world by storm singing the likes of "Swanee" and "Rock-a-bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody." What we remember is Jolson saying to his Yiddish mama "You ain’t seen nothing yet!" And what we cherish here is star-in-the-making Ric Ryder tearing into "Let Me Sing And I’m Happy" or "Carolina in the Morning" with vigor and unabashed joy. Leave coherent storylines for other shows; let The Jazz Singer warm your heart just by wearing its own on its sleeve.

There are things wrong with this revival of The Jazz Singer. The lyric to a song like "Mammy," famously performed in blackface by Jolson, doesn’t scan very well in 1999; Mr. Ryder tries but fails to give it the zing that Jolson unfailingly brought to it all those years ago. And in fact this hard-working young performer may be stretched a bit thin here, all but running out of steam before he’s done with the socko "Born in a Trunk"-styled finale. He’s out of breath before he hits that big note at the end of "Swanee"; he gets the audience to join him in a singalong of the last of the evening’s hit parade of standards, "April Showers."

But, hey, the singalong is fun; there’s no point in knocking either show or star when, for the most part, they’re both so darn engaging. Mr. Ryder dances and sings like a pro: he’s not Al Jolson, (nor, for that matter, is he Gene Kelly): what he is is a talented young man who is going to find his own style and win us over in a show written expressly for him.

I’ve already told you that the two-man chorus of Peters and Swoboda are terrific; let me now add that Mr. Ryder’s leading lady, Beth Leavel (whom you may recall from the original cast of Crazy for You) is sensational too, matching all three of these gentlemen step-for-step in winning musical sequences set to "Baby Face" and "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee." Evalyn Baron, as Jack’s long-suffering mother, and Reuben Schafer, as family friend Yudelson, provide invaluable support. (Mr. Schafer gets to do "Sonny Boy," another of the numerous signature Jolson tunes included in this score, and he does it splendidly.)

Choreography is by Kirby Ward; it’s swell. The colorful costumes are designed by John Russell, and Thomas M. Beall has provided an ingeniously economical unit set which has been seamlessly integrated into Mr. Sabellico’s clever production. Best of all, perhaps, is the on-stage playing of Christopher McGovern and his four-man orchestra (piano, trumpet, reeds, and percussion). In arrangements of more than a dozen hit tunes from The Jazz Singer’s own era, these musicians sound terrific. Even if Mr. Sabellico’s handywork can’t quite rescue The Jazz Singer from its own hopeless hoariness, Mr. McGovern’s band won’t fail to send you, at least for a while, on a pleasantly nostalgic journey to a time when the marquees of Broadway blazed with the names of shows just like this one.

The particular short-sighted individual on trial in this play is Victoria, a young, upwardly mobile black woman. Expensively and stylishly dressed, her hair dyed and lacquered, Victoria has brought suit against two of the icons of the Jim Crow era--women who, by virtue of their mere persistence in contemporary culture, are holding her back. These defendants are Mammy Louise, who looks suspiciously like Aunt Jemima (from the pancake box) or Hattie McDaniel (from Gone with the Wind), and Safreeta Mae, a long-haired, wild-eyed, barefoot slave girl whom we instantly recognize from the covers of countless politically incorrect paperback bodice rippers of long ago.

It doesn’t take Ms. Leslie very long to make it clear where her sympathies lie (indeed, her title gives it away). In the course of about two hours of "testimony" from Victoria, Mammy Louise, Safreeta Mae and half-a-dozen of their acquaintances and colleagues, it becomes eminently clear that Victoria is the guilty party here. Her adamant desire to squelch the images of her ancestors amounts to the same thing as denying their humanity. Victoria may not like what she sees when she looks back upon the history of African-American women but she cannot erase it. The stories of Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae must be told. And they must be remembered.

Trial suffers a bit from its own artifice: despite the presence of a judge, defense and prosecuting attorneys, and an enormous American flag on the rear wall, the proceedings are never really convincingly judicial. Nevertheless, Ms. Leslie has filled her play with numerous scenes and speeches that are splendidly effective, giving earnest and resonant voice to the passions that led Ms. Leslie to put pen to paper in the first place. The most forceful of these are given to Mammy Louise, whose innate common sense, dignity, and serenity are shown to have been put to the test in a searingly honest monologue that suggests what a life in slavery really may have meant. But other passionate and persuasive arguments are made by others, including some wrenching and suitably melodramatic testimony by Safreeta Mae, and a stirring and pointed summation by the defense attorney that invokes the names and words of Civil Rights leaders from W.E. DuBois to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is no question that Trial derives a good deal of its strength from the estimable ensemble of actors gathered for this production. Brenda Denmark and Petronia Paley are vigorously implacable and intelligent opponents as, respectively, defense counsel and prosecutor. Carla Brothers finds in Safreeta Mae a delicate balance of toughness and sadness that feels exactly right; JoAnna Rhinehart, interestingly, brings much the same qualities to the vulnerable plaintiff Victoria. Peter J. Macon demonstrates impressive versatility in several roles, while Barbara Montgomery is dignified but sassy as the presiding judge. Ebony Jo-Ann is simply galvanic as Mammy Louise, turning Ms. Leslie’s speeches into arias that give voice to the pain and suffering of an entire people.

Videotaped excerpts from the likes of Imitation of Life and Amos and Andy provide a neat social context for the play. But in the end, Ms. Leslie convinces us that as much as we’d like to exorcise our guilty consciences by expunging these offensive film clips from our collective memory, it’s vital that we not do so. Black or white, male or female, the only way we can build a future together is by acknowledging the truth about our past.

Jack lives with his niece Sophie, an earnest, bright young woman who finds salvation in working the land with her uncle. She, too, has a secret desire: to win the heart of Michael Ashe, a local doctor and part-time ecology activist who is Jack’s best friend. Everyone knows how Sophie feels except for Michael; he is infatuated with the beautiful Helena.

Rounding out the household are Jack’s patrician mother Elizabeth, a spoiled but sensible woman who can (and will) launch into a tirade at a moment’s notice protesting, for example, the media’s treatment of Hilary Clinton; Waffles, a gentle but somewhat slow-witted young man who works with Jack and Sophie on the farm, so-named because of his poor complexion; and Mary, the elderly black housekeeper whose common sense and decency single her out as the one person in the extended family that everyone respects. Together these eight individuals pass a spring and summer in which nothing happens but everything changes: when the play is done, lives that were once inert have been irrevocably transformed, even though everyone is more or less where he or she was at the start.

If you know the works of Chekhov, then you will have recognized his Uncle Vanya in all of this: Mr. Cohen has based his play on that work, and the characters and events of Uncle Jack mirror the original rather faithfully. But Uncle Jack is no mere translation; or, rather, it is precisely and felicitously just that: the extraordinary thing that Mr. Cohen has accomplished here is to find what is essential and timeless in Chekhov and recast it in thoroughly original, thoroughly contemporary terms in this very special play. The melancholy and the despair that we associate with Chekhov are all here, but what’s most palpable in Uncle Jack is the sense of constantly missed connections. In wonderful, telling moments, like the one where Helena struggles to stifle a yawn while Dr. Michael babbles passionately about West Virginia’s devastated forestlands, people who honestly care for one another consistently fail to give each other what they need.

For me, the very human dilemma at the core of Uncle Jack is summed up in a brief scene near the center of the play. Professor Kaufman has gathered the family together to tell them of his desire to sell the estate; this announcement enrages Jack, who sees in Kaufman’s plan connivance and betrayal—this is a frontal assault on the very foundation of Jack’s sense of self-worth. He cries out against Kaufman and to his family in real pain. And then—and here’s the moment I’m talking about—his mother reaches out and comforts him, cradling his head in her lap, but telling him at the same time that she really thinks that her son-in-law is right. The ineffable sadness of this moment is something we have all known at one time or another; finally, it is the aloneness of Mr. Cohen’s characters that makes them resonate so strongly.

Mr. Cohen, who is the artistic director of the Worth Street Theatre, has also staged the play, and he has done so beautifully. In every department, he has enlisted associates who have realized his vision with economy and grace, from the melancholy bluegrass score composed and played by Steve Bargonetti and Diane Gioia to the rich, evocative lighting of Chris Dallos. Mr. Cohen has brought together a superb ensemble of actors, anchored by the deeply-felt performances of Gerald Anthony’s Jack and Bernard K. Addison’s Michael. Most memorable of all, I think, is veteran actress Leila Danette, who brings the old servant Mary to life with dignity, sensitivity, and warm good humor.

The Roundabout Theatre Company has announced a high-profile Uncle Vanya for Broadway next spring; work this rich can’t be done too often, and indeed we are privileged to get to see what are bound to be two very distinct takes on the same themes one after another. Whatever you do, though, don’t decide to pass up Mr. Cohen’s Uncle Jack while waiting for that other show; this sad, funny, and unerringly true play is not to be missed.

Ok, so you’ve figured out that I had a really great time at Sail Away. It’s not, by the way, a show that I knew much about: after its initial run nearly 40 years ago, it pretty much disappeared off the radar screen. It turns out be a very sixties musical comedy, meaning that it has a bountiful and tuneful score of would-be pop standards, two juxtaposed romantic couples (one singing, one dancing), and lots of colorful characters and interesting locales. The main story concerns Mimi Paragon, a middle-aged divorcee who works as cruise director on an ocean liner, and Johnny Van Mier, a younger man traveling on the ship with his bossy mother. There’s never any doubt that Mimi and Johnny are going to wind up together, any more than there is a question whether handsome young Barnarby Slade and sweet, pretty, innocent Nancy Foyle will end the evening in a clinch despite her initial protestations to the contrary.

The fun, of course, is in getting there, and here—especially with the spectacularly stellar cast assembled for this particular production—we get more than we have a right to expect. Ms. Stritch, as Mimi, wows us with her trademark deadpan delivery; no one can throw away a line the way she can. She also has a very funny first act number called "Useful Phrases" in which she reads a series of preposterously inane phrases from her Italian guidebook—sounds silly but in her hands it’s comic gold. Later, she pulls us up short with an affecting rendition of a lovely ballad called "Something Very Strange" that is startlingly moving in its simplicity. And then she tops herself, as already mentioned, with that show-stopping turn of hers just before the finale.

Almost stealing the show from Ms. Stritch—like that’s possible—is Marian Seldes, who plays a self-important literary grande dame, a woman who writes overblown romantic novels and turns a supercilious eye to the rest of unworthy humanity. Ms. Seldes has a field day in this role, turning every phrase into a deliciously arch pronouncement. When her niece (who is acting as her secretary) asks her how to spell a particular word, she pulls herself up and declaims, in a majestic manner worthy of, say, Queen Victoria, "I neither know nor care."

And then there’s Jane Connell, another of our theatre’s great treasures, playing one half of a seemingly sweet elderly couple (her real-life husband Gordon Connell plays the other half). Ms. Connell gets her due in the second act, in a wry comedy number called "Bronxville Darby & Joan" and she’s a joy to watch: the final payoff in verse three is a veritable treat.

Jerry Lanning, a pleasant leading man with a clear tenor voice, plays Mimi’s love interest Johnny; others on hand include Jonathan Freeman as the ship’s purser, Alison Fraser as a socialite with a bratty child, and a very talented young man named Paul Iacona as that badly-behaved youngster. The orchestra, conducted by Ben Whiteley, sounds glorious in the unamplified Weill Recital Hall. In every department, this Sail Away is a splendid experience, reminding us how unassumingly disarming musical comedy used to be in days gone by.

This production was conceived as part of the year-long tribute to Noel Coward, in honor of the centennial of his birth. But the raison d’etre of this staging of Sail Away is indubitably Ms. Stritch, who presides over the proceedings with the warmth, grace, and unmitigated delight of a hostess of a particularly successful party. Watch her turn around in her seat on stage to listen to the orchestra during one of the musical interludes, or smile appreciatively as her co-stars score with a joke or a well-turned song: she is beaming with pride at being the center of this extraordinary event. All that we need do is bask in her incandescent glow.

In Dinner with Friends, Donald Margulies has written the play of his generation, a drama that taps into the collective psyches of those of us who came of age in the '70s with unerring precision. Margulies puts before us two archetypal married couples: Karen and Gabe, exemplars of earnest yuppie solidarity, and Beth and Tom, free spirits who find they must decouple to achieve self-actualization. In the '80s we might have sided with Beth and Tom, who free themselves from an unworkable marriage to pursue their respective individualities. But it’s the '90s, and Margulies understands that Karen and Gabe are the admirable characters here; as Gabe says, their values are the rock on which nothing less than civilization rests. And it is the betrayal of those values by self-centered Beth and Tom—and not the compromises and accommodations that Karen and Gabe find themselves forced to make every day—that finally threatens to destroy the sometimes shaky foundations of Karen and Gabe’s marriage.

This is unsettling, scary territory that Margulies is visiting here, because it’s so familiar. We all know people like Karen and Gabe and Beth and Tom; the dialogue rings so true in this play that it feels, in places, like a replay of a conversation we just had a day or a week ago with our sister or best friend or ex-husband. We’ve visited friends for dinner and lingered casually around the dining room while the kids troop upstairs to watch a Disney video for the umpteenth time; we’ve watched in dismay as a loved one announces his need to follow his true nature and abandon his family; we’ve witnessed the cataclysmic transformations of people we thought we knew, morphing oxymoronically into middle-aged adolescents who spend their days rollerblading and their nights having hot, uninhibited sex with significant others that they regard as playmates.

This is the world Margulies exposes in Dinner with Friends, and he lets it fester before our eyes like an uncauterized wound. He is showing us the rampant destructiveness that is our age’s central tragedy. It’s not pretty.

Which is why, I think, the creative team behind this production of Dinner with Friends seem so afraid to let the play’s blunt honesty stand on its own.  Margulies’s theme is clearly conveyed in his text, but director Daniel Sullivan, actors Matthew Arkin, Lisa Emery, Kevin Kilner, and Julie White, and set designer Neil Patel have all pulled some punches in their realization of that text on stage. There’s a frenetic, forced quality to the proceedings, like the nervous fits of laughter that we sometimes get when we sense danger close at hand; tense moments are not allowed to stand unchecked, but are defused with jokes instead. There’s also a sense of pulling back, particularly in the performances of Arkin and Emery, who portray Gabe and Karen: there’s almost a fear that if the reality of the characters they play were truly expressed here, it might be too gapingly painful to watch. Gabe, to mention the most serious example, has a genuine epiphany in the play’s second act, but Arkin so underplays this scene that it almost slips by unnoticed; this causes serious damage to the integrity of the piece.

Naked bravery is what’s called for here. Dinner with Friends has a point of view, but it has been obfuscated here by what seem like deliberate efforts to lighten the evening’s tone.

For all I know, Margulies approves wholeheartedly of what’s been done to his play; at any rate, there’s little point in belaboring the flaws of a production that, in spite of them, is undeniably effective and successful on its own terms. White, in particular, is masterfully dry as Beth, and Emery and Kilner have some terrific, telling moments as Karen and Tom. The yuppie chatter flows naturally and easily and cuts deep when it needs to; this Dinner with Friends is thankfully neither brainless nor witless.

But it is, I think, finally soulless, and that’s a pity. Margulies’s last play in New York, Collected Stories, was lucky enough to find a second production in as many years to help us appreciate what a fine and thoughtful work of theatre it is; with any luck, Dinner with Friends will also get a second hearing. I certainly hope so: Mr. Margulies has given us, to invoke Shakespeare, a mirror to hold up against ourselves; we don’t need to be wearing rose-colored glasses when we look into it.

Told in flashback, the story of Yoshke Muzikant is simple and touching. At the beginning of this century, Sheyne, a pretty young woman who was orphaned at an early age, works as a servant in the home of rich, snobbish Madam Lurye. Sheyne is in love with her employer’s son, a selfish fellow named Semyontshik; but although they apparently had some sort of romance at one time, he has spurned her in favor of a rich young woman with a handsome dowry. The impoverished but sweet-natured fiddler Yoshke Muzikant, meanwhile, is in love with Sheyne, though she cannot stand the sight of him. When Yoshke wins 160,000 rubles in the lottery, he impulsively gives all of the money to Sheyne. But she uses the money to buy her way into a marriage with Semyontshik, proving that for both her and Yoshke true happiness can only come from sacrificing everything for the one you love.

This sad, old-fashioned little tale becomes enchanting theatre in the hands of Dimov and Buloff and their present-day collaborators Ms. Reissa (who directed) and Mr. Mlotek (who is responsible for the music). The characters are portrayed with sincerity and depth by an expert company, and the play’s gentle mixture of melodrama and folk wisdom is warmly and effectively realized. Quiet moments, like Sheyne’s hopeless declaration of unrequited love entitled "Du, Du" ("You, You"), are sadly affecting; joyful moments, like the exciting song and dance "Makhtzhe a Lekhayim" ("To Life!") which celebrates Yoshke’s lottery win, are blissfully exuberant and bountiful.

There are also occasions for broad, unabashed comedy, none so sublime as the duet "Oy, Es Tut Mir Vey!" ("Oy, It Hurts!"), performed by Madam Lurye and her friend Hodes, the chicken seller. It happens that these two ladies are played by Shifra Lerer and Mina Bern, who are legendary grandes dames of the Yiddish theatre (and deservedly so). This is a pairing to rival, say, Merman and Martin back on that Ford TV special in 1953: watch these two old pros attack this number with the brio and verve that only comes with star quality. It’s the ecstatic peak of a show that contains many high points.

It’s also one of the few times when the simultaneous translation (available in English and Russian) is absolutely unnecessary: I shucked off my headphones immediately, the better to relish the work of these two extraordinary performers. Elsewhere, though, you will want the recorded simulcast (unless of course you can understand Yiddish); it’s generally unintrusive and undeniably helpful.

Ms. Lerer and Ms. Bern are only the most celebrated among a company that is, in every way, outstanding. Rachel Botchan is fine as the unfortunate heroine Sheyne, and she sings very prettily. I.W. Firestone (as an eager grave salesman) and Keith Howard (as Yoshke’s exuberant father, Berl the water carrier) have some wonderful moments; Deana Barone is enormously appealing as Madam Lurye’s mischievous daughter Reyzele. Best of all is Spencer Chandler as Yoshke, perfectly capturing all of that character’s wistful, dreamy optimism, his joy, and his sadness. Mr. Chandler has a duet with Mr. Howard near the end of the show that is especially winning; watch, too, for his brief, thrilling leap into a moment of kazatzki during the "To Life!" number.

Accompanying the performers are three klezmer musicians, Struli Drezdner, Annette Huepper, and Lisa Mayer. They’re wonderful, leaving the audience clapping their hands and tapping their feet even after Yoshke Muzikant’s final curtain has fallen.

On a crowded eastbound cross-country train from California, May and Raleigh find themselves sharing a compartment one December night in 1940. The war in Europe is very much on their minds: Raleigh has just been discharged from the service because he suffered some "fits" during training; May’s fiancé, the man she journeyed two thousand miles to visit for Christmas, has changed, disappointingly, since his enrollment in the army. It turns out that Raleigh and May come from the same small town in Kentucky, a tiny place called Corbin whose claim to fame is that it is the site of an annual fair called the Nibroc Festival. (Nibroc, Raleigh explains, is Corbin spelled backwards.)

If fate were all that governed our lives, Raleigh and May’s course would be easy and clearcut; but it isn’t, and so it’s not. Raleigh is heading not to Kentucky but to New York City, with dreams of becoming a writer there, dreams that he feels are bolstered by the presence, on this very train, of the remains of the recently-deceased authors Nathaniel West and F. Scott Fitzgerald. May, on the other hand, says she wants to be a missionary, though we sense that she’s not absolutely certain of this. In fact, the only thing she will finally agree to with any confidence is that, yes, she will allow Raleigh to take her to the Nibroc Festival next summer. Fade out.

Fade in: a year and a half has passed, and we are at the 1942 Nibroc Festival. It turns out to be something of a disappointment, according to Raleigh, whom we are at first slightly surprised to discover here, affecting the homespun attire and ungrammatical dialect of the country farmer. We find May here as well, of course, in the company of an itinerant preacher and in the neatly-pressed uniform of a local schoolmarm. Things have not gone as hoped for either one; by the end of Scene Two, it begins to look as if the love we are certain these two share will never come to fruition.

I leave it to you to discover how Ms. Hutton ties this all up: I will only tell you that she does so in a manner that is slyly surprising and immensely satisfying. What I love most about Last Train to Nibroc is that Raleigh and May finally wind up with exactly what they thought they wanted. But they can’t fulfill their dreams without also fulfilling their destiny.

It’s hard to imagine a better production of Last Train to Nibroc than this one. Alexandra Geis and Benim Foster, who have played May and Raleigh since the first incarnation of this piece at the 1998 New York International Fringe Festival, truly inhabit these characters; in performances that are warm and smart and compassionate, they find all the foolish inconsistencies of these ordinary young people and bring them vividly to life. Michael Montel’s unassuming directorial hand wisely leaves his actors and author space to breathe and his audience wide berth to imagine: his staging is the embodiment of simplicity. A single piece of furniture—a bench—is transformed before our eyes from train compartment to park bench to front porch swing, with just some upholstery and some atmospheric lighting (courtesy of Si Joong Yoon and Christopher Gorzelnik). It is exactly all that we need to frame this timelessly lovely romance.

Last Train to Nibroc asks us to believe wholeheartedly in the power of love, even while it reminds of the imperfect and imprecise ways that we ordinary mortals try to cope with it. It’s a theme that’s as simple as it is true; it’s also one we seem to be losing track of in our millennial madness. How fortunate we are to have this modest and touching little valentine to the human heart in our midst.

As that name may suggest to you, Ms. Parks has taken as inspiration for this play Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. That novel, you will recall, takes place in colonial Massachusetts and tells the story of Hester Prynne, a young woman whose adulterous affair with a local minister causes her to be branded, literally, with a scarlet "A." In the Blood begins under a bridge in a large American city in 1999, where the word "SLUT" has been scrawled in white chalk across the slab of concrete where another Hester makes her home. But Ms. Parks is not really concerned with such obvious, outward judgments; instead she makes us confront here the insidious, implicit judgments we make everyday about Hester and people like her. This is a play about human beings who somehow slip between the cracks of society—the forgotten, embarrassing detritus of the contemporary urban landscape. How is society to deal with those who fail to honor or uphold its values? And how can we maintain our humanity when we deny the humanity of some of our fellow human beings?

Hester has five children, each from a different father; for this promiscuous and careless breeding, the world has branded her a pariah. Uneducated and unskilled, Hester makes money the only ways she knows how, which usually means some pathetic combination of begging, prostitution, and indentured servitude. Forced to live on the streets, she nonetheless lacks real street smarts; the only effective instincts she possesses are maternal, and we see, immediately, that she is a devoted and loving mother, one who unfailingly and uncomplainingly sacrifices everything for the sake of her children.

Ms. Parks cannily shows us all that is admirable in her heroine—and there’s quite a bit—early on in In the Blood. What she does next is show us, or rather, remind us, that the world we live in has absolutely no place for such a woman. We meet Hester’s doctor, a troubled man who expresses sincere concern about the problems of the homeless and the dispossessed; his honest but impotent response is that since he can’t help all of these people, how is he to choose the one that he will help? For Hester he has only a dollar bill (drawn from a wad that looks like it contains a hundred of them) and a recommendation that she undergo a hysterectomy so she will stop having children.

We meet, too, Hester’s welfare case worker, an African-American woman who lectures her hollowly about the unlimited opportunities of upward mobility (citing herself as an example), but admits to us privately that she has nothing in common with her low-class charge. All that she has for Hester, finally, are another dollar bill (recompense for a vigorous massage that Hester administers during her visit) and a bag of sewing for which she will pay, upon completion, some paltry but unspecified amount.

We eventually also meet two of Hester’s lovers, men who were happy to sire Hester’s oldest and youngest sons but have not provided support of any kind since. You will not be surprised to learn that both find themselves able to rationalize their past actions and their refusal to help Hester now or in the future.

In the end Hester slowly, spontaneously combusts. In a glorious and spectacular outburst in the play’s final scene, Hester lashes out at the world that denied her her dignity and we are all implicated. Implicated, mind you: not blamed, not reproached, not judged; no one in this play is. Ms. Parks makes it clear that Hester fails to act upon many opportunities that come her way that might change her situation; she makes it clear, too, that the representatives of the outside world who touch Hester have good and substantial reasons for actions that seem thoughtless or cruel. The questions raised in In the Blood have no easy answers; indeed they may not have any answers at all. But we can’t function as a civilized society without sometimes confronting them. Ms. Parks compels us to do so with wisdom and courage. She forces us, the next time we pass a Hester on a Manhattan street, not to look away.

In the Blood is a remarkable piece of writing, and it has been blessed with an equally remarkable production at The Public Theatre. Director David Esbjornson has staged it in the center of the auditorium in the intimate Susan Stein Shiva Theatre, cannily providing us with a clear, close-up vantage point from which to witness this blistering drama. The spare, simple design—notably the harsh, raw lighting by Jane Cox—brilliantly serves the piece, as do the taut and complex performances of the six-person ensemble. Rob Campbell, Gail Grate, Bruce MacVittie, Reggie Montgomery, and Deirdre O’Connell each double as one of Hester’s children and one of the emissaries from the outside world; all are superb, with Ms. Grate’s monstrously refined welfare worker perhaps the most vividly realized among this splendid collection of very human portrayals.

Towering triumphantly at the head of the family and at the center of the play is Charlayne Woodard, who, in the performance of the season, is unforgettable as Hester. Ms. Woodard is probably best known for her work twenty years ago in the original production of Ain’t Misbehavin’ (she was the skinny one). Good as she was then, nothing in that stylish turn will prepare you for the raw power of her Hester. This is one of those performances that will become legendary: to witness it is—I mean this—an electrifying, shattering experience.

In the Blood has already been extended one week at The Public, and if there’s any justice in this theatre world of ours it will be extended for many many more. If you care about theatre and its unique power to rouse the human heart and soul in pursuit of a better world, then you must see this play. It’s extraordinary.

She recreates that long-ago moment in Putting it Together, the new musical review which is now playing at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre, and it’s absolutely magical: I think all by itself it's worth the price of a ticket. Like that other Carol (Channing, I mean), Ms. Burnett has that rare quality that makes her mere presence on a stage a palpably thrilling experience; all she has to do is that trademark tug on her earlobe and the audience erupts in heartfelt cheers. So to watch her perform brilliantly crafted material like "The Ladies Who Lunch" is a privilege and a joy, because she does so with so much intelligence and wit and authority, fully in command of her enormous talent as comedienne, actress, and, yes, singer.

Later, Ms. Burnett tops herself with a rendition of Mr. Sondheim’s "Getting Married Today," also from Company, which she reinvents as a show-stopping eleven o’clock song, its usual breakneck pace slowed to allow us to savor every one of its many, many jokes. (It’s like a funny "Rose’s Turn.") And in between these two numbers, Ms. Burnett's co-stars step in and do some show stopping of their own: Ruthie Henshall, the up-and-coming British star who recently played Velma in Chicago, rips into a comic song from the film Dick Tracy called "More" and makes you forget that Madonna ever came near it. Bronson Pinchot (best-known as Balki on TV's Perfect Strangers) delivers a spectacular "Buddy's Blues" (Follies), finding laughs in it that we didn't realize were there.  Handsome leading man John Barrowman gives the Company outtake "Marry Me A Little" a beautiful and thoughtful interpretation in what proves to be the emotional peak of the evening. And stalwart George Hearn recreates "The Road You Didn't Take" from Follies and then gives us a "Good Thing Going" (Merrily We Roll Along) that knocks us out with its grace and simplicity. I had never really appreciated the lines "And while it's going along/We take for granted some love will wear away" until I heard Mr. Hearn sing them here.

That, by the way, is the other wonderful thing about Putting it Together: it showcases nearly three dozen of Mr. Sondheim's theatre songs--many familiar, some not--and gives them a much-deserved rehearing. If you know Mr. Sondheim's work, then you will understand what a treat this proves to be: this material only grows richer and deeper and clearer the more we listen to it. They don't always feel seamless out of context: a song like "Hello Little Girl" from Into the Woods, for example, is very specifically about a pair of familiar characters (i.e., Red Riding Hood and the Wolf). But despite the occasional non-sequitur, everything included in Putting it Together works beautifully. Recall that the show is billed as a "musical review" (as opposed to revue): like that of other great poets of the ages, the collected works of Stephen Sondheim are entirely suitable for anthologizing. This show provides us with an opportunity to absorb and think about the prodigious output of our premier composer-lyricist over the past thirty-odd years: a chance to--sorry--put together what he has said to us about life, love, relationships, and art.

Especially art; especially the art of the theatre. For as much as Putting it Together offers a retrospective of the witty, clever, and sometimes wise words that Mr. Sondheim has written, it is also very much a celebration of the musical theatre. Mr. Sondheim wrote for this most rarefied of media because he had to: despite popular opinion to the contrary, he is the savviest man of the theatre of his generation. And so Putting it Together turns out to be a grand old '30s style revue, as stunning an exercise in pastiche as the "Loveland" sequence in Follies. It's no accident that Bronson Pinchot (in a brilliant, career-redefining performance, by the way) begins the show with the sly, silly "Invocation and Instructions to the Audience"; or that the show climaxes, organically but illogically, with a big number for its headliner Carol Burnett that otherwise would appear to be out of sequence if not entirely out of place. Please understand this about Putting it Together: There is not one narrative here, but rather thirty-four separate narratives. The story being told is the story of our lives, filtered through Mr. Sondheim's evolving sensibility over four decades. 

Director Eric D. Schaeffer has fashioned a thoroughly impressive evening of theatre around that story. He's blessed, as I've said, with an extraordinary cast, and they all have ample opportunities to shine. And of course he's got a magnificent collection of songs--there's not a dud in the bunch.  Add to that the simpatico orchestrations of longtime Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Tunick, the simple but effective unit set by Bob Crowley, the remarkable, provocative projections by Wendall K. Harrington, and a stunning suit created for Ms. Burnett by famed designer Bob Mackie and, well, you've got all the necessary ingredients for a significant hit. This is essential theatre: I don't know about you, but I'm ready to see it again. 

Forbidden Broadway's back and it's better than ever--certainly funnier and smarter than any of the shows it parodies. The format's the same as always: a hard-working pianist and four versatile actors perform a series of sketches based on the current crop of musicals on the Great White Way, most of them built around songs from those shows, re-cast with Gerard Alessandrini's wickedly witty lyrics. The cast is terrific this time around, and the material--roughly 80% of it brand new--is sharp and clever and hits the bull's-eye with remarkable consistency.

Much of the fun comes from the delicious surprises devised by Alessandrini and co-director/choreographer Phillip George and costume designer Alvin Colt, so I don't want to give too much away here. But expect richly deserved swipes at recent Broadway phenomena like Kiss Me, Kate's rather crass billboard photo, Aida's elaborate sets, and Contact's pre-recorded soundtrack. And watch for merciless, hilarious take-offs of the likes of Craig Bierko, Elaine Stritch, David Hasselhoff, Sarah Brightman, Patti LuPone, Elton John, and Heather Headley, to name just a few.

Each of the four singer-dancer-actors gets at least a couple of really wonderful moments. Felicia Finley does Aida's Headley to a "t" in a number called "It's Cheesy" and is a hoot as Charlie's Angel-turned-Annie Oakley Cheryl Ladd. Danny Gurwin scores big in a tour-de-force called "Sondheim's Blues" (to the tune of "Buddy's Blues" from Follies; eat your heart out, Mandy Patinkin), and is also pretty funny as Aida leading man Adam Pascal (check out the tattoo). Tony Nation is eerily on target as both Kiss Me, Kate's Brian Stokes Mitchell and The Music Man's Craig Bierko; he also gets to strut his stuff in the brief and inevitable Full Monty number.

First among equals has to be returning champ Christine Pedi, a veteran of many a Forbidden Broadway revue from days gone by. This extraordinarily talented (and funny) woman defies reason: how is it possible for one larynx to produce dead-on impressions of both Elaine Stritch and Barbra Streisand? Pedi's like a walking repository of the spirits of musical comedy divas, from Merman to Minnelli to LuPone, with Edith Piaf and Judi Dench (!) thrown in for good measure. Her Streisand number here, titled "Barbra Streisand's Farewell Tour" is superb; and her old standby "Stritch" ("You're so deadpan people think that you're dead") remains a howl and a half.

Speaking of "Stritch," Alessandrini does recycle a few old favorites here--if you've seen Forbidden Broadway before, you may recognize the Jekyll & Hyde, Cabaret, and Lion King parodies. But there's lots and lots of new material, including updates on the soon-to-be-departed Miss Saigon and Saturday Night Fever, plus a new song for Javert in the Les Miz skit. And this fall's newest shows--The Full Monty, The Rocky Horror Show, Seussical, and Jane Eyre--all get their due.

The best stuff in Forbidden Broadway, though, seems to come straight for Alessandrini's heart: a series of pieces that poke fun at, and sincerely despair about, the lack of passion and originality and creativity that's all-too evident these days on Broadway. Alessandrini is rightfully vexed by the soulless "dance recitals" that seem to be taking over the once-grand institution called the American Musical Theatre. His nostalgia for the glorious days of Merman and Martin make this edition of Forbidden Broadway a bit sadder than usual.

But  he's absolutely right. Shrewdly, he ends the evening with a rousingly optimistic number (to the tune of "76 Trombones"--what else?), predicting a return of the musical comedies we knew and loved. Wishful thinking, perhaps; but the perfect way to send out an audience cheered by this loving and lively tribute to Broadway--warts and all. 

Midnight Brainwash Revival takes place during the three days before New Year's, in the wide open spaces of Moab, Utah. Here, Serena and Kyrin Ridge are grappling with the apparent death of their father (lost in a Himalayan mountain climbing expedition), and in particular with the disposition of their inheritance, the Triple Zero Ranch. Kyrin and his fiancée Gemma want to sell the family homestead to a mysterious technocrat-entrepreneur known as Mordecon, an action to which Serena, vainly hoping that their father will return, is firmly opposed. But when Mordecon proposes marriage to Serena, she begins to rethink her position. Kyrin, meanwhile, meets up with a strange man called Casanova, whose love for the untouched and unfettered land around Moab foments a strong and unexpected bond between the two. Influenced by his new-found friend, Kyrin hesitates in completing the deal.

As the Ridges struggle to work out their uncertain futures--racing, by the way, against a midnight, December 31st deadline--the larger world around them finds itself hurtling uncontrollably toward that same millennial milestone as well. Indeed, Kyrin and Serena's Uncle Hooch, a Leary-esque druggie-guru-con man, is earning a living catering to the apocalyptic fears of the masses. Hooch eventually manages to convince Swagart, the Ridge family lawyer, that he is the Messiah, causing that comical personage to form a cult, on the spot, with a pair of tourists from Wisconsin named Vicki and Ted Dumbcowski as his chief disciples. There's also a trucker named Trash who has picked up a hitchhiking ex-convict named Spam: they eventually devise a plan to detonate a bomb (which they have tied to a hapless policeman, appropriately named Officer Softy) that threatens to blow everyone in Moab to kingdom come.

These paragraphs only hint at the convoluted goings-on that Mr. Bromley manages to juggle in Midnight Brainwash Revival. What ties it all together--apart from the metaphorical ball-dropping at midnight on New Year's Eve--is a continuous and irresistible propulsion forward. Kyrin and Serena and Casanova and Swagart and Hooch and Mordecon and the Dumbcowskis all want to know what's going to happen next: what are they about to become? And we, in the audience, lean forward in our seats in eager anticipation asking the same question.

The answer--a truly beautiful one, I think--is that they--we--can become whatever they--we--want. Without giving away too much of the ending, let me tell you that some characters abandon pastoral Moab for the rather different charms of New York City while others stay behind to live off the land; arch conservatives and wigged-out liberals drive off into the sunset arm-in-arm. Mr. Bromley gives us a world so full of bounty that even the literally dead get a second chance, thanks to the folks at Chillcor, a company specializing in "cranial cryonics."

Mr. Bromley's genius is given shape and voice by the talented members of Inverse Theater, who have mounted (and helped to create) this production . Producer/literary consultant Chad Gracia and director Howard Thoresen have done a splendid job realizing Mr. Bromley's vision, giving us a physical production that is remarkable in its energy, humor, and resourcefulness. (These two gentlemen also get a brief moment to shine in front of the footlights, as the representatives from Chillcor, at the very end of the play). Joshua Spafford's simple unit set proves wondrous in its versatility, while Karen Flood has provided delightfully appropriate but witty costumes for the various eccentric personalities who occupy the piece. (I loved, for example, the "Hello My Name is Swagart" name tag.)

An ensemble of sixteen actors bring those personalities to life with skill, commitment, and passion. Most memorable is Matthew Maher as the pompous hypocrite Swagart, who has a breathtakingly hilarious monologue (reminiscent of Malvolio's in the famous "letter scene" of Twelfth Night) in which he thinks he has been proclaimed Savior by Yahweh. Joshua Spafford scores as the villainous Mordecon, who lives (and dies) in the outsized, grandiose style that Mr. Spafford excels in. (Can anyone arch an eyebrow as prodigiously as Mr. Spafford?) Inverse favorites Al Benditt (as Uncle Hooch) and Hank Wagner (as a deus-ex-machina called Coyote, who keeps popping up in various guises throughout the play) are invaluable.

As we tiptoe gingerly--or leap headlong--into the 21st Century, it's good to have a play like Midnight Brainwash Revival to help us find our bearings. In this cynical age, Mr. Bromley's message of boundless hope sometimes feels as out-of-style as the very idea of a revel. Yet no one is as contemporary and in-synch with humanity as Mr. Bromley; perhaps in Midnight Brainwash Revival he's just ahead of the curve. This, at least, is what I choose to believe.

Mr. Deak essays the role of Truffaldino, the earnest and simple clown who decides one day to become exactly what the play's title promises. He arrives in Venice with Master #1, an impetuous youth called Signor Rasponi who is in fact his own sister Beatrice in disguise. For reasons that never make much sense (and don't really matter), Beatrice has come from Milan to find her lover Florindo. Her disguise, however, disrupts the planned wedding of Clarice and Silvio because Clarice was promised to Beatrice's brother (the one she's impersonating) until he was killed in a duel by Florindo. Florindo arrives in Venice soon after, of course, in search of his beloved Beatrice.

Confused?--of course you are, but don't worry: everything gets sorted out by the time the play is over. All you need to know is that Truffaldino manages to make Florindo Master #2, and then manages to keep both Beatrice and Florindo from finding one another for the full three acts of the play. To our delight (and their consternation), he also confuses their mail, mixes up their belongings, and leads each to believe that the other is dead. He simultaneously serves both an elaborate multi-course dinner; he receives a beating from each for his pains. In the end, he enlists both bosses to help him win Clarice's maid Isabella for his wife, even as all the trouble that his deception has caused is finally brought to light and sorted out.

A role like Truffaldino is rife with opportunities: Mr. Deak makes the most of him. Called upon variously to clown, cajole, cavort, and cower, Mr. Deak does all of these with exuberance and joyous aplomb. The centerpiece of his performance is the dinner scene, which is the finale of Act One, executed here as a balletic juggling act worthy of the Flying Karamazov Brothers: Mr. Deak, along with Marc Diraison and Neil Shah as the waiters, stops the show with this routine.

What's best about Mr. Deak's take on Truffaldino, though, is that he never forgets--and never allows us to forget--that this scamp is motivated almost exclusively by his empty tummy. Truffaldino's unabashed longing for his next meal utterly defines him; he's almost Pooh-like:  a servant of very little brain, innocently and cagily searching for the next pot of honey. It's a wonderfully deft, appealing approach to a character that can all-too-easily be rendered unpleasant.

Happily, the same light touch infuses every aspect of this production. Mr. Polgar has staged the show airily and jokily, pushing neither the farcical turns of plot nor the deliberately stale comic routines too hard. Everyone in the company is well-cast (and they all seem to be having a grand time); standouts include Elise Stone and Jason Crowl as Truffaldino's masters, Angela Madden as his beloved Isabella, and Cocteau mainstays Harris Berlinsky and Craig Smith as two feuding fathers who find themselves embroiled in the madness afoot here. Ellen Mandel's whimsical musical score proves ideal for the show; so, too, does Robert Joel Schwartz's simple unit set.

A final note: Beatrice and Florindo employ a real live slapstick to punish their wayward servant. (A slapstick, originally developed in commedia dell'arte performances hundreds of years ago, is a wooden paddle made of two sticks that make a loud noise when they slap together.) I've never actually seen one in person before--the slapstick lives on nowadays only through the raucous form of comedy that became its namesake: What a fascinating and delightful touch!

King of Hearts takes place in 1918 in a small village in France; it's the very last day of World War I, and although the soldiers on both sides of the conflict are ready to return home, they still have one more day's work to put in. So the Germans plant a bomb in this tiny town and the Allies evacuate it. But the inmates of nearby Ste. Anne's asylum don't know anything of the war or bombs, and when they discover that the town has been emptied of its regular inhabitants, they take it over for themselves.

Into this pixilated place comes Private Johnny Able, a dreamy American soldier who has volunteered to defuse the bomb in order to win a bit of glory for himself. Johnny is surprised to find the asylum's residents installed in a town he thought had been evacuated; he's even more surprised when they proclaim him the King of Hearts and ask him to be their ruler. Johnny is quickly charmed by the essential goodness and innocence of the people of Ste. Anne's, in particular the lovely young Jeunefille, with whom he immediately falls in love.

Johnny decides to become the King of Hearts, and spends a strange but happy day with his new-found subjects. Before the day is over, however, reality intercedes in the form of his Army Lieutenant, some German soldiers, and the bomb, set to go off at midnight and destroy everyone in the town. Johnny, feeling responsible for his "people," must figure out how to save them from the explosion. And he also must decide whether to rejoin the real world outside Ste. Anne's, or to remain in a community he has come to love.

It's a familiar fairy tale in its way; very much a blend of The Madwoman of Chaillot and Lost Horizon. From Lost Horizon comes the time-tested story of a man drawn to a strange and wonderful place, one that requires him to give up everything in order to find perfect happiness. From Madwoman comes King of Hearts' whimsical sensibility, which dares to ask who the crazy people in life really are: the supposedly normal folk who kill each other as a matter of course, or the blissfully odd ones who can't even conceive of the idea of harming another human being.

To this mix, Mr. Link and his collaborators Jacob Brackman (lyrics) and the late Steve Tesich (book) add some heaping doses of (now old-fashioned) 1960s liberalism. King of Hearts is unashamedly anti-war and just as brashly pro-love (all kinds, in fact: a pair of homosexuals is celebrated along with all the other "deviants" of the asylum). The authors clearly love their eclectic and eccentric creations: when the denizens of Ste. Anne's sing about what's important to them, in songs like "Nothing, Only Love" and "Now We Need to Cry" and "A Day In Our Life," we are convinced that their outlook on life is the correct one.

Elsewhere in Mr. Link's lovely score, we learn more about the so-called sane people: Johnny's anthem "Close Upon the Hour" is particularly rousing; the quiet chorale "Going Home Tommorrow," sung by soldiers on both sides of the war, is also especially moving.

All seventeen members of the cast do fine work here. Michael Magee sings the role of Johnny beautifully (although his acting is a bit stiff; but remember, he's still on book in this staged concert); Kerry Butler is delightful as his leading lady Jeunefille. Shaelynn Parker proves indomitable as the worldly (and world-weary) courtesan Madeleine, and T. Doyle Leverett is lovably, bombastically childlike as Jeunefille's adopted father Genevieve. Teri Gibson also makes a strong impression as the slyly regal Duchess of Diamonds, who, if she doesn't exactly see the world through rose-colored glasses, at least filters out its least rosy parts.

Gordon Joseph Weiss plays Demosthenes, a clown-like mute who, as the discoverer of King of Hearts Johnny, is catalyst for all of the wondrous events that befall him. Mr. Weiss created this role in the original production of King of Hearts and he is brilliant in it; what a privilege to witness a performance this extraordinary! 

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather see a King of Hearts become Broadway's next surprise hit than a game old chestnut like Kiss Me, Kate that has already had its day. That's not likely to happen, though; at least we have this (too brief) Musicals Tonight! engagement to satisfy our appetite for truly interesting and inspiring musical theatre. Go see King of Hearts: it's really rather special.

Let me explain. Another American begins with a recording of one of the interviews that Mr. Wolf conducted in researching this piece: a woman suspiciously takes Mr. Wolf through a litany of questions designed to provide her some assurance that the answers she is about to give won't somehow bring her harm: "Are you a policeman? Are you with the FBI or CIA? Are you in the military?"  It's an effective opening, helping us to understand right away the sort of strongarm tactics employed by the U.S. military to weed out gay service members, and the accompanying paranoia that results from them.

The rest of the show has Mr. Wolf impersonating the men and women he talked with, recreating segments of their interviews for us verbatim. He shifts deftly from one subject to another, with changes of lighting, posture, accent and timbre to guide us along. The mostly anonymous folks that he presents to us have useful and interesting things to say, and they say them with the eloquent inarticulateness of everyday speech. They are witnesses, though, not characters; the whole experience feels like a radio documentary.

And that's the trouble: documentary proves an uneasy fit for Mr. Wolf. Anna Deavere Smith uses a similar format in her shows about racial tension (Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992), but her purpose is to demonstrate the endless complexity of sociopolitical discourse: she allows people from all sides of the issue to testify in her shows, and leaves it up to us to make up our minds.

I don't think Mr. Wolf has any such intention: the material he has selected to include point us squarely to a single conclusion--one that I don't disagree with, by the way--that the current policy of the U.S. military toward gays is unconscionable. Sure, lip service is paid to the opposing viewpoint, but that's all it is; there's nothing even-handed about Another American. That's Mr. Wolf's privilege: it's his show. So while I applaud him for stating his mind, I am concerned that his use of the documentary form to do so smacks of dishonesty.

I think, too, that the shape Mr. Wolf has chosen for his work undermines its theatrical effectiveness. Real people don't talk like characters in plays: there's a reason why dramatists strive to capture the essence of real speech without faithfully recreating it. Nearly all of Mr. Wolf's subjects talk too much, hesitating and rambling artlessly until they are confident that they have said what they set out to say. I'm not sure, though, that putting these people up on a stage without giving them better lines to speak is especially empowering. In fact, I think it does the reverse: the centerpiece of Act Two, for example, in which we hear from the mother of Allan Schindler, a gay naval officer who was killed by his shipmates, never generates the emotional sparks that it should. In close-up, on film, her reality would overwhelm her ordinariness; on stage, though, she is diminished rather than enlarged.

But enough of the stories Mr. Wolf repeats here do have some resonance: A gay marine with an outstanding service record is arrested, beaten up, discharged, and winds up homeless on a Los Angeles street. A gay army corporal is charged with "conduct unbecoming" after participating in a drag show for a local AIDS charity. A gay Green Beret recalls his Vietnam service with pride and then recounts his arrest in a protest against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in front of the White House.

So, my problems with it notwithstanding, I conclude by telling you that Another American is a show that deserves to be seen. Allan Schindler's mother, along with the dozen or so other Americans who are depicted in Mr. Wolf's work, want their stories to be heard; each of us, as citizens of this perversely prudish land of ours, need to hear them.

But that was then; today, on stage, with its text somewhat revised by the author and with two fine but uninspiring actors in its leading roles, Amadeus underwhelms. It turns out to be nothing more than a well-made, interesting drama, and while that’s certainly nothing to complain about, neither is it especially cause for celebration. If you decide to see Amadeus—and I certainly encourage you to do so—you will be entertained and you will be engaged. But I don’t think you will be much enlarged by the experience: don’t expect any new or startling discoveries here. Instead, expect a supremely well-put-together work of theatre, one that is articulate and accessible and consistently intelligent; reassuringly familiar and surprisingly lacking in depth.

The title character of Amadeus, as you probably know, is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the brilliant but erratic child prodigy who composed some of the most glorious music known to man. The protagonist of the play, as you also undoubtedly know, is Antonio Salieri, court composer to Emperor Joseph II of Austria. Salieri is a dedicated musician with a gift for recognizing greatness in others but, alas, only a mediocre talent for creating greatness himself. He has come to Vienna from his native Italy in search of fame and glory, and in the court of the conservative, stodgy emperor he has found both. But when he hears the compositions that burst, seemingly endlessly, from his young rival Mozart, he declares war on God Himself.

Salieri’s envy, which turns into jealousy and then obsession, is grounded in his notion of entitlement: why should a careless, thoughtless, unruly child (all of which Mozart absolutely is) be blessed with boundless, infinite talent, while an educated, upstanding, deserving fellow like himself is saddled only with mere competence? This question—which of course has no answer—drives Salieri to betray Mozart in some not-so-subtle ways: acts of vengeance against an unjust God, wrought on his voice-on-earth Amadeus. What makes Salieri’s battle interesting is its irony: we know that for all his conniving, Mozart’s work will survive and endure while Salieri’s will be quickly forgotten.

And what makes Salieri tragic is that he knows this too. He hates God because God has endowed him with the one gift he can’t abide: He has made Salieri, alone among all of his peers, recognize the true extent of Mozart’s greatness. In Amadeus, we witness the attempted eradication of pure art by pure intellect. And we understand that in the end, it is art, not intellect, that is triumphant.

Amadeus has the power to be an affecting tragedy, I think, but it needs a vivid, larger-than-life Salieri to realize that power. In David Suchet, unfortunately, this production does not have the magnificently vainglorious Salieri it requires. Mr. Suchet shrinks into his role rather too well, giving us a Salieri who is small and petty and, well, mediocre: he shows us the self-loathing but it never feels all-consuming. Salieri’s obsession should eat away at his insides, palpably. But Mr. Suchet’s Salieri remains coolly in command of his jealousy, and as a result never becomes the outsized theatrical figure that he ought to be.

Michael Sheen, on the other hand, is a thoroughly memorable Mozart: his energetic, highly physicalized performance is almost exhausting to watch, with sweat and spittle pouring from his face as he throws himself perhaps too literally into the role of childlike, childish savant. Some of the outward manifestations of Mr. Sheen’s performance feel over-the-top, but they come from Mr. Shaffer’s script: the foolish excess energy, the giddy nervousness, the goofy giggle. But listen to Mr. Sheen explain, in Mr. Shaffer’s most eloquent language, how it feels to create music:

I tell you I want to write a finale lasting half an hour! A quartet becoming a quintet becoming a sextet. On and on, wider and wider--all sounds multiplying and rising together--and then together making a sound entirely new!...I bet you that's how God hears the world. Millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us!

 He has found the soul of genius here; in moments like this, he elevates Amadeus to the kind of transforming theatricality that it otherwise (and too often) falls short of.

Under Sir Peter Hall’s direction, the rest of the company does a smooth and satisfying job creating the Viennese court in which Salieri spins his intrigues. David McCallum (of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. fame) is fine as Emperor Joseph, providing him with dignity and even a bit of self-awareness that nicely balance his character’s essential dullness. Cindy Katz is wonderfully vibrant and feisty as Mozart’s wife Constanze; even in repose, watching or listening to others on stage, Ms. Katz is always interesting and charming to observe. J.P. Linton, Terence Rigby, and Michael Keenan are effective (if interchangeable) as three of the Emperor’s trusted advisers, worthy but unwitting representatives, here, of the undiscriminating and uninformed tastes of what we today call the media elite.

The production, designed by William Dudley and lit by Paule Constable, looks a bit less opulent than we might expect. But Mr. Dudley scores an early coup de theatre with a stunning mirror that reflects the audience right into Salieri’s deluded mind: we, of his future, are what his obsession with posterity is all about, after all. And near the end of the piece, as Mozart starts to lose his grip on reality, Mr. Constable gives us some memorable shadow figures that would seem to pop right out of the composer’s deluded and flailing consciousness.

So often in theatre expectation is everything: if you come to this Amadeus free of the baggage that this oh-so-popular play has carried with it these last twenty years, you will probably find yourself able to lose yourself in it. There’s no doubt in my mind on this point: Amadeus is not the masterpiece we thought we remembered. But it’s still a finely crafted work of theatre, and it has been produced here, if not brilliantly, then at least with respect and care. It’s eminently satisfying as long as you remember that it only flirts with the sort of greatness embodied by the man whose music inspired it.

Just because a show has music in it and plays in a theatre, it is not necessarily musical theatre. Such is the case with Swing!, the latest of New York’s hybrid entertainments to defy easy classification. It consists of nearly two hours of non-stop dancing and singing, all to the smooth and snappy accompaniment of a sleek big band-styled orchestra called The Gotham City Gates. There’s no dialogue, no story, no through-line, no point of view. What there is is swing music, lots of it, from Duke Ellington’s "It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing" to Louis Prima’s "Sing, Sing, Sing," with pretty much everything you’d expect in between (plus the occasional unfamiliar tune offering a contemporary counterpoint).

It’s pleasant and tuneful and entertaining in its way, but it’s hardly the sort of thing that a drama critic can really sink his teeth into: Swing! has more in common with competitive ballroom dancing or Olympic synchronized swimming than it does with the traditions of musical revue. The people on stage are good at what they do—very good, in some cases—but the vehicle in which they are performing has no theatrical purpose that I can make out. We could be watching Swing! on TV or in a nightclub or at Madison Square Garden (with the dancers’ and musicians’ moves magnified for us on one of those giant video screens): I’m certain the experience would feel more or less the same. The St. James Theatre, the grand old Broadway house where Swing!’s producers have installed this show, was once home to Oklahoma! and The King and I and Hello, Dolly!; that’s the only thing that Swing! has in common with the genre known as musical theatre.

Mind you, this isn’t a bad thing, but it’s tricky: the folks responsible for Swing! are marketing it as a musical of some kind or other. So all of the forgoing is by way of managing your expectations, both for the piece itself and for the perspective that someone like me necessarily brings to an evaluation of it. And now here’s my evaluation: I didn’t like it. Swing! is, simply, not the kind of show I go to the theatre to see. Lots of people in the audience at the performance I attended responded enthusiastically, but the experience for me was repetitive and unengaging. (I should add that while the response was enthusiastic it was not ecstatic; Swing! did not feel like a hit to me.)

That said, there were certainly a few musical numbers that I did enjoy. Foremost among these was "Cry Me a River," amusingly performed here by singer Laura Benanti and trombonist Steve Armour as a facetious bluesy duet, with Benanti’s crystal-clear voice saucily matched to Mr. Armour’s mellow licks: a sweet idea, in conception and execution. Benanti (who, by the way, you will not recognize as having played Maria opposite Richard Chamberlain in The Sound of Music last season), is the main reason you will want to see Swing!: she’s in total command of a burgeoning talent, as she demonstrates in her other number, a medley of "Two and Four" and "Hit Me with a High Note and Watch Me Bounce." We don’t get to see nearly enough of her here.

The same is true of the talented dancer Michael Gruber, late of Cats, whose first act solo "Billy-a-Dick" is one of the show’s few choreographic misfires and whose second act number "Boogie Woogie Country" is so brief it’s almost not there. Another veteran of Broadway musicals, Scott Fowler, registers strongly near the end of Act One in a Gene Kelly-ish ballet to "I’ll Be Seeing You" and then we pretty much never see him again either.

Top-billed soloists Ann Hampton Calloway and Everett Bradley get lots more stage time, though they are never particularly impressive. Bandleader/musician Casey MacGill has several numbers, too: he’s skillful but rather unassuming. Blonde, leggy Caitlin Carter, who has some attention-grabbing moments in "Blues in the Night," is the standout among the dance ensemble. Robert Royston and Laureen Baldovi do a showy number of their own devising in the country-western section of the program; Beverly Durand and Carol Bentley do some crowd-pleasing aerial choreography on bungee corded-swings to a song called "Bill’s Bounce."

The choreography is mostly by Lynne Taylor-Corbett: it’s competent but tends to look the same after a while. The eye-catching costumes are by William Ivey Long; serviceable sets and lighting are by Thomas Lynch and Kenneth Posner, respectively. As I’ve said, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, but to my mind there’s nothing terribly right with it either. When I spend $75 to see a musical, I expect something more substantive (and more substantial) than Swing! But I’m a drama reviewer, remember: what do I know about a show like Swing!?

Well into the second year of its run, Fully Committed remains as entertaining and crowd-pleasing a show as ever. Christopher Fitzgerald now plays Sam, the overworked and under-appreciated reservation clerk at a chic Manhattan restaurant who is the play’s hero; as well as some thirty other characters of varying disputatiousness and eccentricity with whom Sam interacts during the course of an eventful day. Fitzgerald follows Mark Setlock (who, with playwright Becky Mode, created these characters) and Roger Bart in this marathon acting extravaganza and he is quite good--engaging, likeable, and utterly in command of the outrageous parade of restaurant patrons and staff who talk, whine, scream, wheedle, cajole and berate Sam as the play progresses.

The idea of the play is simple enough: it’s a struggling actor’s revenge fantasy, in which Sam, who works at this horrible job solely to support a budding acting career, gets the best of his abusive boss, his neglectful agent, his annoying friend/rival, and his irresponsible co-workers; and winds up with cash in his pocket and an appointment with Bernie Gersten*. It’s a sweet conceit, one that resonates not just with actors but all the reasonably downtrodden in the world, which is to say practically all of us: there’s a little bit of Sam in everybody, and we can’t help but root for him.

The fun of the play comes from its gimmick, which is that a single actor portrays all of its characters. Sam spends the entire play alone in the restaurant basement, just him and five telephones; the actor playing Sam speaks both sides of all conversations. When Setlock starred in Fully Committed, he never stopped being Sam–all the other people were voices in his ear, filtered through his earnestly stalwart sensibility. Fitzgerald takes the opposite approach, shifting back and forth between Sam and his various callers. This makes for a broader interpretation: what’s gained are a host of belly laughs as we watch Fitzgerald transform instantaneously into, say, the horrifying snob, Carol Ann Rosenstein Fishburn, nervously fingering the (undoubtedly) pearl buttons of her designer blouse, while complaining for the umpteenth time about an "emergency" that she needs to discuss with Jean Claude, the restaurant’s snooty maitre d’.

What’s lost is a touch of humanity, I fear; this Fully Committed veers at times toward cartoonish caricature. But Fitzgerald’s outsized take–every bit as valid as Setlock’s more intimate one; in no way undermines the integrity of the piece.

Becky Mode’s hilarious script and Nicholas Martin’s fast paced staging ensure that the laughter never flags, and Fitzgerald gets all the requisite mileage out of Mode’s satirical creations: Bryce, effete and officious assistant to super model Naomi Campbell; Curtis, Sam’s cloyingly insincere agent; Rick, a relentlessly cheerful helicopter pilot; the aforementioned Mrs. Fishburn and many, many others. He also gets Sam’s hangdog charm exactly right.

At the performance I attended, every one of the Cherry Lane’s seats was – well – Fully Committed. This is a well-crafted, good-natured play that audiences love; it wouldn’t surprise me if that state of affairs persists for many more months to come.

* Note: Bernard Gersten is one of the producers in charge of Lincoln Center Theater.

I'm not sure if this means anything, but the song that lingered in my head after visiting Our Sinatra was "All the Way." There were plenty of other well-worn standards for my lazy brain to choose from: "Young at Heart" or "Where or When" or "Witchcraft," to name just a few of the 65 songs that comprise this new cabaret-style musical revue celebrating the life and career of Frank Sinatra. The concept of Our Sinatra is simplicity itself: a guy, a gal, a pianist (who sings, sometimes), and a bassist, all in fashionable evening attire by Ralph Lauren and Perry Ellis; some patter,  with the occasional dry anecdote; and lots and lots of singing. Most of the material is very familiar, and most of it is exactly what you'd expect to hear in a show celebrating the man who, according to co-conceiver Eric Comstock, was the most important singer in the world in the 20th century.

The format's familiar, as well-- indeed, too familiar for its own good: even loaded to the gills with songs by Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, Oscar Hammerstein, etc., Our Sinatra is only modestly entertaining. The highpoint is a song called "The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else," mostly because it's  unfamiliar (it's a 1924 Gus Kahn-Isham Jones novelty song). It's also charming and upbeat, something that unfortunately can't be said for the bluesy, smoky ballads that dominate the evening. And, with more than half of the songs crammed into one of those inevitable, insufferable medleys (34 tunes, by my count, in about ten minutes), we really don't get to relish the Sinatra oeuvre the way we might wish to.

Our Sinatra does justice to the music of its legendary subject, I suppose. But I'm not sure---especially at the prices being charged--that I'd be any happier there than I would be at home, listening to Frank on the stereo.