nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

45 Seconds from Broadway, Neil Simon's latest play, is in many ways his saddest. That's because, from where I sat, it felt very much like his last: a farewell--valedictory, if you will--to the Broadway that not so long ago celebrated him as its most prolific and successful practitioner. The Polish Tea Room, the friendly, schmoozy coffee shop on 47th Street where 45 Seconds from Broadway takes place, already feels mythical; the milieu of Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple and Plaza Suite and The Sunshine Boys seems lost forever, a vestige of a glorious Great White Way now given over, too much, to blaring poperettas and soulless extravaganzas.

So here's our premiere playwright taking a bittersweet and affectionate last look at the Broadway he knew and loved. 45 Seconds from Broadway is about a specific time and place and all that they stood for: kids from the sticks arriving in the Big City to make good; agents and artists making deals over borscht and bagels. Sure, that all still happens, but the rhythms are different, and so are the rewards. It's no coincidence that this play ends with one stage veteran heading for L.A. and a sitcom, and another to a fringe theatre in London, while the starstruck girl from Ohio does Arsenic and Old Lace in a church basement in Brooklyn. No real happy endings here.

But lots to laugh at--it's Neil Simon, after all; and lots to well up at, too. The play--which is practically not a play at all, actually--tracks a dozen Broadway types from summer to spring, in four more or less typical afternoons at the Polish Tea Room. Center stage--literally as well as figuratively--is a comedian named Mickey Fox, a hard-driving wise guy with a thick Jewish accent, an endless reservoir of humor, and a heart of gold: think Jackie Mason crossed with The Dick Van Dyke Show's Buddy Sorell crossed with Auntie Mame. Mickey is starring in a successful one-man show when we meet him in the summer, and negotiating half-heartedly with a British producer named Andrew Duncan who is thinking of casting him as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof in London. By the following spring, Mickey's show is closing and the offer on the table is, well, significantly less lucrative.

Mickey banters with a sassy black actress named Bessie James (she's the one who gets the TV gig), with South African waiter-playwright Solomon Mantutu, and with recent arrival Megan Woods, a budding actress who eventually signs on as a waitress. He also has an emotional and cathartic encounter with his older brother Harry, a man who has lived in his famous sibling's shadow all his life and now asks for something in return--a boost for his own wannabe-comic son. The scene between Mickey and Harry, which is the emotional high point of the play, gives Simon a chance to offer some heartfelt truths about the nature of comedy and of being comic, and also about the toll exacted by fame on the celebrity's family. It feels personal and honest, more so, I think, than anything else Simon has written.

Mickey also meddles in the affairs of the restaurant's owners, Bernie and Zelda, an elderly Jewish couple who dispense crusty advice and free pie to the young performers who frequent their establishment. And he also finds himself enmeshed, briefly, in the rather surreal world of Rayleen and Charles Browning, a bizarre and vaguely mysterious couple who invade the cafe in each of its seasons. Charles is frail and neat and silent; Rayleen is gregarious and talkative and eccentric (if not downright wacko). She's played--to the hilt, and then some--by Marian Seldes in a supremely funny performance. I don't know exactly what Simon has in mind with this pair: is she suffering from a form of dementia, perhaps? But they're sketched with love and--what else?--enormous humor.

So, too, are the play's other two characters, a pair of upper-middle-class matinee ladies named Arleen and Cindy, who are at once 45 Seconds' most peripheral and essential creations. They interact, mostly, just with each other; they chitchat about the show they just saw or are about to see: a backer's audition for a truly terrible musical about the life of Irving Berlin (only the Berlin estate wouldn't give the rights to any songs, so the score was by another composer who wrote songs that sound like Irving Berlin songs); a symbolic drama called "My Father Was a Grape" ("I didn't think they meant an actual grape"). Arleens and Cindys are still among us, thank God, but who knows for how much longer: Simon pays his most devoted audience a lovingly hilarious tribute with these two, who are brought to life with comic perfection by Judith Blazer and Alix Korey.

Indeed, the entire company is terrific: David Margulies (Harry), Lynda Gravatt (Bessie), Louis Zorich (Bernie), and Rebecca Shull (Zelda) are superb as the old-timers, while Kevin Carroll (Solomon) and Julie Lund (Megan) are engaging as the youngsters. Bill Moor (Charles) and Dennis Creaghan (Andrew) are solid in smaller roles.

John Lee Beatty's set is miraculous. William Ivey Long's costumes (especially a rather astonishing coat for Rayleen) are sensational.

Anchoring the entire enterprise is Lewis J. Stadlen, immensely warm and funny as Mickey in a star turn that would have been career-making back when Neil Simon was the king of Broadway comedy.

Today, work like Stadlen's is either taken for granted or taken to task by tastemakers; the supremely nuanced timing, the sophistication underlying the broad humor--these seem not to be appreciated so much anymore. And so the master makes fond farewell. He's gonna miss all of this, I think, and we're gonna miss him.

Tom Selleck makes the transition from screen to stage with the same effortless ease that his TV alter ego Magnum, P.I. used to solve even the thorniest murder mysteries. In his Broadway debut as cuddly iconoclast Murray Burns in Herb Gardner's lightweight comedy A Thousand Clowns, Selleck is affable, engaging, and both funnier and more charming than his character. Fans will not be disappointed, and neither will those less casually acquainted with his work.

But you may be surprised by the creakiness of Gardner's play, which is accentuated by John Rando's sluggish and sloppy direction and by serious miscasting in three of the play's six roles. A Thousand Clowns is set in the early '60s in a New York somewhat distant from the city we know and love today. Selleck's character, Murray, is a curmudgeonly non-conformist who is raising his nearly-11-year-old nephew Nick. He's an unemployed TV writer, fired from a job on a kids' show after he insulted his boss. He's idealistic and immature and lovably eccentric in an Auntie Mame sort of way.

Enter Albert Amundsen and Sandra Markowitz, emissaries from the Child Welfare Bureau who have come to investigate Murray and possibly take Nick away. Murray addles Albert and seduces Sandra; he also eventually acknowledges his responsibilities and gets his old job back. The plot feels rather trite nowadays (though I don't think it did back in 1962)  and overall the play is somewhat unsatisfying.

But the journey should be lighthearted and pleasant; and it would be, I think, if we could believe in it. But Selleck and Robert LuPone (who plays Murray's buttoned-down brother) are both twenty years too old for their roles; and Barbara Garrick is far too well-put-together to be at all convincing as neurotic, repressed Sandra Markowitz. About Nicolas King, the cutely pudgy nine-year-old cast as Nick, the less said the better: he resembles, far too much, the "grotesque cherub" that Murray jestingly calls him at one point in the play.

Bradford Cover (Albert) and Mark Blum (Leo, Murray's boss) excel in their roles. And Selleck, despite the vaguely unsettling (if inadvertent) problem of making Murray into a very middle-aged kid, is really quite fine, which is good news for the folks who want to see a TV star up close.

Mark Wendland's set for An Almost Holy Picture is utterly arresting: a mound of dirt, on which sit apparently random detritus of everyday life, sloping upward toward a long wooden platform, reminiscent of an altar, perhaps; to the side, dozens of jars filled with, as we come to learn, salsa verde, meticulously stacked; and nearby a pile of garlic bulbs.

All of this stuff gets mentioned and used in Heather McDonald's script; like the play itself, though, its meaning is murky and oblique. An Almost Holy Picture is about a man undergoing a crisis of faith, though undergoing may not be the right word, as this crisis has been lingering for a very long time. Samuel Gentle heard the voice of God in a New England cranberry bog when he was a boy and thereupon decided to become a priest. His calling takes him to the wide open spaces of New Mexico, but a terrible bus accident, in which several children are killed, leads him to question not just the priesthood but larger issues of religion.

So Samuel returns east, becomes groundskeeper at a cathedral, and marries an anthropology professor. After several miscarriages, they finally have a little girl, whom they name Ariel; the child has a rare disorder which causes her to grow hair all over her body: her downy fuzz must be shaved twice a week to keep her looking somewhat "normal."

The climax of the story comes when Ariel is nine years old. The family summers in the same New England town where God talked to Samuel so many years before; here Samuel's wife stars in a production of The Glass Menagerie and Ariel works at a camp for blind children. Ariel also makes friends with a local boy whom she calls her "guardian angel." When he exhibits photographs of the girl in a local gallery, it sets off a chain of events that eventually lead to the resolution of Samuel's crisis.

Samuel's stories fascinate with their detail and their questing moral purpose. They're narrated and enacted with enormous skill by Kevin Bacon, who gives a resourceful, energetic, highly focused performance in this one-man play. And the props provided by Wendland—chairs, jars, roots, etc.—each take their respective places in the story.

But what, finally, is that story about? Frankly, I'm not sure: McDonald covers lots of intriguing ground here, but I don't know what she's trying to tell us. Part of the problem could be mine: the salsa and the garlic and the hair and the Glass Menagerie jonquils all feel like they mean something very specific, but the symbolism eludes me; likewise, the Native American philosophy and Bible passages that Samuel quotes liberally throughout the play portend something big as well, but I couldn't say for sure just what. Ideas about guilt and faith and holiness and purpose and responsibility are floated, but, for me at least, they never come to rest anywhere.

So An Almost Holy Picture feels rich but unsubstantial; and its narrative, similarly, rivets attention even as we note its flimsiness; and its structure, most interestingly, strains the one-person-show paradigm, Bacon clearly wanting to tear down the fourth wall that McDonald has forced between his character and the audience. Bacon-as-Samuel wants to connect with us; but his creator won't allow him to.

What we're left with are the musings of a very articulate man and a stage filled with objects, neither of which we fully comprehend.

It's nice to have Bea Arthur back on the New York stage. She's 78, but you won't believe it when you see (or hear) her: she looks great, in a chic pants suit that reminds us of her "Maude" days; and that familiar deep, growly voice that perpetually seems on the brink of exuberant discovery sounds exactly as you remember: she utters a "God will get you for that, Walter" and then the dire warning from "The Golden Girls" ("Shady Pines") and we eat it up. We like to see our TV stars up close.

So if I report, as I must, that Bea Arthur on Broadway is a touch disappointing, don't let it keep you away, particularly if you're a fan. Nobody does the withering putdown stare as well as she does, and she does more than one during the ninety minutes she's on stage. And nobody can deliver a well-aimed barb with that mixture of class and irony and drop-dead perfect timing: they pepper stories of her career (including a zinger about Pia Zadora from her Fiddler on the Roof days), jokes (the show's funniest moment may be the prolonged punchline of a story she told at Charles Pierce's memorial), even musical numbers (especially a bawdy Sophie Tucker ditty in which she proclaims that she's the "healthiest gal in town").

The disappointing part is what comes in between. Although the show opens with a promisingly off-the-wall digression about cooking lamb, it quickly devolves into plastic patter. There are several talented people billed in the program as collaborators and consultants—in addition to Arthur, her musical director Billy Goldenberg, lyricist Mark Waldrop (When Pigs Fly), director Richard Maltby, Jr. (Ain't Misbehavin'), and playwright Charles Randolph Wright (Blue). So it's hard to believe that when Arthur does her encore ("The Man in the Moon" from Mame) she actually says something like, "I swore I would never do this song again, but because you've been such a nice audience,  I will."

The musical selections represent, mostly, another misstep. Though she made her name in musical theatre, she hasn't got much in the way of signature songs to choose from: besides the already mentioned "Man in the Moon" there's "Barbara Song" from Threepenny Opera and half of "Bosom Buddies" from Mame, and that's about it. She gives us neither: she sings a chorus of "Bosom Buddies" but with no foil to play straight man to she can't deliver this comic gem; and from Threepenny she sings not her song but one of co-star Lotte Lenya's, "Pirate Jenny," which I have to admit was nice to hear on stage even if Arthur can't be said exactly to nail it.

Other songs—and there are lots of them—run the gamut, from "I Happen to Like New York" to "Some People" (from Gypsy) to "Fifty Percent" (by Goldenberg, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman). What the songs have in common is that Arthur likes singing them; but singing is not what Arthur does best.

And yet, all that said, why begrudge this lady the time she's decided to give us in this airy charmer of a show? Serendipity has landed Bea Arthur on Broadway in the same season as Elaine Stritch: At Liberty and caused lots of folks to want to compare the two. My advice: don't. Arthur has had neither the often-calamitous life nor the long Broadway history of her colleague; their shows have little in common save the towering presence of a deep-voiced leading lady. Stars come in various styles, but they don't come nearly often enough—see 'em both while you can.

By Jeeves is more than a disappointment; it's a dud. At the performance I attended, roughly twenty percent of the patrons seated in the orchestra section did not return after intermission. More tellingly, the ones who stayed applauded politely but noncommittally; at the curtain call, the applause died down before the house lights went up. I predict that By Jeeves, after a five-year quest to get to Broadway, will not stay here for very long.

The surprising thing is, I saw By Jeeves when it premiered in London in 1996 (in a much-revised form; the original original By Jeeves was a rare failure for creators Alan Ayckbourn and Andrew Lloyd Webber back in the '70s). What's surprising is that in London I found this modest musical comedy quite delightful--a frothy, careless evening of reasonably sophisticated merriment, highlighted by a pleasingly tuneful score. Well, somewhere between the West End and here, all the charm got lost, or removed. For what we have at the Helen Hayes Theatre is a musical devoid of interest, energy, or entertainment value. Broadway's By Jeeves is DOA.

So what happened? Ayckbourn's book seems to be intact. It's a breezy tribute to the spirit of P.G. Wodehouse, whose "Jeeves and Wooster" stories are the show's inspiration. Quintessential upper class British layabout Bertie Wooster is about to give a concert to benefit a local church, but for some reason his banjo is missing. Jeeves, Bertie's even more quintessentially unflappable British butler, who is (naturally) stage managing, suggests that while waiting for the replacement instrument, Bertie might entertain the audience with an anecdote or two. Bertie eventually follows Jeeves' advice (as he always does), and the show proper begins.

The tale Bertie relates to us, with a good deal of help from his devoted servant, turns out to be a farcical morass of mismatched couples and mixed-up identities, set in a country house called Totleigh Towers and involving, among other things, a false marriage listing in the Times, a charity walk for hedgehogs, and the necessity for Bertie to disguise himself as a pig and pretend to commit burglary. The characters involved in this charade have names like Gussie Fink-Nottle, Honoria Glossop, and Stiffy Byng.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of this: it's gently witty fun, punctuated--in the style of a Lupino Lane musical of the '30s--by diverting ditties with titles like "Travel Hopefully" and "When Love Arrives." Ayckbourn's book and Lord Lloyd-Webber's music are as well-crafted (if fundamentally undistinguished) as I remember them to be. So what is wrong with this show?

An obvious answer lies in the casting. John Scherer is a nimble enough performer (and when he gets an opportunity, near the end of the show, he proves to be a first-rate comic dancer). But he's not Bertie Wooster: he's obviously and rather resolutely American, for one thing; and he comes across as too old, too self-assured, and too naturally intelligent to convince us for a moment that he's the helplessly muddled twit that we know our hero to be. Nor has Scherer much chemistry with Martin Jarvis, the self-described distinguished British actor who plays Jeeves with a dishearteningly smug air. Supporting players are mostly at sea, especially Steve Wilson who gets the lone American character, a jelly heir named Cyrus Budge III, entirely wrong. And Emily Loesser, quite visibly pregnant, seems an odd choice indeed for the eager-to-marry-but-virginal Stiffy Byng.

All that said, everyone on stage seems to be working hard, albeit for naught. So, one more time, where--how--did things go so awry? Ayckbourn is credited with the staging, which is lackluster and simple-minded, resorting at one point to a foolish attempt at interaction with the audience: a half a dozen oversize flowers are handed out to audience members in the front row, who are made to hold them up, making the stage look a bit like a garden. About two minutes later, the flowers are collected by an actress and chucked off stage. If this was Ayckbourn's idea, what was he thinking?

 It's just one of the many many moments in By Jeeves that falls dismally flat. Come to think of it, just about all of the moments in this show fail to register. Bad timing, perhaps, coupled with lack of interest on the part of the entire creative team? In the end, I'm not sure what makes this production of By Jeeves so sadly lame. But I honestly didn't blame any of the folks who chose to bale out before the final curtain.

In the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, I find that what I respond to most in theatre is not so much comfort as commitment: I want to see the work of artists who have an urgent need to communicate. The lingering thought that whatever I'm seeing tonight could be the last thing I'll ever see impels me in this direction; what the disaster proved was that to think otherwise was always an illusion. So an important distinction emerges among theatrical events, now, between shows that producers and artists have mounted because they can and shows that producers and artists have mounted because they must.

Dance of Death falls squarely in the former category. Except for its oddball set and some overdone gothic music, this is in every way a commendable exercise. But an exercise is precisely what it feels like, and furthermore one meant, explicitly, to draw the praise and commendation of the tastemakers and opinion shapers for whom it has been crafted. Where's the passion, the spark, the overarching vision to shape and bring immediacy and revelation to a play rightly regarded as a classic? Not here, I'm afraid; this Dance of Death is as intractably lifeless, though every bit as impressive, as a lavish museum exhibit. It defies engagement, offering no answer to the entirely reasonable question of why I should care about a hundred-year-old play.

No answer, that is, except the self-evident one: The Broadway revival of Dance of Death is a pre-packaged media event, featuring an Important though Rarely Produced Great European Writer, a hot young British director, a famous and Tony-winning British actor, and a well-regarded British actress who is also a bona fide TV star. Can't miss, and it doesn't; though something's severely wrong with this picture, don't you think? (To confirm that suspicion, just watch the fine young actor Eric Martin Brown, who had the lead in a new American play off-off-Broadway just a few months ago, marching silently back and forth as the Sentry in this production, a role so undemanding that to call it thankless elevates it. I know Brown is making more money and possibly acquiring more connections here than he ever could off-off-Broadway. But what about craft?)

The point is, the soullessness of the production does not, alas, belie its conception. It's not that commerce can't breed art, for indeed a kind of artistry is on view here; it's just that commercial interests can almost never create passion. And to come alive, a century after its time, a play like this, above all, needs passion.

So what do we get? Well, we get a truly radiant Helen Mirren and a magnetically gruff Ian McKellen locked in mortal combat for some two-and-a-half hours. Their characterizations, both carefully thought out and flawlessly rendered, have little to do with one another. It's as if this married couple, Alice and Edgar, have come from different planets--and remained on them--despite nearly twenty-five years of married life together. Actually, this amounts to a valid interpretation of the play, I suppose, but it feels not so much thought out or even imposed, but instead merely the natural result of unyielding ego. David Straithairn, whose character Kurt serves as mediator between the two, finds himself caught in the middle. So do we.

Santo Loquasto's costumes are appropriate, but his set design is eccentrically off-putting. I was seated far to the right so I couldn't see all of it: it's dominated by a huge fortress-like structure in front of which are arranged some furniture and clutter in a more or less random pattern. A doorless door frame, leading to the Outside World, stands almost alone at the opposite end. Spatially disorienting and ugly, the design detracts from rather than enhances the piece. Dan Moses Schreier's Halloweenish music and sound effects are similarly destructive: the audience doesn't need ominous portents from the sound system to gauge the mood of the play.

I realize that I've reviewed the trappings of Dance of Death as much as the actual experience; I don't usually like to do that, but the parade of savvy marketing that passes for showmanship these days (cf. Hedda Gabler and especially Mamma Mia) has really got me down. We need theatre so much in times like these, to bring us together, to help us understand things about the human heart. Surface and shadow don't help: we need honest-to-goodness substance.

There are so few authentic theatre stars around these days, that when one of them turns up in a solo show we have to count ourselves not just lucky, but darn fortunate. When it's the probably legendary Elaine Stritch--armed not only with delicious anecdotes and lessons learned from a lifetime on and off stage, but also with an orchestra led by Rob Bowman and a trunkful of songs, signature and otherwise--well, count on an evening of must-see theatre.

The happy, unsurprising truth is that Elaine Stritch: At Liberty is every bit as sensational as you know it's going to be. Stritch, whom longtime theatregoers may have seen more than five decades ago in her Broadway debut, singing a novelty number called "Civilization" in a revue called Angel in the Wings, proves to be timeless, indefatigable, and serenely wonderful. She strolls down memory lane, recalling a sheltered if eccentric youth in Catholic schools and an adventurous young adulthood at Erwin Piscator's acting seminar in The New School where she gained invaluable exposure to Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Marlon Brando. Later, she speaks candidly and uncompromisingly about her battles with alcoholism (which she has happily and triumphantly won).

And of course she recounts a career of remarkable breadth, from comic relief in that forties revue to that quintessential lady who lunched in Sondheim's Company, and from earthy diner waitress in Inge's Bus Stop to acclaimed star of a British sitcom called "Two's Company." To our immense good fortune, she recreates some of the highlights of that career, starting with that very same "Civilization" song, featuring, she tells us, as only she can in that dry deadpan way of hers, the original choreography. The program is perhaps different at each show, but expect some or all of the following to follow in Elaine Stritch: At Liberty: "Zip" from Pal Joey (the show that made her a star), "Broadway Baby" from Follies, "Why Do the Wrong People Travel" from Noel Coward's Sail Away, and--spectacularly; heart-stoppingly--"The Ladies Who Lunch" from Company.

Watch her put over a song like "Broadway Baby": it's a lesson in the art and craft of musical theatre. And witness the recreation, thirty years after the first time, of "The Ladies Who Lunch": sheer theatre magic. What makes Stritch Stritch? I think it's that enormous, unfettered desire--need--to communicate: she's got something profound, or beautiful, or true to tell us, and an instrument--that fabulous foghorn of a voice--that she knows, or at least suspects, isn't quite equal to it. So she throws her heart into the song, and her soul; her very being sometimes, which is why the climax of "The Ladies Who Lunch" is so palpably physical. When Stritch literally bounces up and down in the final stanzas of "I'm Still Here" it's to provide tangible testament to the veracity of that claim: not only is she here, she's got no plan to be anywhere else anytime soon.

So a spirit of giving, with all the joy that that implies, is what suffuses Elaine Stritch: At Liberty. My companion compared the show to Judy Garland's at the Palace and I could see what she meant: Stritch connects that intensely with an audience. Garland, by the way, is the subject of one of Stritch's splendid anecdotes; Merman (for whom Stritch had the thankless job of standby during Call Me Madam) is the subject of some of the show's ripest material, delivered with verve and genuine affection. Stritch is gossipy but she has no real axe to grind here (well, maybe one: Gloria Swanson gets pretty savage treatment). Mostly, Stritch is amused and/or appalled by her own naiveté and stubbornness. She tells us how she cast aside a man who loved her so she could chase after Rock Hudson while filming A Farewell to Arms. "We all know what a great decision that was," she concludes.

At the performance I attended, after a well-earned standing ovation, Stritch treated the audience to an encore. The totally unexpected choice: "Something Good," from The Sound of Music. "So somewhere in my youth or childhood," rasps the oddly comforting, beyond-boozy voice, "I must have done something good." And how: over and over again. What a privilege to spend a few hours in her company.

Fortune’s Fool offers its audience exemplary performances by Alan Bates and Frank Langella, and an expertly plotted script written by Ivan Turgenev and adapted by Mike Poulton. But other than these praiseworthy attributes, the play offers little else to engage its audience’s attention. Stylistically, it’s a realistic production, performed on a stage set with bubbling samovars, wooden chess sets, and gold icons. Turgenev’s story, unlike those of his spiritual disciple Chekhov, is full of plot, action, and melodrama. These characteristics make the work particularly accessible, but only barely provide an evening’s entertainment.

Returning with her new husband to her country home after a nine-year absence, Olga Petrovna (Enid Graham) stirs the sleepy estate into a flurry of activity. Her late father’s “court jester,” a pathetic, penniless gentleman named Vassily Semyonitch (Bates), has lived on the estate for years but must now re-establish himself with Olga and her husband. Vassily’s case goes poorly from the start when Olga gets his name wrong, and it gets worse over dinner as he drunkenly rambles on about his torturous battles to win back his own estate in court. Egged on with drink and mockery by a local landowner, an “infamous, fatuous fop” named Flegont Tropatchov (Langella), Vassily reveals a secret about Olga that will inevitably result in his exile.

Turgenev’s greatest works—his theatrical masterpiece A Month in the Country and Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, a collection of short stories—pioneered the earthy humor slowly drowning in melancholy that is still considered a typically Russian tone. As a result, Turgenev almost single-handedly established the theatrical and literary reputation of Russia in the mid-19th century. Poulton’s adaptation captures perfectly the details that make Turgenev worth performing: the fatalistic decisions, the foolishness that spurs people to act on those decisions, and the bravery that allows those people to face the consequences.

Turgenev demonstrates his dramatic mastery by examining two types of fools, Vassily and Flegont. Langella obviously relishes playing Flegont’s frenchified smugness and gleeful meddling. His entrance is astounding: he welcomes Olga and her husband to the region with a verbal avalanche that lasts several minutes, parading around the dining room inspecting every glass and candle. He’s like a 19th-century Russian Looney Tune, dripping egotism; the character deserves to be hissed at by the audience for his villainous arrogance.

As Vassily, Bates gives a more subtle performance that takes advantage of the character’s complexities and uncontrolled emotions. In his first moment in the spotlight, Bates has Vassily ramble on in a five-minute speech about his 27-year-old court case—drunkenly, but without caricaturing drunkenness—making points to the guests, the servants, even the wall as he finds himself unable to conclude his story despite his obvious foolishness. But this ridiculous figure gains our sympathy in the second act: as his character slowly and painfully tells Olga about her parents’ relationship, Bates demonstrates that Vassily finds other people’s problems much more important than his own. The two stars implicitly underscore Turgenev’s theme that folly may be common but it doesn’t define a person’s character.

Unfortunately, the rest of the production fails to equal the script and the two lead performances. Director Arthur Penn seems to have let Bates and Langella work on their own while he chose which door actors should enter from and when they should stand up. Brian Nason’s lighting design and Brian Ronan’s sound design are similarly negligible. And none of the other actors reach Bates and Langella’s heights; maybe they were too intimidated, or maybe they were too busy watching the stars to find their own moments to shine. As a whole, Fortune’s Fool is directed, designed, and performed with competence but, excluding the lead performances, it lacks the passion and magic that its autumnal tone requires. But two great performances can make up for a lot, and ultimately Bates and Langella manage to do so.

Hedda Gabler, the first drama to arrive on Broadway this fall, left me totally cold. At its center is a showy, actress-y performance by Kate Burton in the title role that sheds almost no light on this famous and complex character: I kept waiting for Burton to ask Lady Iris to ring for her wrap, so broadly and shallowly audience-driven is her rather blatant star turn. Burton strides across the stage--usually taking the longest path available to get to wherever she's going--like Katharine Hepburn at her mannered horsey worst;  she spits out her lines in a nasal twang that suggests a slightly classier version of Alice Kramden. And she's perfected an attention-getting braying laugh, too, that comes out of nowhere on more than one occasion.

Oh, it's interesting; but I'm afraid Burton never reveals anything substantive about Hedda to us: this is a performance made up of Big Moments and Dramatic Gestures that finally add up to very little. When she dies, beautifully, in a pool of white light, every hair miraculously still in place, we feel no loss because she hasn't given us a Hedda to value.

Which came first: Burton's over-the-top portrayal or the anemic production that surrounds it? Hard to say: while Burton chews and spits out every available bit of scenery, co-star Harris Yulin fades into oblivion as a colorless Judge Brack. The script informs us that Brack is the powerful manipulator who steals Hedda's destiny; Yulin's Brack is so utterly lackluster that he doesn't seem able to ask directions, let alone ruin a woman's life. Meanwhile, Michael Emerson turns Hedda's professor husband into a lily-livered nerd, a nonentity so foolish and feeble that it's almost impossible to believe he ever worked up the nerve to ask her to marry him.

Jon Robin Baitz's new adaptation of the Ibsen play doesn't help much, either. The piece is still set in Norway in the 1890s, but Baitz throws in clunky colloquialisms that jar, utterly.  (Hedda to Brack: "So you really need to be top dog, is that what you're saying?")  I assume Baitz is trying to make the thing more accessible to a modern audience; but staccato banter during the big dramatic confrontation between Hedda and the Judge feels like a bad outtake from Double Indemnity: I honestly had trouble following the thread of the conversation.)

Alexander Dodge's set is as spare and stark a drawing room as you've ever seen, dominated by a huge stove that looks like a lighthouse, looming over the proceedings from one side of the stage; and by an enormous portrait of Hedda's father General Gabler, illogically hung in front of a bookcase, providing rather obvious symbolic portent in what otherwise appears to be an expressionist house. Costumes, by Michael Krass, are appropriate, though I was surprised that Burton's were as unglamorous--and few--as they turned out to be.

There are some intermittent rays of light among the dismal proceedings: Jennifer Van Dyck is sympathetic and believable as Hedda's rival Mrs. Elvsted, and Angela Thornton is a commanding, compelling, richly human Aunt Julia. The moment when Hedda insults her new hat stings more honestly than anything else that happens in this mostly plastic revival.

If You Ever Leave Me... I'm Going With You! is accurately billed as a celebration of the acting/writing partnership and marriage of Renee Taylor and Joe Bologna. Now 36 years old and still going strong, the Taylor-Bologna union--professional and personal--is enduring and inspiring. What's nicest about their new show is the way their mutual love and respect flows over the footlights and into the audience: their relationship is the real thing, despite--or perhaps because of--the remarkably public forum in which they've conducted it.

If You Ever Leave Me... feels like a cocktail party where you're the only guest and the host and hostess get to regale you with jokes, anecdotes, and stories about their life together. It's an entertaining and diverting evening, if a bit familiar and contrived. The format is simple. Around six excerpts from their plays Lovers and Other Strangers, It Had to Be You, Acts of Love, Bermuda Avenue Triangle, and Bedrooms--plus some video footage of wedding receptions and a hilarious scene from their movie Made for Each Other--Taylor and Bologna engage in some humorous reminiscing. The vignettes are the highlights: the material is consistently funny and reminds us how both of and ahead of their time these two writers have been.

They also provide Taylor and Bologna with can't miss-opportunities to demonstrate their considerable prowess as performers. In the scene from It Had to Be You, Taylor plays Theda Blauough (the "ough" are silent, she explains; it's her stage name), a would-be actress auditioning for a TV commercial. It's practically a monologue, showcasing Taylor at her deadpan best. Later, as a bride-to-be whose fiancé announces he is canceling the wedding, and as a retired widow being wooed by a smooth con man, she keeps the audience in stitches with a sad-eyed stare or a well-timed non-sequitur.

Bologna, meanwhile, scores in the two Lovers and Other Strangers bits, as the husband-to-be with the bad case of cold feet, and, especially, as an opinionated, slow-talking middle-aged Italian papa, a character that he says was based on his own father. This scene, by the way, is probably the choicest of the ones included here: Taylor and Bologna are pricelessly on target as Frank and Bea, as homely and comfortable a married couple as there ever was. Here they are trying to help their son Richie resolve his own marital troubles:

Frank: Did you hear that, Beatrice? They're not happy.
Bea: I heard, Frank.
Frank: Who's happy?
Bea: Who's happy?
Frank: Do you see me running around dancing in the streets? Or your brother?
Bea: Or your Uncle Mike?
Frank: Or your Cousin Jerry?
Bea: Or your Cousin Nickey?
Frank: Do you think your sister's happy with that bum she's married to?
Bea: Or Jackie next door? I say, "When you make your bed, you suffer in it."
Frank: You think your mother and I are happy?

At moments like this one, the theatre fills with the laughter of recognition. It happens over and over again in If You Ever Leave Me...: don't come here looking for a fresh perspective, but do come for some reassuring reminders of why some things in life do last. Taylor and Bologna do well to invite us to join them on their little stroll down memory lane. And it's nice to get a chance to thank them personally for the fruits of their still-fruitful partnership.

The truth is that I was bound to be disappointed by the revival of Into the Woods, and I was. The original production, which opened at the Martin Beck Theatre just 14 years ago, remains a cherished, vivid memory; one that the original cast album helped make indelible. For me, Joanna Gleason will always be the Baker's Wife, Danielle Ferland will always be Little Red Riding Hood, Bernadette Peters will always be the Witch, and so on.

So I didn't really need another Into the Woods, not so soon. But we have one: I'm almost never consulted about these things. So let's see if I can be usefully objective about it.

In great measure, the show is just as it was. "Once upon a time, in a far off kingdom," intones our Narrator, "lived a young maiden, a sad young lad, and a childless baker with his wife." The maiden is Cinderella, as the Brothers Grimm imagined her, with a pair of beautiful but evil step-sisters and a Prince Charming who obtains one of her slippers and searches 'til he finds her. The lad is Jack, of Beanstalk fame, who trades his sickly cow Milky White for some magic beans that lead him to a fantastical kingdom in the sky occupied by giants. The Baker and his Wife are the inventions of librettist James Lapine and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim: victims of a witch's curse, they will remain childless until they obtain the four items the Witch needs to reverse her own curse.

The four items are, quoting Sondheim again, "The cow as white as milk/The cape as red as blood/The hair as yellow as corn/The slipper as pure as gold," which means that in addition to Cinderella and Jack, the Baker and his Wife must also encounter Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel to break the Witch's spell. The authors ingeniously intertwine these familiar tales to create Into the Woods' clever first act, in which all of our heroes manage to get what they wish for and the various wrongdoers—the Witch, the step-sisters, the Wolf, the Giant—are punished or killed.

And then comes Act Two. The same characters, theoretically happy, find they are nevertheless discontented; and then the widow of the Giant that Jack slew arrives on the scene, bent on revenge and wreaking very real havoc on the kingdom until she gets it. Suddenly there's a very grown-up problem to solve, and the childish enchantments that have served our protagonists thus far in their stories simply don't apply.  Urgency, and then tragedy, bring real learning: Cinderella and the Baker eventually acquire genuine wisdom:

Sometimes people leave you,
Halfway through the wood.
Others may deceive you.
You decide what's good....
No one acts alone.
Careful,
No one is alone.

What, finally, is Into the Woods about? Lots of things: families—parents, children; wishing for things and choosing things; responsibilities. Growing up. Red Riding Hood sings:

Isn't it nice to know a lot!
... and a little bit not...

And Jack sings:

And you think of all of the things you've seen,
And you wish that you could live in between,
And you're back again,
Only different than before,
After the sky.

There's the soaring, brilliant soul of this show, in the stunning language and melodies of Stephen Sondheim.

Now all that said, the truth is that Into the Woods never fully worked when it was first produced and it works, if anything, less well now. Subtle changes made by its creators (Lapine also directs) point up the flaws in the show's structure rather than fix them; the effect, for me, was of dumbing down rather than improving. This Into the Woods is jokier than the original, and less interested in making its fairy tale heroes and heroines into real people.

It's also, to speak about more technical matters, substantially less pretty to listen to. Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations still work their magic, but with a couple of exceptions the voices are far less attractive this time around. (The exceptions are Laura Benanti's Cinderella and Gregg Edelman's Prince; the jarring worst-case is Marylouise Burke's resoundingly unmusical turn as Jack's Mother.) Other performances, if reasonably well-sung, simply lack conviction: I never believed Vanessa Williams' Witch cared about Rapunzel for even one second, for example, and I was unconvinced that Kerry O'Malley as the Baker Wife learned a thing during her final adventure in the woods (with Cinderella's Prince, in what is perhaps the show's pivotal scene).  Things feel, mostly, perfunctory, which is indeed how too many musical revivals feel these days.

Douglas W. Schmidt's sets are gorgeous, however.

So where does all this leave us? If you've never seen Into the Woods, you may want to see it now, for the wonderful score if for no other reason. (On the other hand, you may not want to: my companion, entirely unfamiliar with the work, hated it.)

As for me, I'm feeling a bit wistful. I think my golden memories of the original show that I loved so well are still mostly intact, but it's just possible that the defects of this production have tarnished them, at least a little bit. Not necessarily the best thing for memories, that. So, Broadway producers, here's my final word: leave me my memories, please. Bring us something new.

The most important thing I can tell you about the Roundabout's revival of Major Barbara is: go see it. This revival of George Bernard Show's serious comedy from 1905 has been fashioned and executed with care and rigor: it's clear that director Daniel Sullivan, his creative team, and his actors have put a lot of thought and heart into their work. The result is a work of immense humor and intelligence that is first and foremost a spectacular theatrical entertainment and secondarily a fascinating and revelatory glimpse inside one of the great minds of the last century and a half.

The play begins in the library of Lady Britomart Undershaft's London home, where she is preparing to entertain, for the first time in many years, her husband, Andrew. Andrew is an enormously wealthy and influential arms magnate; but the Undershaft fortune passes, by tradition, not to a son but to a foundling who is brought into the business. Lady Brit's opposition to that tradition led to her estrangement from her husband, but now she is concerned about the welfare of her three children, which is why she has asked Andrew to dinner, to convince him to do his duty for each of them.

The children are Stephen, a petulant and thoroughly snobbish twit of a man; Sarah, the pretty, likable daughter who is engaged to the handsome but dull-witted Charles Lomax; and Barbara, courageous and smart, currently a major in the Salvation Army. Andrew understands immediately that it is Barbara whom he must court in this family; and the bulk of the play concerns his efforts to teach her the way of the world, at least as he understands it.

This gives Shaw license, or an excuse, to turn Undershaft into a magnificent mouthpiece, espousing a variety of ideas, ranging from a pragmatic defense of war and revolution to an idealistic vision of economic prosperity based on the broadening of education and opportunity. Even if you don't listen carefully you'll see the holes in Undershaft's arguments: Shaw makes no pretense about playing fair, here, and though he pits Undershaft against nothing less than the sanctity of the Church (by way of the Salvation Army) he cheerfully stacks the deck against the pious hypocrisy of the Establishment. (You'll observe, too, that–Shaw being a product of his time–Undershaft addresses his philosophical legacy not to Barbara but to her fiancé, a clever former professor of Greek named Adolphus Cusins.)

What you'll also notice–and perhaps be worried or even appalled by–is the shocking naivete of Shaw's oh-so-clear-eyed world view. Undershaft's defense of aggression and weaponry is massively dated; the horrors of two world wars, not to mention the realities of nuclear warfare, lay years in the future when Shaw wrote Major Barbara: were, indeed, unimaginable.

This doesn't make Major Barbara any the less stageworthy, but it prevents it from being timelessly eternal: it turns out that the Big Idea of this play is a relic of a time long gone. So the pleasures of the current revival--which are many and significant--have to do with the work's substantial wit and its apt, rather Wildean social satire. No character embodies this aspect of the piece so well as Lady Brit, and Dana Ivey threatens, over and over again, to steal the show in a performance of inspired comic brilliance. Watch her walk slowly and deliberately across the stage from chair to sofa, and then order her son to retrieve the cushion she has left behind: who else could make resolute imperiousness this funny?

That Ivey's co-stars are the estimable David Warner and Cherry Jones makes her achievement all the more impressive. But don't worry, Warner and Jones more than hold their own. Warner is delightful as the rascally old businessman; and his light, bemused touch, which makes his scenes in which he reacquaints himself with his family especially appealing, helps him through the long, windy last scene where he is forced by his playwright to lecture rather than converse.

Jones is, as ever, luminous and wonderful, her natural warmth and intelligence infusing the characterization throughout. In the moment when Barbara first understands that her father is right about the world–that the Church and her beloved Salvation Army are corrupt and useless institutions–Jones projects, silently, a devastation of catastrophic proportions. It's so powerful that it becomes the play's emotional center and reinforces Barbara's primacy in the piece (despite her near-disappearance from it in Act Two). The whole production is informed by this moment: it's been designed, by Jones and Sullivan and the rest of its creators, to make us think long and hard about every word Andrew Undershaft will utter.

Rick Holmes is devilishly funny as the doltish Charles, and Henny Russell is appealing and memorable in the relatively small role of Sarah. Denis Holmes practically stops the show at one point as the exquisitely unruffled butler Morrison. John Lee Beatty's lovely sets and Jane Greenwood's tasteful costumes provide a stunning visual setting for the play; they, along with the other less visible components of the show's design, reflect the extraordinary care and thought that have been lavished on this production.

It has taken me a very long time to write this review. That's because I haven't wanted to write it.

Mamma Mia! is indisputably Broadway's current Big Thing; no matter what happens this spring, there will not be a bigger hit in 2001-02 than this show. The advance sale is in the tens of millions of dollars. At every performance, most of the fifteen hundred or so patrons at the Winter Garden are going to leave the theatre in a happy mood. Many will join the company for reprises of the show's well-known Abba songs during the dance-in-your-seats-and-aisles finale.

There's not a thing wrong with any of this: audiences and critics alike embraced this show, which opened five weeks after the World Trade Center attack, as the feel-good escapist musical diversion that the city and the country sorely needed. Anybody who gets two-and-a-half hours of good time at their evening at Mamma Mia! is certainly entitled to just that.

God knows I arrived at the Winter Garden full of optimistic expectation. After a month of post-WTC anxiety and years of depressing, overwrought Broadway musicals like Marie Christine and The Wild Party and Parade, I was 100% ready to have a grand time at Mamma Mia!

Trouble is, I didn't; not at all. Mamma Mia! depressed me more than any of those other shows. If this is the future of commercial musical theatre–and I worry that it may be exactly that–well, as the Madwoman of Chaillot once said, I don't want to know.

Mamma Mia! tells the story of a mother and daughter who live on a Greek island. The daughter is about to be married, and she wants her father at the wedding. The problem is that she doesn't know who her father is, and it's just possible that her mother doesn't know either: echoing the plot of the Gina Lollabrigida movie Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, there are three possible dads, each of whom the daughter secretly invites to the ceremony, hoping that when she lays eyes on her real father she'll somehow recognize him.

So far, so good: lots of wonderful musicals have been built around premises much flimsier and stupider than this. We're happy not to wonder where young Sophie met her hunky boyfriend Sky; or why all the people on this Greek island all seem to be Americans and speak flawless English; or why three grown men would actually accept Sophie's invitation; or how mother Donna has supported herself all these years. If everything else works, we can do without logic.

Donna used to have a rock group, and her two ex-backup singers Tanya and Rosie show up for the wedding, along with dad candidates Bill,  Harry, and Sam, one of whom is gay and another of whom is clearly the Love of Donna's Life. Sky and his hunky teenage friends have too wild a time the night before the wedding and Sophie begins to get cold feet, resulting in a dream sequence you absolutely don't see coming. And of course everything comes out just fine in the end.

Mamma Mia!'s score consists of twenty-two Abba songs. They're listed in the program in alphabetical order (as opposed to the usual method of placing them chronologically within acts and scenes). I don't know, maybe the company performs them in a different order every night–Mamma Mia! is certainly loosely enough constructed for that to be true. Apparently some of the fun of this show comes from seeing how blatantly ridiculously the songs have been placed in the story: "Dancing Queen" is performed by Tanya and Rosie to try to cheer Donna up in her bedroom, while "The Winner Takes It All" is the big second act ballad that Donna sings to Sam. Abba diehards in the audience start to snicker as soon as they hear a downbeat. Perhaps it's a defensive ploy: Forbidden Broadway won't be able to make fun of Mamma Mia! because it's already making fun of itself.

Despite the presence in the cast of a whole bunch of lithesome and energetic young people, there is practically no dancing in the show; certainly there's no choreography, just inane posing and grouping to music that makes Footloose and Saturday Night Fever seem like they'd been created by Martha Graham. Despite the presence in the cast of bona fide Broadway powerhouses Karen Mason and Judy Kaye (plus alleged Canadian powerhouse Louise Pitre as Donna), all of the singing is heavily miked, as if by Phil Spector in fact; during Pitre's big solo she's unaccountably backed by unseen voices that ring through the space–for all I know she's lip-synching.

The Winter Garden's previous tenant, Cats, used to get a lot of ribbing. But Cats engaged its audience: the famous junkyard set invited us to imagine ourselves in a new world, and the ingenuity with which that world got realized–in terms of costume, lights, sound, and music–renewed our capacity to wonder and to be awed by theatre magic.

Mamma Mia!, by contrast, is so cynical and disinterested that it doesn't even show up. Sets, costumes, and lighting are negligible; music is recycled; story is ludicrous; sound is artificially enhanced. This is a musical for very tired businessmen: it's background noise for a night out, familiar and therefore relaxing, but entirely challenge- or content-free.

Is this what we want from musical theatre? The Lion King, whatever its plot deficiencies, is a feast for the senses. Even Aida attempts some kind of moral purpose. Mamma Mia! is the void; one of my friends calls it the death of musical theatre, and I'm inclined to agree.

And yet, reasoned diatribe notwithstanding, Mamma Mia! is a hit. As Beckett said, nothing to be done. Unless–what if we resist the irresistible hype; what if we ask ourselves, when we leave the Winter Garden (or any other theatre, for that matter): what has just happened? Have we honestly, genuinely had an experience? Or have we forked over a hundred bucks to passively sit in a dark room watching a hacked-together live sitcom while thirty-year-old recordings play on a high-tech sound system?

My friend Eric Winick urged me to see Metamorphoses, saying simply: "It is the reason we go to the theatre." Happily, I took Eric's advice and discovered that he is exactly right. Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses is an exploration and celebration of the storytelling urge, particularly the pressing need that humanity has had, for thousands of years now, to sit together along the side of a hill (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and watch and listen enrapt as some very special people–actors–use their particular magic to bring tales old and new to life.

The tales Zimmerman has chosen come from Ovid–myths of the ancient Greeks, some very familiar, some less so. All are told with simplicity and clarity and dazzling theatricality. And all are resoundingly potent: we tell each other stories for important reasons, and what these legends have to teach us about the world and about ourselves is resonant and wise.

None more so, these days, than the one about Orpheus and Eurydice, here told and then retold, by way of Rilke, so as to melt away two thousand years and make an oft-repeated plot feel strangely new. Orpheus, you will recall, loved Eurydice so much that he journeyed to the Underworld to try to bring her back to life; so much, in fact, that he was able to convince the gods to allow him to return to Earth with her. The one condition was that he could not look back at Eurydice until he left the Underworld. Nearly through his task, though, Orpheus did take a fleeting glance, and in doing so lost Eurydice forever.

A first rendition of the Orpheus legend in Metamorphoses emphasizes the notions of undying love and faith that we generally associate with it. A second, the one inspired by the poet Rilke, is about the fragility of human existence: when Orpheus looks back, his dead beloved Eurydice doesn't recognize who he is: she's already lost to him. In the shadow of the World Trade Center tragedy, how potent is this transformation of the familiar myth.

Transformation is key, by the way: Metamorphoses delights and tantalizes us by recasting these classic stories in unexpected ways. A pool of water covers most of the surface of the stage, providing an unconventional but thrillingly appropriate setting for pieces like the account of Alcyon, who lost her beloved in a storm at sea. A doorway and a brilliant blue sky are the other dominant features of Daniel Ostling's set, reminding us–and enabling us–to use our imaginations to fill in the details as Metamorphoses unfolds. Vivid, warm lighting (by TJ Gerckens), versatile yet simple costumes (by Mara Blumenfeld), and evocative music (by Willy Schwarz) similarly engage and enlarge.

Ten remarkably accomplished actors play literally dozens of roles, sometimes narrating, other times enacting the timeless legends that comprise Metamorphoses. Their names are Anjali Bhimani, Raymond Fox, Kyle Hall, Doug Hara, Felicity Jones, Chris Kipiniak, Louise Lamson, Erik Lochtefeld, Mariann Mayberry, and Lisa Tejero. With writer-director Mary Zimmerman they take us on journeys filled with wonder and wisdom.

Which brings me back to Mr. Winick, whose single sentence is really all that needs to be said about this marvelous work of theatre. Take his word, and now mine, and experience it for yourself.

There's a real treat in store for you at the Lyceum Theatre right now. That's where Lincoln Center Theater has mounted their sublime new production of Morning's at Seven. With an all-star cast, gorgeous homespun sets, costumes and lighting, and masterful and graceful direction by Daniel Sullivan, Morning's as near-perfect as one can hope for. It's Broadway's sunniest, loveliest show.

I didn't know the play before-hand; it's a delightful surprise. Written by Paul Osborn in 1938, it's set in a small town in the American Midwest in that year, in the adjoining backyards of the Theodore Swansons and the Carl Boltons. Cora Swanson and Ida Bolton are sisters; a third sister, Aaronetta, who never married, lives with Theodore and Cora; while the fourth and final sister, Esther, lives down the road apiece with her crotchety husband David. Ida and Carl live with their 40-year-old son Homer, who on the day the play takes place is at long last bringing—after a seven-year engagement—his fiancée Myrtle home to meet the family.

It turns out to be an eventful day. Not only does everybody satisfy their curiosity about Homer's mysterious girlfriend; nearly every one of his relatives manages to cook up a little stew of their own, as well. Cora has become obsessed with the notion of moving to a new house—the one that Carl built for Homer, should he ever finally decide to get married—in order to get away from busybody Aaronetta. Carl is having one of his "spells" and can be found banging his head against a tree or blathering vaguely about how he has to go back to the fork and take the right path. David is executing a plan to exile Esther to the top floor of their house as retribution for her desire to socialize with her sisters, who he thinks are "morons." Ida's just trying to entertain Myrtle as best she can, all the while fretting about the stay-at-home son she may be about to lose. And Aaronetta is poking her nose into everything, some years-old baggage providing her with a bit of an extra burden.

I don't want to tell you much more: this is a beautifully crafted play, and after a leisurely beginning it builds to a magnificently funny second act curtain and an even more wonderful climax. Morning's at Seven, whose youngest character is 39-year-old Myrtle, is about the wisdom and foolishness of age; about loneliness, joy, and sorrow; about all that it means to have a soul mate and a family that you genuinely care about. It's a warm, welcome reminder of the values that make people so terrific to be with, even as it gently pokes fun at the foibles and nonsense that make people so exasperating.

John Lee Beatty has created a heavenly backyard for the play's characters to live and carry on in, and Jane Greenwood has created costumes that look like they came right out of these people's closets. Brian MacDevitt lights the piece with warm sunshine and, later, glowing twilight that suit the play perfectly. Daniel Sullivan's direction is the kind that never, ever calls attention to itself: heavenly.

And then there's this formidable cast, bringing Osborn's quirky family to life with great warmth and clarity and insight. The sisters are played by Elizabeth Franz (Aaronetta), Piper Laurie (Esther), Estelle Parsons (Cora), and Frances Sternhagen (Ida), and their husbands are portrayed by Buck Henry (David), Christopher Lloyd (Carl), and William Biff McGuire (Theodore). They all deliver the expert performances you'd expect, and they seem to genuinely appreciate working together. They've all got moments to shine, and if I single out Christopher Lloyd (for a moment of focused insanity worthy of his old Reverend Jim character on "Taxi"), Frances Sternhagen (especially trying to "block a pass" when the sisters chase each other around the yard, in an effort to retrieve something from Aaronetta's prying eyes), and William Biff McGuire (reacting—masterfully—to some surprising news from another character near the end of Act Two), know that they're very much firsts among equals. The "youngsters" are played by Stephen Tobolowsky and Julie Hagerty with enormous charm and intelligence.

There's really no substitute for talented people coming together to create theatre that they believe in and care about; what a joy that Lincoln Center has brought these particular people together right now to end this less-than-wonderful Broadway season on a triumphant note. Theatre seldom gets better than this: I can wish nothing pleasanter for you than an evening or afternoon at Morning's at Seven. Enjoy.

Are you, by any chance, in the mood for a bit of diversion?

Oh, yes you are.

Here's what you do: Call TicketMaster, or visit their website, or just go to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre and get yourself some tickets to Noises Off. This show is just what the doctor ordered in the midst of this oh-so-serious Broadway season. I guarantee that you will, to coin a phrase, forget your troubles and get happy; you will laugh and laugh and laugh.

There's a place in the second act of Noises Off–commencing (more or less) with the priceless comic moment when Patti LuPone's character lights a triumphant cigarette after her ex-lover falls down a flight of stairs because she tied his shoelaces together, and lasting (more or less) until Katie Finneran's character plunges blindly through the rear wall of the set to make an entrance that has been heretofore delayed by the loss of her contact lenses–well, it's a place of sheer, non-stop mirth. You laugh 'til tears come, 'til sides ache, 'til you're embarrassed by your very lack of control. This doesn't happen nearly as often as you might wish in the theatre: it's a phenomenon to cherish.

As, indeed, is this delicious play by Michael Frayn. Noises Off is a farce about a farce, and also a farce about the farce that is life. It's as well-crafted a theatrical entity as anything Feydeau or Shakespeare ever thought of; it's as riotously hilarious a concoction as anything written in the last two dozen years or so (maybe more, who knows?). It tells the story of a doomed touring production of a doggedly awful comedy called "Nothing On," viewed in acts one and three from the front of the house and in act two from the back, each time with progressively more catastrophic results.

The play-within-the-play is a walking cliché, from the opening exposition (delivered, naturally, by the wisecracking maid, over a telephone) to the closing tableau (involving a father discovering his long-lost daughter and a plateful of sardines). In between, two couples hoping for some privacy keep running into the maid, each other, and the sardines on a set containing no fewer than nine doors plus a big set of French windows. "Nothing On" is awful but it's pure formula: as we watch its cast members unravel during the three successive run-throughs of the same, lame first act of the thing, we come to appreciate the indestructibility of dramatic convention.

Those run-throughs occur over a three month period, by the way, during which the members of the "Nothing On" company (six actors, two stage managers, and the director) couple and uncouple and spat and battle and fume with at least as much irrational zest as the characters they're trying to bring to life. The result is, as 'twere, a mirror to nature, though whether the play or the play-within-in-the play is the mirror I leave to you to decide. Maybe they're both mirrors. Life isn't a cabaret; it's a British sex farce.

What makes Noises Off the magnificently brilliant comic jewel that it is is the flawless staging by Jeremy Sams, with every move timed to the nanosecond for optimal hilarity. The cast is a gift from the gods. Patti LuPone, as leading lady Dotty Otley, trades on her Norma Desmond image to grand advantage when necessary, and jumps headfirst into broad clowning the rest of the time. Peter Gallagher lets loose with hysterical abandon as the most egotistical director imaginable; watch for a show-stopping physical bit in Act Two when he demonstrates what a matinee audience rushing to their seats looks like.

Faith Prince is wickedly restrained as busybody/peacemaker Belinda Blair, while Edward Hibbert is a dithery but likable bundle of nerves as the somewhat slow-witted character actor Frederick Fellowes. Richard Easton (lately of The Invention of Love) pretty much walks away with the first act as a Great Old Actor given to drink; Thomas McCarthy, as earnestly hunky juvenile Garry Lejeune, takes the most impressive stage tumble I've ever seen  in Act Two. Newcomers Robin Weigert and T.R. Knight more than hold their own with these heavyweights as the frantically put-upon stage managers.

The one you'll be hearing most about, I think, is Katie Finneran, in a breakthrough role, here, as clueless ingénue Brooke Ashton. Finneran plays drop-dead gorgeous and drop-dead stupid with the same guileless aplomb that Marilyn Monroe brought to, say, All About Eve. And she hurls herself into slapstick with the verve of Lucille Ball.

Is your appetite whet yet? Go back to paragraph three, and gird yourself for the most fun it's possible to have on Broadway right now without having to wait a year for tickets.

I think it's fair to say that Oklahoma! endures because of its wonderful score. Right at the beginning there's the glowing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'," followed almost immediately by the breezy "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top," and then, in rapid succession, "Kansas City," "I Cain't Say No," "Many a New Day," and "People Will Say We're in Love." And then capping the evening is the exuberant title song, with its instantly familiar title phrase seemingly a celebration, all by itself, of the bounty and goodness of the legendary Great American West.

Mind you, it's not just Richard Rodgers' glorious music; the evocative imagery of Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics works hand in hand with the melodies to make these songs great. There's authentic poetry in a phrase like

The breeze is so busy it don't miss a tree
And a ol' weepin' willer is laughin' at me!

(from "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'"); there's delicious, naughty wit in a line like

I'm jist a girl who cain't say no.
Kissin's my favorite food.

And what better captures the boundless American spirit than these words from "Oklahoma!":

Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom—
Plen'y of air and plen'y of room—
Plen'y of room to swing a rope!
Plen'y of heart and plen'y of hope...

No doubt about it, Oklahoma!'s score is one of those theatrical miracles that just about knocks your socks off. What must it have been like to have heard it for the first time, nearly sixty years ago?

The question before us now, though, is what it's like to hear it in its latest incarnation, which comes to Broadway from London courtesy of director Trevor Nunn, choreographer Susan Stroman, and producer Cameron Mackintosh. The answer is: it's not so grand at all. Oklahoma! 2002—lifeless, lumbering, even ugly—is a disappointment in practically every department.

The sincere, open-hearted, life-embracing good-naturedness of the thing (see the examples above) is simply missing from the stage of the Gershwin Theatre. What's there instead is a production that combines the stately reverence of Harold Prince's recent Show Boat with the jittery "we-can't-trust-an-MTV-short-attention-span-audience-to-like-this-hokey-old-piece-of-corn" mentality of recent revivals like Kiss Me, Kate and Annie Get Your Gun. So the book—such as it is—is mined for psychological depth that it just does not have, and the musical numbers are "improved" by replacing naive simplicity with antic, continuous action: "Oklahoma!," for example, is done here not as a rousing anthem but as underscoring for Curly & Laurey's wedding party (I was waiting for a caterer to wheel in a buffet cart).

Anthony Ward's design is a series of spare, blah tableaux that—at least on the huge Gershwin stage—dwarf the actors. His costumes are mostly in shades of brown: realistic, perhaps, but not terribly eye-filling. The performances are generally competent, but only that. Shuler Hensley is getting a lot of attention as a stupefyingly  intense Jud Fry, the villain of the piece; but the only one who really seems to have a lock on what Rodgers & Hammerstein were trying to do, for my money, is Andrea Martin as Aunt Eller.

I need to spend a moment now on the utterly jarring miscasting of Aasif Mandvi as Ali Hakim, the "Persian" peddler who is traditionally played by a Jewish-style comic. Nunn and Stroman must think they're righting decades of wrongheaded bigotry with their politically correct decision to put a genuine Middle Eastern actor in this presumably Middle Eastern role. But think about it: the joke is that Ali Hakim absolutely isn't a Persian. Not to mention: what American cowboy or farmer in 1900 would have stood by while an obvious "foreigner" took advantage of their women?

Josefina Gabrielle, the much-heralded first Laurey to both sing and dance (in the dream ballet that closes Act I), registers as inadequate in both endeavors. Patrick Wilson is a wooden Curly, and he and Gabrielle generate zero electricity as the evening's principal romantic couple. On the other hand, Justin Bohon and Jessica Boevers feel downright adversarial as second bananas Will Parker and Ado Annie; she, in particular, seems badly off-track, playing this open-hearted country girl with the shrill misanthropy of Singin' in the Rain's Lena Lamont.

The point is, none of these people seem to care about each other very much, let alone about the "brand new state" they live in. If nobody on stage or backstage can summon up any passion for the show they're in, how can we in the audience? I failed to be thrilled for even one moment during Oklahoma!, and I was expecting to be thrilled quite a bit. When a score this good fails to stir the soul or touch the heart, there's trouble afoot.

As I write this, the closing notice has already been posted for One Mo' Time: a meager advance sale and tepid reviews in the daily newspapers have caused the producers to shut down after just 21 performances. Too bad, too, because thus far in this admittedly lackluster musical theatre season, One Mo' Time was, hands down, the best time I've had at a Broadway musical. It's a crowd-pleasing, cheer-spreading charmer of a show, with rousing performances by people who actually deserve to be called stars. It's so much fun that I was able to completely ignore the fellow seated next to me who kept poking me in the ribs; we sure could use entertainments like this one on the main stem.

One Mo' Time is a celebration of black vaudeville of the 1920s. The program includes a very informative note about the Theatre Owners Booking Agency circuit, or "T.O.B.A," which eventually came to be known as "Tough on Black Asses" because of the lousy conditions under which African American singers, dancers, and musicians were required to perform. But perform they did, and from their ranks emerged stars like Ethel Waters, Bill Robinson, and Bessie Smith, who eventually broke into "mainstream" (that is, white) vaudeville and helped transform it.

The thin book that Vernel Bagneris has written for One Mo' Time has Bertha Williams and her touring troupe on the bill at the Lyric Theatre in New Orleans in 1926. The Lyric is run by a white man with low tolerance for the black performers and patrons on whose backs he earns his living; Bertha and her colleagues have even less tolerance, but it's clear they've had to deal with worse. We watch Bertha and her co-stars, Papa Du, Ma Reed, and Thelma, prepare for their show backstage and of course we get to see them on-stage: the grind of petty squabbles and tribulations contrasted with the sheer joy of jazz, rhythm and blues.

One Mo' Time works because the music Bagneris has selected is rich and evocative and, mostly, unfamiliar (which gives the piece greater interest than it might otherwise have, I think). And it ultimately triumphs because the cast and the on-stage band are so darn talented. Clarinetist Orange Kellin leads the combo, which also features Mark Braud (trumpet), Conal Fowkes (piano), Walter Payton (tuba), and Kenneth Sara (drums). In front are Roz Ryan as Bertha, wringing every possible double entendre laugh out of songs like Andy Razaf and Alex Bellenda's "Kitchen Man" and Eddie Green and Clarence Williams' "Right Key But the Wrong Keyhole"; B.J. Crosby as Ma Reed, clowning shamelessly in a faux exotic dance to "Hindustan" and then shaking the rafters with the likes of Creamer & Layton's "After You've Gone"; Rosalind Brown as Thelma, scoring in a solo ("Everybody Loves My Baby," by Jack Palmer and Spencer Williams) and in a smashing duet with Ryan (Bessie Smith's "My Man Blues"); and Bagneris himself, as Papa Du, gliding effortlessly and smoothly in a thing called "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues" by George W. Thomas.

It ends on an exuberant high note with the entire company high-stepping to "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." And that's exactly what we've had. 

Private Lives depressed me.

Now, that's certainly not the reaction I was expecting; nor does it seem to have been the response of most people around me in the audience, who chuckled heartily throughout the play (at least Acts I and III). But it occurs to me that it may well be that what happened to me is what the people putting on this revival of Private Lives are after: in mining this not-terribly deep comedy for something of substance, are not director Howard Davies and lead actors Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan indeed interested in provoking something more resonant than mere laughter? The play is, finally, a portrait of two explosively selfish people who do precisely what suits them with no regard for anyone else. We think of these two, Elyot and Amanda, as the ultimate Beautiful People, and that's how they've traditionally been portrayed by Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Collins, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and others.

But the Elyot and Amanda of Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan are resolutely not Beautiful People; they're older, for starters, than the couple are generally played, and they're smarter, too, by which I mean they Should Know Better. When Rickman's Elyot drinks too much brandy or crows about how certain women should be beaten regularly like gongs, there's the weight of experience behind him—empty acts and words suddenly take on a malicious cast. Similarly, when Duncan's Amanda muses about the nature of God and the afterlife, the play actually feels serious. No wonder these two sing Coward's sad little tune "If Love Were All" instead of just settling for the usual, callow "Someday I'll Find You."

So for all the scintillating banter flying about the stage—not to mention the impressively executed slapstick that eventually embroils all five actors (including a full somersault down a short flight of stairs by Alex Belcourt, who has the tiny role of Amanda's French maid)—this Private Lives feels claustrophobic and a little manic. During the second act, in which Amanda and Elyot alternately coo and bicker after their impetuous reunion, I was reminded again and again of Sartre's No Exit. If only these people could see a way out of themselves—if they could think of anyone other than themselves—there might be a way out of this hell they've created for each other.

Rickman and Duncan give us an Elyot and Amanda who are difficult to like; it's not particularly pleasant spending 2-1/2 hours in their company. But their performances got me to thinking about Coward's play and the world it represents: deprived of the trappings that make them "better" than ordinary mortals, how different are these two from, say, the hopelessly self-involved, perennially dissatisfied leading characters of TV's "Seinfeld"? More to the point, what sort of world do we end up with when being able to get what you want with very little effort becomes the norm instead of the privilege?

Private Lives as cautionary tale? Maybe; Coward may prove somehow prescient in his understanding of the baser aspects of human nature. Or perhaps we can learn something: I know I couldn't wait to escape from the company of Coward's sacred monsters.

"QED" is a fascinating glimpse at the life, work, and thoughts of Richard Feynmann. Feynmann (1918-88) was one of the youngest scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, where the first atomic bomb was developed; later he became an enormously successful physicist and physics professor, eventually winning the Nobel Prize. At the end of his esteemed career, while battling cancer, he joined the investigation of the explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger and made headlines again when he discovered that it was the tiny "o" rings, unable to withstand the cold temperatures on the day of the launch, that had caused the catastrophe.

Feynmann was an iconoclast and a free thinker, at the mercy of a constantly curious, questing mind. It is this mind that playwright Peter Parnell exposes in this intriguing play, as we watch the 68-year-old Feynmann prepare for a lecture on "What We Know." As he writes—or finds excuses not to—Feynmann reminisces about his accomplishments, practices his drumming for a campus revival of South Pacific, and dreams of a planned trip to Tuva, an obscure Siberian province the name of whose unpronounceable capital city he happened upon quite by accident.

What's revealed here is an intellect of heroic proportions, not least because it comes with a conscience of equal size. Responsibility for creating the first nuclear weapon becomes Feynmann's greatest burden: this theme has real resonance in our current, chaotic world. So, too, does Feynmann's reference to "Ground Zero" in a climactic account of the detonation of the first A-Bomb at Hiroshima; I actually stopped listening for a moment, my bearings having been temporarily lost. (Note: I live about two blocks away from the World Trade Center site.)

Alan Alda brings Feynmann to vivid life in an engaging, thoughtful performance. "QED" is nearly a one-man show (though an odd one: it's never really clear who Alda-as-Feynmann thinks he's talking to throughout much of it); Kellie Overbey puts in a brief appearance as one of Feynmann's students.

I've never read any of Feynmann's popular works, let alone his more scientific ones, so I welcomed "QED" as a chance to quickly learn a bit about this remarkable man. It certainly awakened a desire to find out more about him. For one thing, I'm wondering if he ever made it to Tuva or not...

John Leguizamo's new Broadway show, Sexaholix, turns out to be a  surprising disappointment. Leguizamo's last theatre piece, Freak, was as intelligent and sharp reflection on growing up amid–and, finally, in spite of–rampant stereotyping. Sexaholix, by contrast, is neither smart nor sharp, substituting glossy surface and callow self-congratulation for depth and introspection.  It also plays to, rather than reacts against, ethnic joke peddling; like a Latin Jackie Mason, Leguizamo ridicules Dominicans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and "regular" white people to earn cheap laughs. After the smarts of Freak, Sexaholix is a serious step down for this writer-performer.

Sexaholix is essentially a stand-up concert rather than a play; it would play exactly the same in a stadium, and it wouldn't surprise me if it eventually does so. Leguizamo spends an inordinate amount of time at the top of the show reminding us how rich and famous he has become; presumably packing more fans into the house would have some appeal.

What's lost, of course, is any sense of connection with an audience. Lily Tomlin's one-woman show last season felt immediate and urgent, even though it was fifteen years old. Sexaholix, on the other hand, feels like a long music video. What a shame.

I have not seen the film Sweet Smell of Success, on which Broadway's newest musical is based. This almost certainly works in the show's favor: lacking familiarity with the Ernest Lehman/Clifford Odets screenplay or the performances of Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, I have no high standard with which to compare what's on stage at the Martin Beck Theatre. So I give high marks to the show's librettist John Guare and its star, John Lithgow: their work is as good as anything on Broadway right now.

But the rest of the Sweet Smell of Success team has disappointed, badly. This is a musical that never seems to want to sing or dance: despite the presence onstage of full-voiced Brian d'Arcy James in the Tony Curtis role and offstage of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch, there's not a single soaring note of music in this score; there's a relatively large cast of dancers comprising what is, literally, a chorus, yet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon gives them nothing interesting to do. And all this despite a gripping story steeped in show biz glitter and lore.

That story, if you don't know it, concerns Sidney Falcone, a two-bit press agent and hustler eking out a living in 1952 Manhattan. He's got a girlfriend—Rita, a streetwise waitress; and he's got a client—a smalltime jazz club with an up-and-coming pianist named Dallas. What he wants, however, is celebrity: power, money, and entree to the glitzy, glamorous world of the famous and infamous. His idol is J.J. Hunsecker, the ruthless, enormously influential gossip columnist whose daily missives determine who and what is in and out in America.

Sidney strikes gold one night when J.J.'s kid sister Susan shows up at the club, with J.J. right behind her. Turns out that Susan is in love with Dallas and afraid to tell her brother, fearing (rightfully) that he will try to quash the relationship. Susan enlists Sidney to help cover up what's going on, unwittingly granting Sidney his fondest wish. In a single astonishing night, J.J. takes Sidney under his wing, giving him a new suit, a new name (Falco instead of Falcone), and a new life. Sidney's on the inside, now; he's one of the town's power brokers. His Faustian bargain will, of course, cost him his soul.

The story proceeds, slickly, through two acts of Sidney's ups and downs. Guare's book keeps us riveted, but the songs and occasional dances that are supposed to punctuate it instead slow it down or stop it cold. A well-conceived second act climax, in which J.J. performs an old vaudeville act in counterpoint to Sidney's performance of an act of almost unimaginable cruelty, brings the show as close as it ever gets to genuine excitement. Yet we can almost hear Bob Fosse turning over in his grave: where are the visionaries who could shape this promising material into the compelling musical play that Sweet Smell of Success by rights should be?

A catalog of poor decisions made by the show's creators could go on for paragraphs; suffice to say that the score by Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia is banal and unmemorable, the staging by Nicholas Hytner is unimaginative and stultifying, and the design by Bob Crowley (sets and costumes) and Natasha Katz (lighting) is hideous, not to mention extremely hard on the eyes. (Almost all of the show's action occurs against a black backdrop—fifteen feet of unrelieved darkness upon which rests the stylized Manhattan skyline that frames all of Crowley's sets. Note to Crowley: There's a reason people don't paint the walls of their houses in black.)

The one good decision that the production team made was to cast John Lithgow in the choice role of J.J. Hunsecker. After years as the over-the-top farceur lead of TV's "Third Rock from the Sun," it's terrific to see this fine actor back in form, biting into this juicy character with relish. It's a controlled, savvy portrait of megalomania, with all sorts of psychology hinted at though never bared; it's also as ruthlessly cold a performance as anything you've ever seen on stage.

Brian d'Arcy James has the difficult role of Sidney, who is the story's protagonist but by no means the show's star. He acquits himself reasonably well, though a decent song or two would have boosted his chances considerably. The other key players are Stacey Logan (Rita), Kelli O'Hara (Susan), and Joanna Glushak (Madge, J.J's secretary), who do good work, and Jack Noseworthy (Dallas), who seems woefully miscast.

Guare peppers the book with allusions to McCarthyism, making this the third high profile show this season to focus on that sad episode of American history (The Crucible and Mr. Goldywn are the other two). Such is the zeitgeist.

Lithgow's towering performance and Guare's expert writing aside, Sweet Smell of Success is a failed enterprise, no doubt about it.  Now consider this sobering thought: it may well turn out to be the best original musical on Broadway this season. Sweet Smell indeed.

The Crucible will make you angry. You watch the persecution of several fundamentally good people by a panicked mob of ordinary people, egged on by a manipulative (some would say evil) young woman bent on revenge for imagined slights. And then you watch the prosecution of the same fundamentally good people by others who are just as fundamentally good, but misguided and misled by dogma and belief systems based on fear and retribution rather than understanding and justice. And you get mad. And you can't decide which group is worse... or which group resonates more vividly in America in 2002, an America that was supposed to have learned the lessons of Arthur Miller's incendiary play long ago.

"Long ago" was the 1950s, when Miller wrote The Crucible as an impassioned rebuttal to the scary Communist "witch hunts" conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committees: attacks on innocent citizens ranging from innuendo and blacklisting to trials and even prison sentences, sanctioned by the government and the corporate establishment. In The Crucible, Miller only thinly disguised what he saw happening around him, taking in all the hot-button topics—guilt by association, naming names, and trumped-up "confessions" are as much a part of the Salem of 1692 depicted in this play as they were of the America Miller lived in 270 years later.

The Crucible begins with Reverend Parris, an unpopular and opportunistic minister of the fire-and-brimstone variety calling in supposed "witch expert" Reverend John Hale to attend to his young daughter Betty. Betty came down with a mysterious ailment after a night of forbidden revelry with a group of other girls and Parris' Barbadian slave Tituba, and Parris suspects that she may have been "witched." Hale is inclined to agree, and soon the whole town of Salem, Massachusetts is in a panic, seeking sorceresses among the outcast women of town and, eventually, among the most pious as well. Among the accused are the saintly Rebecca Nurse, who refuses to succumb to the hysteria and pays dearly for it, and Elizabeth Proctor, whose only crime, apart from fundamental goodness, is having banished a young harlot named Abigail Williams from her household the year before when she suspected her of having an affair with her husband John. Abigail is Parris' niece and quickly becomes the de facto leader of the bullying mob; it is her testimony that damns Elizabeth as a witch.

Deputy Governor Danforth arrives to prosecute the several dozen suspected witches. Convictions come quickly, until John Proctor and some of his neighbors defy the Court, attempting to bring it down using peaceful, reasoned argument. Proctor's liberal, humanist spirit is entirely alien to Danforth's conservative, doctrinal mindset; the two find themselves locked in mortal opposition, with Danforth playing Javert to Proctor's Jean Valjean.

There are two conflicts infusing The Crucible: the one between the unruly mob and the innocent lives they so eagerly sacrifice, and the other between the determinist tyranny of the Deputy Governor and the freedom-embracing individualism of quintessential American John Proctor. Miller makes it easy for us to know which side to take in each: The Crucible is first and foremost a very effective work of propaganda, so well-crafted that it's pretty much unthinkable that your reaction when, say, Abigail leads a pack of local girls in ritualized taunting of another girl who has defied her will be anything but righteous rage.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this: moral clarity is something we could use more of these days; Miller's willingness—need—to take a stand here feels brave artistically as well as politically in this post-modern world of ours. The third act of The Crucible, especially, is brilliantly theatrical and spectacularly incendiary: its emotional impact is devastating and genuine.

Richard Eyre's staging, highlighted by Tim Hatley's roughhewn sets and drab costumes and Paul Gallo's stark dramatic lighting, is enormously powerful. Liam Neeson anchors the play solidly as John Proctor, at once larger-than-life and resoundingly unassuming, as quintessentially "American" as Paul Bunyan or Davy Crockett. Laura Linney is equally effective as Elizabeth, a less explosive presence but just as steadfast and determined. Standouts among the rest of the large cast include Helen Stenborg as pious, common-sensical Rebecca Nurse, Patrice Johnson as the pragmatic Tituba, and John Benjamin Hickey, whose performance as Hale is enormously persuasive and intelligent. Hale, by the way, may be The Crucible's real protagonist—it is he alone among the principals who achieves authentic insight and courage as the play progresses.

Brian Murray's turn as Deputy Governor Danforth is problematic. Murray is, as ever, fully in command of the stage; but I think he may be too modern a thinker to stand comfortably in Danforth's shoes: Danforth must be unyielding and unwavering, but in places Murray wavers and yields. The balance—Proctor v. Danforth—is thrown off unhealthily as a result.

But never mind: this is still vitally compelling theatre, a work whose sheer moral authority dwarfs just about everything else on the boards right now. It demands to be seen.

Sean Mathias' new staging of Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man is a major disappointment. I saw an excellent revival of this play a few years ago off-off-Broadway. What I remember about that production was the humanity and compassion with which the complimentary stories of its two leading characters were told. John Merrick, the grotesquely deformed man is rescued from almost certain death by Dr. Frederick Treves. But as the one comes to feel more "human," the other comes to understand how inhuman most humans are.

The fundamental simplicity of Pomerance's message is mirrored, or should be, in its physical production. So the first obstacle that this Elephant Man faces is the massive, ugly unit set provided by Santo Loquasto. I'm not even sure what it's supposed to be: it's comprised of two clunky wooden platforms and two odd funhouse-style mirrors, each of which gets lugged around the stage in various entirely unsuggestive combinations. They're framed by a bulky arch, the top of which carries projected titles that "set up" each scene.

The set design drives much of Mathias' direction, which, like the very worst of amateur theatre, mostly consists of moving the furniture around, to no purpose whatsoever.

The three leads bring almost nothing to their roles. Kate Burton reprises her stage-y Hedda as the actress Mrs. Kendal, which works at first but fails to illuminate any warming relationship with John Merrick as the play progresses. (She also, unnecessarily, bares her breasts, in response, perhaps, to Kathleen Turner's more hyped nudity at the Plymouth Theatre just next door.) Billy Crudup plays Merrick as the Elephant Child rather than the Elephant Man, all whiny, sickly innocence, sort of like a large Tiny Tim. Rupert Graves plays the pivotal character of Dr. Treves like a very tired Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins, alternating weary nonchalance with blustery rage.

The only performance approaching actual characterization is given by Edmond Genest, who plays Treves' superior.

An original score by Philip Glass matches Loquasto's overbearing, drab design, as does James F. Ingalls' portentous lighting. Did I mention that there are giant letters spelling out "The Elephant Man" running across the proscenium arch?

Neither subtlety nor humanity is sustained in this tiresome revival. Too bad, too, for this is a pretty fine play. But you wouldn't know it from the evidence on display at the Royale Theatre.

Edward Albee's new play The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is about a successful, happily married man who has just celebrated his fiftieth birthday, just received a prestigious award in his field (architecture) and a lucrative government commission, and nevertheless finds himself severely compromised because he is forced to confess, to wife and son, that he has fallen in love with a goat.

"Things happen," is what this man, Martin, concludes, and he's not being glib or even sardonic. The Goat is, I think, about a man—an apparently fine man, caring and liberal, intelligent and principled—allowing something to happen that he should not. It is also about the nature of that allowing—words like tolerance or understanding or even justification don't quite do here, but they're all close—because Albee, via Martin, actually leads us to a place where we almost accept the play's impossible premise.

The Goat is also, now taking Martin's wife Stevie's point of view, about how we deal with something disastrous and unforeseen and life-changing; here, a revelation that is a prime facie death-knell to the solidest of marriages; but draw whatever resonance you will from this starkly powerful theme.

Elsewhere in this provocative, funny, troubling play, Albee touches on familiar themes like the myth of the American Dream and the hypocrisy of the striving American establishment, and on less expected but entirely welcome issues like irrational homophobia and disillusionment with people in power. The dialogue is smart and well-considered and that one degree more articulate than actual conversation that characterizes the playwright's work; it's witty and challenging and distancing, even in the midst of the most intense marital battles this side of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  The Goat starts as self-referential Noel Coward comedy of manners (there's even a reference to a woman called "Large Alice") and ends, grandly and ambiguously, as Greek tragedy, complete with ritual sacrifice.

It's a play that demands to be seen, and read, and heard; there's stuff in it that will feel ringingly true and significant and useful to you. The particulars—the meaning, the precise resonance—are going to be different for each of us, I think, because the nature of Albee's work generally and The Goat specifically is to be dense, knotty, and not quite knowable. At once a profound conundrum and a malevolent game, The Goat is engineered not to be solved. It's designed, instead, to provoke, to challenge, to push buttons, to awaken us from lethargy and ignorance, to shock, and—yes—to amuse, too. That it does all of these so well is a measure of Albee's genius; that it frustrates us for its ultimate unfathomability is our weakness, not his.

Don't get me wrong: The Goat is not perfect; it may not stand the test of time the way A Delicate Balance turned out to or Virginia Woolf indisputably does. But a playwright as smart as Albee deserves to be heard, and heard seriously: The Goat is an important piece of this theatre season, and what (or if) it will someday tell us about this American moment isn't important right now.

David Esbjornson's staging seems to me just right: it has style, sharpness, and urgency. Recent cuts and tucks and alterations feel somewhat evident; I wonder if director and playwright are satisfied with The Goat we've been invited to review. The four actors who comprise the cast are in superb form, that's for sure: Stephen Rowe plays Ross, best friend and catalyst for the play's events, with an assured swagger that feels good at first but turns nasty; Mercedes Ruehl, Bill Pullman, and Jeffrey Carlson (as Martin and Stevie's son, Billy) create an organic family unit so strong that its destruction has real weight. All three give performances of immense emotional intensity; there may not be a better ensemble working on Broadway.

I don't claim to understand all of Albee's intentions in The Goat, nor do I necessarily embrace the ones I do understand. But what I know is that the body blows Albee serves up in this discomfiting domestic drama are electric jolts of energy. We need that; boy do we need that. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter what The Goat means. What matters is that it compels you to figure it out.

With the arrival at the Plymouth Theatre of The Graduate, Broadway reaches its nadir, and I don't just mean this season. At least I hope this is its nadir: The Graduate, which is even more reprehensible than Mamma Mia!, nevertheless has in common with that show a crass cynicism in which reliance on a brand name substitutes for wit, style, or intelligence. The Graduate goes on, however, to rely also on hype—notably a 20-second nude appearance by Kathleen Turner that has gotten more attention in the media than anything else that's been seen on Broadway with the possible exception of Edward Albee's bestial Goat.

When it's not lewd or disgusting—which it is, fitfully—The Graduate is mostly extremely dull as it trudges through the events but not the feelings of the famous screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry. Undirected college grad Benjamin allows himself to drift into a stupid affair with his older neighbor Mrs. Robinson, only to realize that he has fallen in love with her daughter, Elaine. On screen, with '60s California as its backdrop and with that iconic Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack, it seemed to mean a lot. On stage, with what sounds only like Paul Simon's vamps emanating from the speakers, and with just Rob Howell's preciously expressionist oversized unit set to look at, it means nothing at all.

Young movie stars Jason Biggs and Alicia Silverstone do nothing wrong as Benjamin and Elaine, but neither do they do anything particularly right. Kathleen Turner, presumably the show's drawing card, registers nary a clap when she skulks on stage for the first time, looking, acting (and sounding) like Tallulah Bankhead on steroids. Later, when her bare bosoms are flopping around in the first act's protracted sex scene, she makes more of an impression.

What struck me most was Turner's ingenuous statement, in an interview in the Playbill, that "I was desperately looking for a way to justify some clothing": nudity for art's sake, you see. Interestingly, costar Biggs had no such compulsion—he emerges from the bed, after a rather grotesque simulation of oral sex, in his underwear. Hooray for the double standard.

Later, Susan Cella, a good actress, is reduced to playing a stripper who cooch dances in tassels and a g-string, much to the embarrassment of  Silverstone's character. (She was not alone.) Just when we thought Times Square was raunch-free, here comes The Graduate to remind us of the good old days. For something like 10 times more money per ticket.

The Roundabout Theatre Company's current offering is a revival of Arthur Miller's 1944 flop, The Man Who Had All the Luck. A great deal of money and time has, it seems to me, been wasted.

I mean just what I say. There's certainly value—curiosity, academic, what-have-you—in taking a look, 58 years on, at the first Broadway play written by one of the 20th century's acknowledged masters. Which is precisely what the Williamstown Theatre Festival did, last summer. I didn't see that production, but it's hard to understand why anyone who did thought that The Man Who Had All the Luck needed to return to Broadway, in a gazillion-dollar production (there's a car on stage!—see photo above) and with a top ticket price of $65.

This is a bad play. Objectively. It's clumsy; the dialogue is stilted; the characterizations are weak; the themes are dense and muddled and poorly developed. The Father-Son conflict, a hallmark of Miller's work, here has to do with a well-meaning dad locking his son in the basement and forcing him to practice pitching baseballs. The Political Angle comes down to a weird speech, assigned to an Austrian auto mechanic, about the pitiable Europeans who have gotten what they deserve (presumably, Hitler and Mussolini) because they're not ambitious enough (or something). The Big Crisis that fuels the cathartic third act denouement involves bad fish fed to some minks.

I told you it's a bad play. Miller has nothing to be ashamed of: All My Sons and Death of a Salesman and The Crucible (which you can see right now on Broadway) provide more than enough evidence of his greatness. But it's hard to believe that he doesn't cringe at least a little when he revisits this earlier work; I know I did. And sure, there are signs of the brilliance to come (including a plot idea that he throws away here but uses in Salesman to great effect). But that doesn't make The Man Who Had All the Luck worth anyone's time or money, with the possible exception of a Ph.D. candidate.

For the record, here's a quick rundown of the plot. David Beeves is a man with something like the Midas touch. With no formal training, he's become the esteemed mechanic of the small town where he lives. He wants to marry Hester Falk, but her miserly old father is opposed to it; wouldn't you know that the father gets hit by a car on the very day when David and Hester contemplate eloping? Enriched, now, with a new wife and a new 110-acre farm, David quickly builds up his auto repair business with the help of Gustav Eberson (the Austrian mechanic I mentioned) who miraculously appears in the shop just in time to help him fix a car belonging to a rich old mink farmer who becomes David's mentor.

Miller called The Man Who Had All the Luck a fable, which is why he allows himself to make David so implausibly and unstoppably fortunate. He surrounds David with Men Who Have Non