Julian Fleisher and Kacie Sheik in "February House." (Courtesy Joan Marcus)

February House, a splendid new musical at the Public Theater, is set in that commune-like home, and among its many achievements is to remind us that, despite what we’ve been told by innumerable New York magazine covers, Styles section features, and Lena Dunham, Brooklyn-as-bohemia is not a recent invention. This creative home was a real one—a house, granted, not an illegal loft, in Brooklyn Heights rather than Bushwick—and in 1940 and ’41 it was occupied by W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and others. They wrote, sang, drank, danced, slept with each other, avoided paying rent and sniffed cocaine in back bedrooms at parties. They worked on their art, and themselves; they talked about art, and themselves; and amid all the chaos, they didn’t seem to get very much done. As the Brooklyn-frequenting if not actually Brooklynite David Byrne might note: Same as it ever was.

Their stories unfold—loves and heartbreak, artistic failures and triumphs, arguments about the artist’s political obligations in a world on the brink of war—in a haunting, minor-key production propelled by the character of George Davis (Julian Fleisher, a bald, nebbishy leading man charismatically campy and wonderfully wistful), the flamboyantly gay editor and erstwhile novelist who has assembled the house’s residents and dedicated himself to their care and feeding. February House, as 7 Middagh Street was dubbed because so many who lived there were born in that short month, is his work of art, his masterpiece.

The musical February House is its own lovely work of art. Directed by Davis McCallum, with scenic design by Riccardo Hernandez and lighting by Mark Barton, it is an impressionistic, sometimes ghostly staging, befitting a special moment that came and went. There is a battered parquet floor, a suggestion of crown molding overhead and a black, brick upstage wall on which a spectral Brooklyn Bridge occasionally appears, outlined in LEDs. The six-piece band sits onstage. There is a handful of pieces of bulky Victorian furniture, shrouded under drop cloths as the show opens.

George welcomes us to the house and introduces us to his menagerie. Auden (Erik Lochtefeld), who has “married” his acolytic young lover, Chester Kallman (A.J. Shively), is studiously avoiding any comment on the war in Europe while collaborating on a dreadful opera about Paul Bunyan with his housemate Benjamin Britten (Stanley Bahorek), the composer who lives at 7 Middagh with his own, equally alliterative lover, the singer Peter Pears (Ken Barnett). McCullers (Kristen Sieh) is drinking her way through attempts at her second novel and being seduced by Erika Mann (Stephanie Hayes), an Austrian refugee and Auden’s wife of convenience, who is agitating to get the United States into the war. Reeves McCullers (Ken Clark), Carson’s husband and a lesser writer, shows up from time to time to try to get his wife back, and Gypsy (Kacie Sheik) has moved in to write her best-selling novel, The G-String Murders, under George’s guidance. (She also pays the bills.)

These odd, compelling characters, and this mesmerizing musical, grapple with the big questions: art, love, politics. They try nonconformity; they lean back toward conformity. They find they cannot escape politics.

The book, by Seth Bockley, is efficient, effective and often witty, if sometimes overly explicated. The music and lyrics, by the (of course) young Brooklyn composer Gabriel Kahane, are sensational. His melodies are both pretty and earthbound, combining orchestral sounds with plenty of folksy banjo. There is throughout, even in the happier moments, a tinge of sadness. But it’s his lyrics that have most stayed with me.

The very first words of the musical in “Light Upon the Hill,” a love song to the house, are a poetic evocation of being young and literary in New York:

“Here’s to the driver who took me Downtown/ When I got to New York I was glad for the ride/ How the buildings we passed were all gleaming/ I was dreaming a life I’d look out from the inside/ Here’s to the parties, the galas, the benders/ The gentle bartenders who drowned us in drink/ Here’s to the sailors, the tailors, the rent boys/ I meant, boys, to tell you your tip’s on the sink.”

Next up is “A Room Comes Together,” George’s tribute to the pleasures of assembling décor—or, for that matter, a group—with its interior-rhyming wordplay: “I grow weak over antique teak/ what I seek is a teacup of bone/ I get a thrill from an iron-wrought grill/ and I finger it when I’m alone.” And, in the same song is my favorite couplet: “Growing up gay in Clinton, Michigan/ Every day I’d wish and wish again/ For a place where I would belong.”

Elsewhere, some of the lyrics come from Auden poems. There’s a mini-aria about bedbugs. (There’s also, perhaps unavoidably, an intellectually pretentious strip tease for Gypsy, “A Little Brain,” that can’t help reading like outtakes from Rodgers and Hart’s Gypsy Rose Lee spoof, “Zip.”)

But, through all that fun, there’s always the sadness. Inevitably, this happy artists’ utopia, like all utopias, will come apart. These creators must move on, must create. McCullers went back home, and her husband eventually went to war. A lovestruck Auden followed Kallman to Ann Arbor. Britten and Pear went to California. Gypsy went back to the burlesque halls. You could also say February House succumbed to Hitler: The horror in Europe made this decadent life untenable.

George was left behind in the house in Brooklyn Heights. It, too, is gone now; it fell to Robert Moses and his Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But creative Brooklyn lives on, of course, and that’s a good thing: It has brought us February House.

editorial@observer.com

"Lonely, I'm Not."

Paul Weitz, the screenwriter and movie director and producer and playwright, seems to have a perfectly happy and lucrative and well-adjusted life: wife, daughter and a string of Hollywood successes, including About a Boy, Antz and the American Pie series. And yet with his latest play, Lonely, I’m Not, he returns to the Second Stage Theatre for the second time in two years with another story about a young man whose early professional triumphs have left him in a near-catatonic state of arrested development.

Two summers ago, in Trust, the erstwhile Scrubs star Zach Braff played a nebbishy dotcom millionaire, paralyzed by his newfound wealth and increasingly loveless marriage. Now, in Lonely, I’m Not, which opened Monday night, the erstwhile That ’70s Show star Topher Grace plays Porter, a nebbishy Wall Street whiz who made a fortune, flamed out, had a breakdown, divorced his wife and now can’t work, date or even, apparently, interview for a job.

It’s enough to make you think Mr. Weitz would rather he’d been a failure.

With Lonely, I’m Not, he comes ever so slightly closer.

Porter (Mr. Grace) is four years past his breakdown and finally, he hopes, ready to re-enter the world. A job interview, to be a second-grade teacher, goes badly. (“And what makes you want to teach second grade?” “Well, I remember liking second grade.”) But a first date with Heather (Olivia Thirlby), another accomplished Wall Street type, a woman who is blind, goes much better. They’re a good pair, each smart, tough and ambitious, each fighting against and resentful of a handicap—his mental, hers physical. Each has one dead parent and one living, problematic one: Her mother is smothering, his father is a con artist. They fall in love, which gives them each the courage to move forward: her to a new job in a new city, after she’s passed over for a deserved promotion, him to get off his couch and take a job at a coffee shop.

It’s not an unpleasant hour and a half, with funny one-liners and amusing characters. Director Trip Cullman gives the play an efficient, nicely polished production, with a minimalist, industrial look and frequent neon and projected titles, wryly signposting new scenes. (The sets are by Mark Wendland, the lighting by Matt Frey and the projection design by Aaron Rhyne.)

Mr. Grace, who also starred in Mr. Weitz’s In Good Company, is excellent in his lead role, buoying the show with the same charming deadpan neuroses that elevated That ’70s Show into something more than a run-of-the-mill sitcom. Ms. Thirlby, who was in Mr. Weitz’s Being Flynn, gives a steely, focused performance as Heather, a hard worker who must work even harder to succeed, someone so determined not to need any help that she’s nearly incapable of accepting any. The talented supporting cast fills an array of roles: Mark Blum is Porter’s dad and Heather’s boss; Lisa Emery is Heather’s mother and the school administrator who won’t hire Porter; Christopher Jackson is the fellow Wall Streeter who tries to get Porter back in the game and also the Starbucks guy; Maureen Sebastian is Porter’s ex-wife and Heather’s bubbly, up-talking, overbearing roommate.

But while Lonely, I’m Not is pleasant, sweet in a way and nicely staged, it’s also not very compelling. It lacks much excitement, or even the winning comedic situations and set pieces of its antecedent, Trust. Where the earlier play opened with its yuppie protagonist entering an S&M dungeon, this one opens with its yuppie protagonist arriving too early at a Starbucks. In the earlier play the yuppie protagonist was jolted out of his funk by falling in love with the dominatrix, with whom he’d realized he went to high school, a funny, unexpected meet-cute. In this one that jolt arrives when its yuppie protagonist falls in love with another yuppie, with whom he is set up by the glib mutual grad-school friend known only by the frat-boy nickname Little Dog. That’s meet-standard, or even a little meet-smarmy.

And, indeed, despite its more or less earnest message, smarm might be Lonely, I’m Not’s biggest problem. When a play’s primary concern is whether a burnt-out master-of-the-universe prodigy can again find within himself the mental stability to “tear some shit up and fucking obliterate some motherfuckers,” as Porter tells Little Dog in the brief moment he’s considering going back to work, one’s natural reaction—in the post-Lehman Brothers, lingering unemployment, collapsing Europe, we-are-the-99-percent era—isn’t to root for him but against him.

There are many words you might use to describe the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream now playing at the Classic Stage Company, but “classic” is unlikely

Sure, it’s Shakespeare, his widely read and performed pastoral comedy, which makes it inherently a classic. But little else about Tony Speciale’s over-the-top, visually stunning staging, with choreography by George De La Peña, sets once again by Mr. Wendland, lights by Tyler Micoleau and costumes by Andrea Lauer, could be described by that staid adjective. Here are some you might try instead: silly, confounding, comedic, effervescent, titillating, sexy, beautiful.

That last one is probably the most important. There are some big names in the production—Bebe Neuwirth, of all people, plays the Amazonian queen Hippolyta and the fairy queen Titania; Christina Ricci is the fair young Hermia; plus there are the downtown stalwarts Taylor Mac as Puck and David Greenspan as the trouper Francis Flute—and also a near-constant stream of laughs. But the thing here is the sets and staging, from the mulch-like floor to the tilted wall of mirrors overhead to the torrents of rose petals that eventually pour down and coat the stage. It’s gorgeous and often very witty, like when lawn chairs and popcorn appear for the troupers watching the lovers fight.

And finally there are the costumes. From Ms. Neuwirth’s fairy costume of a leather bustier, the better to show off those dancer’s legs, to the tight white skivvies in which the young, fetching lovers spend much of Act III fighting with each other—Ms. Ricci and Halley Wegryn Gross as Hermia and Helena, Nick Gehlfuss and Jordan Dean as Lysander and Demetrius—this lush-to-look-at Midsummer Night’s Dream offers something dreamy for everyone.

editorial@observer.com

Oliver Chris and Tom Edden in 'One Man, Two Guvnors.' (Courtesy Joan Marcus)

The 2011-2012 Broadway season—a busy year of 40 new productions—ended last week, with the Tony Awards eligibility cutoff on Thursday, April 26. It went out with neither a bang nor a whimper but with an exhausting rush of last-minute, beat-the-deadline openings: Nine plays or musicals debuted in the last 10 days of elinatgibility. My colleague Rex Reed has reviewed two of them, the pleasant but lazily assembled Gershwin revue Nice Work If You Can Get It, and the also pleasant, even more anemic holy-roller movie adaptation Leap of Faith. Here, brief takes on the seven other shows that rounded out the season:

Clybourne Park: The playwright Bruce Norris’ bracing examination of the unshakable, vestigial racism that lurks behind the platitudinous propriety of even well-meaning white liberals, Clybourne Park is both very funny and more than a little damning. It debuted off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons two seasons ago and was one of the best plays of the year. There was much hand-wringing then that even a play that good couldn’t make it to Broadway. Now, after lauded runs in London and then Los Angeles, plus the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it has arrived on 48th Street and will in all likelihood add a Tony or two—from among the four nominations it earned Tuesday—to its already sizable collection of plaudits. As it should: Even after two years of globetrotting, and despite the move from tiny Playwrights to the capacious Walter Kerr, Clybourne Park is one of the best plays of this year, too.

It is both structurally intriguing and thematically powerful. The first act takes place in 1959, as a white family prepares to move out of its suburban home and sell it to a black family, a transaction about which the neighbors are less than pleased. The second act takes place in the same house in 2009, as a white family has purchased it and is preparing to rebuild it as a bobo paradise, complete with koi pond, about which the neighbors are less than pleased. The same marvelous cast, in place since Playwrights, handles both sets of roles, a technique that draws implicit parallels between the earlier era, when the racism went largely unspoken because it was so expected, and today, when it goes largely unspoken because it’s so politically incorrect.

Pam MacKinnon’s subtle direction doesn’t beat you over the head with any of this, and she does a masterful job of balancing Mr. Norris’ comedy and pathos. Indeed, in the middle of the second act there’s a parade of they’re-not-offensive-because-I-don’t-actually-think-this-way offensive jokes, and the bit is so well written and so well staged that it remains, even when you’ve already seen the show and know what’s coming, simultaneously breathtakingly funny and horrifyingly awful—in other words, totally great.

The Columnist: There is perhaps no one better suited to play a Groton-Harvard stuffed shirt, as was the powerful and clubby midcentury newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop, than John Lithgow, a Harvard man with a patrician manner and a résumé full of stuffed-shirt roles. The chief pleasure of The Columnist, David Auburn’s mildly titillating history lesson of a play about Alsop now running at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, is watching the delighted relish with which Mr. Lithgow dominates the proceedings as this dominating man.

Nearly as much fun are the major supporting actors: the mix of loyalty and rivalry in Boyd Gaines’s understated performance as Joe’s brother and sometimes collaborator, Stewart Alsop; the devotion and frustration Margaret Colin brings to her role as Susan Mary Alsop, more a hostess than a wife for the closeted Joe; Stephen Kunken doing his best not to seem too smarmy as a smarmily written David Halberstam, representing the younger generation of journalists who questioned the wisdom of Alsop’s Wise Men chums; and Grace Gummer as Alsop’s increasingly antiwar stepdaughter, the one person other than himself to whom Alsop seemed devoted.

Under Daniel Sullivan’s typically competent direction and on John Lee Beaty’s typically lush sets, the enterprise cries out to be Taken Seriously. But there’s not much to seriously consider, even with the attention paid—and this is clearly designed to be the hook—to Alsop’s open-secret homosexuality. Ultimately, he becomes simply a self-important buffoon who doesn’t know his time is up. Which leaves little for The Columnist to offer beyond a boomer nostalgia trip.

Don’t Dress for Dinner: “People don’t go around the country taking mistresses to friend’s houses,” exclaims a character early in Don’t Dress for Dinner, now at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre. Would that this were true: If so, Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be an international banker about whose sex life we were blissfully ignorant, and this creaky and clichéd 1960s French sex farce wouldn’t exist.

Don’t Dress takes place at a country house outside Paris, where a well-off married couple, Bernard and Jacqueline, are hosting guests that include Bernard’s best friend, Robert, who is having an affair with Jacqueline; Bernard’s mistress, Suzanne, who Robert and Jacqueline believe is the hired cook; and the cook, Suzette, who must pretend varyingly to be Robert’s niece or his girlfriend.

It’s written by Marc Camoletti, whose Boeing-Boeing, another 1960s French sex farce, was the Tony Award-winning best revival several seasons ago, blessed with effervescent performances and a zippy jet-age production. But Don’t Dress, directed by John Tillinger, just feels tired and stale, down to John Lee Beatty’s stodgy, brown-and-grey set. Countless bits of confusion are set up only by a character’s insistence on pronouns instead of proper nouns. People get wound up in telephone cords. Seltzer is sprayed by angry women on befuddled men, laboriously—and several times. Sometimes the clichéd passes into the offensive: The cook Suzette’s husband, of whom everyone is scared, is large, black and randy. The characterizations are flat, except for Spencer Kayden as Suzette, who does a memorable job of transforming from mousy domestic to faux-sophisticated swell.

And there is, finally, a noticeable issue of changed mores. Boeing-Boeing’s hero was a three-timing bachelor, a very 1960s French character that even today remains essentially innocuous. But in the 21st-century United States, we’re less amused by gleefully adulterous spouses. M. Strauss-Kahn could tell you that.

Ghost: The thing to remember about Ghost, a monster box-office hit in 1990, is that it was in many respects an awful movie, a cheesy, maudlin love story between a dead banker and a sloppy potter (or, if taken literally, between Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg). It was also frustratingly hazy on the logistics of its metaphysics: If ghostly Sam, the banker murdered and left spectral, could walk through walls and couldn’t grasp doorknobs, why could he sit in a chair? How did he walk through an apartment without falling through its floor?

You will not be surprised to discover that Ghost the musical, now at the Lunt-Fontanne, makes no effort to answer these questions, nor many others, including: When is this set? (It seems present-day, but not-yet-dead Sam assures his friend and colleague Carl that in five years, he’ll wish he’d moved to Brooklyn, too.) Why is this couple so devoted to each other? (Until the mugging-gone-bad that kills Sam, all they’ve done is fight.) And how has Carl, who secretly plotted to murder Sam, run up $10 million in drug debts? (That’s a lot of bumps in a club bathroom.)

With a book and lyrics by Bruce Joel Rubin, the screenwriter who wrote the film; music and lyrics by Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard, pop songwriters; and choreography by Ashley Wallen, best known for his work on a BBC dance-competition show, this neophyte-made material is in the more capable hands of director Matthew Warchus, whose work includes that Tony-winning Boeing-Boeing. But the only pleasures he manages to elicit from this mess are some cool illusions (by Paul Kieve), like when Sam walks through a door, and the silly, joyful, totally compelling performance of Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Oda Mae Brown, the Goldberg role.

Everything else here—the story, the other actors, the music—is entirely forgettable, and best forgotten. May it rest in peace.

The Lyons: Nicky Silver’s pitch-black comedy The Lyons opened off Broadway last October at the Vineyard Theatre, where it promptly became one of the best plays of the fall. Now it’s on Broadway, at the Cort, and it’s one of the best plays of the spring. It is, as I wrote then, “an emotionally complicated and deeply affecting portrait of a dysfunctional family in meltdown, troubled adult children and spiteful parents uniting as Dad prepares to die.” Even if it was snubbed for a best play Tony nomination.

It’s the same production now on Broadway. Mark Brokaw once again directs, Linda Lavin and Dick Latessa are once again the horrid Rita and Ben Lyons and Michael Esper and Kate Jennings Grant are once again their profoundly fucked-up children. The dialogue is hilarious, the character portraits are slowly terrifying, and Ms. Lavin is once again giving a triumphant performance as Rita, the most frighteningly bitter, biting, undermining and narcissistic Jewish mother you’ve ever seen. Ms. Lavin’s great accomplishment is that her character is explicitly all these things—and yet also somehow appealing.

One Man, Two Guvnors: French farce might seem passé this month, but British farce—and arguably the single greatest stage farce, Noises Off, is British farce—is going strong. Technically, the pedants will point out that One Man, Two Guvnors, the side-splitting West End import now at the Music Box, is commedia dell’arte, a modern reinterpretation of the 1746 play The Servant of Two Masters, a classic commedia that relies, as the form did, on stock characters, low comedy and an archetypal gluttonous, stupid, cunning servant.

But One Man plays as farce, with the title servant, Francis, running back and forth between the two masters, or guvnors, he has somehow acquired in the low-class British seaside rest town of Brighton. There are hidden identities, slammed doors, swapped dishes and chase scenes that lack only the Benny Hill theme music.

The adaptation is by Richard Bean, it is directed with a light touch by the National Theater’s Nicholas Hytner, and it stars James Corden, who may be the most naturally funny man I’ve ever seen, an Andy Richter look-alike with a broad face and ingenuous smile that makes you like him even as you know he’s pulling one over on you. Ultimately, he’ll pull one over on them all—and us, too, as we happily, gleefully, watch his farce reach its happy ending.

A Streetcar Named Desire: The most notable detail about this latest revival of A Streetcar Named Desire is also, happily, its least noticeable. Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans-set masterpiece of alienation is at the Broadhurst, played by a mostly black cast, and the change seems not only unobtrusive but even natural. Williams’s language is the slow, drawling rhythms of poor New Orleans, and it’s a perfect fit for the rhythms of black speech, with is strong poor Southern roots.

The last name “Kowalski” has been excised from the play, and some lines that remain pack an extra punch in a cast with this complexion: the haughty Stella, hanging onto her gentility, dismissing her brother-in-law Stanley as an “animal,” “sub-human,” “ape-like,” and Stanley’s contemptuous mention of Stella’s “lily-white fingers.”

Unfortunately, while the concept succeeds, the execution doesn’t. Nicole Ari Parker makes a memorable Blanche, delicate and imperious, initially canny and ultimately tragic, but Daphne Rubin-Vega seems badly miscast as Stella, a snarling battle axe who lacks any chemistry with the husband toward whom she’s supposed to feel allegedly animal lust. And Blair Underwood, as Stanley, is hunky and raging, but he never displays the unfettered magnetism that draws both women inexorably toward him.

Indeed, the result of this scattered production, directed by Emily Mann, is to leave its audience, somewhat inexplicably, chuckling its way through what’s typically thought to be a rather bleak drama. If you’re looking to see a rape get laughs and applause, this Streetcar is for you.

editorial@observer.com

'Peter and the Starcatcher.' (Courtesy O & M Co.)

Don’t worry too much about Peter Pan and his Lost Boys. They’ve found their way to Broadway, and they’re doing just fine.

Peter and the Starcatcher, the seriously silly prelude to J.M. Barrie’s boy-who-won’t-grow-up classic, opened Sunday night at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Based on a Disney-published 2004 young-adult novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson (and, yes, it’s that Dave Barry), the Disney-developed play with music debuted a year ago off Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop. It’s a swashbuckling story of orphans, pirates, a treacherous sea voyage and the secret substance that gives Peter has magical abilities, set in an oddly cheerful Victorian England.

With a smart, jokey book by Rick Elice, who cowrote Jersey Boys, and a delightfully clever, calculatedly let’s-put-on-a-show staging by Roger Rees, the British actor and Mr. Elice’s partner, and Alex Timbers, Peter was a hit on East Fourth Street, where it served as a modest, totally charming counterpoint to a certain overblown creation myth then making headlines up on 42nd Street. It was a small, low-fi production, perfectly suited to NYTW’s small, rough-edged East Village space, and it was a hit with both critics and audiences.

But could this show survive the trip uptown? The bigger spaces and more geriatric audiences of Broadway have a way of swallowing up and spitting out scrappy, quirky downtown shows. (See, for example, Mr. Timbers’s Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the emo musical about the seventh president that was a Public Theater hit and a Broadway flop.) The good news for Peter and his band of orphans is: Yes, emphatically.

Messrs. Rees and Timbers have inserted an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink gilded proscenium—gold-painted egg timers form a border around the curtain, and a giant pineapple sculpture sits at top center—within the Atkinson’s more restrained one, shrinking the stage and creating an irreverent, intimate, music-hall feel. The scenery—a mess of rope and rigging suggesting wharfs and ships for the first act; a tropical island’s expanse of shimmering blue sky for the second—is perhaps slightly more complicated than it was downtown, but negligibly so: The show still does wonders with a length of rope, which serves variously as windows, doorways, guardrails and a ship’s deck.

But what makes the directors’ winking, imaginative staging truly take flight—Wendy, Michael, John, Tinkerbell, come on!—is the big, gleeful performances from their impressively talented cast, all returning from the NYTW run.

Christian Borle, the floppy-haired, googly-eyed Smash star, plays Black Stache, the pirate who will become Hook, with foppish, pompous relish, a villain with the heart of a showman. His final face-off with Peter, in which he blusters, bellows and loses both the battle and his hand, is an amazing, lip-smacking, hilarious highlight. “He’s chewing all the scenery, sir,” reports the first mate, Smee (Kevin Del Aguila), as the omnivorous crocodile that will become Hook’s nemesis approaches. “Not in my scene, he ain’t,” Stache yells. “Spare me the theatrics, you reptilian ham!”

Each performance, not just Mr. Borle’s, is its own goofy masterpiece. Adam Chanler-Berat, with his wide face and sullenly jutting chin, the sympathetic stoner boyfriend from Next to Normal, is a perfect Peter, sensitive and sad, defiant and yet also dutiful. Celia Keenan-Bolger is pretty and funny as the bossy Molly, the overachieving Wendy antecedent with whom Peter falls in love. Carson Elrod and David Rossmer are lovable, vaudevillian lunks as Peter’s fellow orphans, and Rick Holmes is amusingly supercilious as Molly’s father, Lord Aster, the devoted Victorian compelled unfailingly to repeat “God save her” upon any utterance of his sovereign’s name. Arnie Burton, cross-dressing as Molly’s beloved, blowsy nanny Mrs. Bumbrake, proves it possible to provide comic relief in what’s already a big, broad comedy.

The play ends with Molly returning to England and Peter left behind, heartbroken, on the island he’ll call Neverland. You know the one: It’s not on any chart, you must find it in your heart—and thanks to the imaginative, hilarious, totally endearing good time that is Peter and the Starcatcher, that’s a very easy thing to do.

Let us stipulate that Magic/Bird, the eponymous Broadway play coproduced by the NBA about the ostensible rivalry between two late-20th-century basketball stars, is not designed for us—not for theater reviewers, not for regular theatergoers, not, really, for Manhattanites. Like its predecessor, Lombardi, about the legendary football coach, which had a successful but unacclaimed Broadway run last season, Magic/Bird is designed for sports fans, for people who don’t go to theater, for—in a neat role reversal from the usual theater ticket-buying pattern—husbands to insist on taking their wives to.

Even so, it’s an air ball.

Lombardi was brought to Broadway by a longtime sports-marketing executive, Tony Ponturo, and his producer partner, Fran Kirmser. Working from a script by Eric Simonson and with the director Thomas Kail, they developed a plausible if mediocre evening of theater, with a real narrative, several textured roles and two memorable performances from real Broadway actors: Jack Lauria as Vince Lombardi and Judith Light as his wife, Marie. The show took a critical drubbing, but, on strength of ticket sales to sports fans, it ran for clearly profit-making 244 performances.

For Magic/Bird, that same creative and producing team returned, this time with a piece about similarly iconic characters from a different sport. They also learned a lesson from their last outing, apparently: There’s no reason to try to make good theater, if the theater people won’t like it anyway.

Magic/Bird lacks even any attempt at theatricality. There is, at base, no story here. We’re told the two players are great; we watch them dribbling and passing, separately; we hear them each discussing their drive and ambition. We see an outline of Magic as a charmer and of Bird as an awkward, almost-autistic basketball savant. We are occasionally treated to manufactured scenes in a Boston bar, where a thickly accented regular in a Red Sox T-shirt argues with a black guy who’s a Lakers fan. Nothing much actually happens, except for a lunch cooked by Bird’s mother during a shoot for a TV commercial, at which the two jocks discover they both had demanding fathers, and thus become friends. Actual sports fans assure me this is all essentially true; it is still not the stuff of great drama.

The actors are fine if not memorable; the best performances come not from the leads (Kevin Daniel as Magic and Tug Coker as Bird) but from the key supporting players, Peter Scolari and Francois Battiste, who play those arguing barflies and, like the rest of the cast, a range of other roles. Mr. Kail’s direction is slick and smooth, and makes excellent use of projected clips from classic basketball games.

If this one works out as well as Lombardi did, no doubt they’ll all be back next season, with a thin script around World Series footage or Wimbledon highlights. Miracle on Ice on Stage, anyone?

editorial@observer.com

Bell, Bowen and Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff in 'Now. Here. This.' (Photo by Carol Rosegg)

Even though I was supposed to, I didn’t love [title of show] a few years back.

The sweet little musical, about people obsessed with musicals making a sweet little musical, was supposed to be catnip for musicals-obsessed people like me. But it wasn’t: I found it charming and endearing, but slight. It was a 90-minute show that seemed at least 30 minutes too long. Perhaps the problem was that I saw it too late, not at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, where it debuted, or at the off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre, where it became a hit, but on Broadway, where its will-we-make-it-to-Broadway storyline was a foregone conclusion (and where it ran for a mere three months).

Now the [title of show] gang is back at the Vineyard with their new show, Now. Here. This., and this time I’m pleased to say I loved it.

It’s another goofy, self-referential show starring Hunter Bell, Susan Blackwell, Heidi Blickenstaff and Jeff Bowen as four goofy, likeable friends named Hunter, Susan, Heidi, and Jeff. Mr. Bowen once again wrote the songs; Mr. Bell once again wrote the book, this time along with Ms. Blackwell. Michael Berresse once again directs and choreographs, and Larry Pressgrove is once again the music director, though this time he leads a four-piece, off-stage orchestra, rather than sitting onstage as a lone keyboardist.

But Now. Here. This. isn’t just silly and jokey; it also has some real existential heft.

Don’t be scared by that word. This isn’t Beckett; it’s a musical that opens with an extended joke about Mr. Bell confusing “cosmology” with “cosmetology.” It’s existential in a Chorus Line way, if A Chorus Line contained dorky references to late-’80s sitcoms: four performers talking and sometimes singing about their backgrounds and childhoods, their hopes and dreams, the disappointments and coming-outs and weird family relationships that made them who they are. Mr. Berresse, the director, who keeps the pace brisk and the tone bright even when the characters get philosophical, not incidentally played Zach, the director, in the 2006 A Chorus Line revival.

The title, we’re informed in the play’s first scene, comes from the work of the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, who argued for fully experiencing life by living in the moment. On a tour through a natural-history museum, the gang views exhibits and extrapolates lessons, often very funny lessons, by looking back at the past in order to do a better job of appreciating the present.

They do so with a giddy sense of fun. Mr. Bell is the weakest actor of the bunch, but he’s also perhaps the most engaging, a puckish teddy bear eager for approval. Ms. Blackwell has wonderful comic delivery; she can easily earn a quick laugh with no more than a raised eyebrow or deadpan double-take. Ms. Blickenstaff is the best singer, and Mr. Bowen serves as a sort of gay straight man, the glue holding this crew together.

Mr. Bowen’s best contributions are his sweet, clever lyrics, with their warm messages, grab bag of cultural allusions, and unexpected rhymes. Here’s the gang early in the show, on the profound unlikelihood of the universe putting all of them, and the audience, in the same place at the same time:

“What are the odds/ That we would get to jam together like a pack of bubble yum?/ What are the odds/ That we would get to swirl and mix up like a cinnamon bun?/ What are the odds/ That we’d be rockin’ out like Zepp’lin under Food Emporium?/ What are the odds?/ Probably about an Ann Jillian gazillion to one.”

At which point an image of the TV-film star is projected on the upstage wall (and an audience member might wonder if the show can play at any venue other than the Vineyard, located, yes, beneath a supermarket).

It’s an unusual and hard-to-pull-off combination, courting profundity while maintaining irreverence. But it works, and that mix of sweet and silly, allusive and insightful, maintains throughout. Now. Here. This. is a show that uses ironic distance to make an argument for wholesome self-actualization.

“Cheesy but great,” I wrote in my notebook, as the play ended with a surprisingly heartfelt number about diving into life. I was in the moment, and enjoying it.

A request to the theatrical scenic designers: When your show is set in New York, and you’re playing to New York audiences, and the script quite specifically refers to a grand apartment on Fifth Avenue, please do not project on the upstage wall a large, dual-towered, clearly Central Park West apartment house. We get that you’re trying to convey grandiosity, which is less clearly connoted by the East Side’s reserved rectangles, but we locals know the San Remo when we see it, and we know it’s not on Fifth.

This design error (it’s by Neil Patel, who also did the  successful projection-based work in Now. Here. This.) is one of several problems in The Morini Strad, an overwrought, schematic new drama by Willy Holtzman that opened in a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters Tuesday night, directed by Casey Childs, the Primary Stages executive producer.

The play is based on at least a rough sketch of the life of the real violin prodigy Erica Morini, a Viennese Jewish refugee who never gained the lasting fame her talent deserved and owned a legendary Stradivarius that was stolen just before her death in New York in 1995. It turns on the relationship between an aged Morini (Mary Beth Peil) and the also real, younger, unknown violin maker and restorer named Brian (Michael Laurence), who softens her heart and is in turn inspired by her to rededicate himself to creating new instruments instead of repairing old ones. (Why this devoted luthier is surprised to discover the famous instrument when he is summoned to her home remains unclear.) Opening with Morini instructing an offstage student and studded with dreamlike solos by a young violinist (Hannah Stuart) who suggests a young Morini, The Morini Strad plays mostly as a histrionic knockoff of Terrence McNally’s Master Class.

But Morini was no Callas, Mr. Holtzman is no McNally, and Mary Beth Peil, the able veteran who plays Morini as a mean, mercurial old bat, is no match for Tyne Daly’s queen-diva turn in Master Class last summer. A great instrument produces a lustrous, memorable tone, this play informs us—The Morini Strad doesn’t.

editorial@observer.com

'Jesus Christ Superstar.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Religion goes down so much more easily when it’s accompanied by guitar.

Innumerable youth-group leaders and Reform rabbis know this truth, and so does Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1970 rock-opera passion play. But the nascent mega-musicalers’ first Broadway outing—Superstar originated as a British concept album, and then debuted here in 1971 before returning to the West End the following year—offers no gentle acoustic strumming. (Neither, blissfully, does it indulge in the bland, feel-good soft rock of Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell, playing this season in a nursery-school-on-speed revival.) No, Mr. Lloyd Webber’s tuneful, hook-filled, guitar-driven score instead provides an account of Jesus Christ’s final week that’s accompanied by scorching riffs, soaring vocals, some funky bass lines, and more than a little rock-god sex appeal.

The show returned to Broadway last week in a slick, pulsing production directed by Des McAnuff; it’s a fun, loud, thoroughly enjoyable revival that plays largely as rock concert. No period piece, it’s a more or less modern staging that presents this chapter of Jesus’s life less as a historical episode than as a timeless story relevant to today.

Mr. McAnuff, who developed this version of Superstar last summer for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where he’s soon ending his tenure as artistic director, knows how to stage rock ’n’ roll: His Broadway version of The Who’s Tommy played for two years in the early 1990s and won him a Tony Award for best direction. At the Neil Simon Theatre, he and his scenic designer, Robert Brill, have built a two-level metal-bar frame around the stage, lined with stadium-style lights and Times Square-style news tickers (that introduce the scenes; “Judea—April 33,” says the first one), an arena-rock venue for Jesus, Judas and Mary Magdalene and a crowd of angrily, jumpily choreographed Jews to sing their story.

If, like The Observer, your religious education was concerned with only part one of the Bible, not its Jesus-starring sequel, Jesus Christ Superstar is not the place to extend your theological expertise. The broad strokes are clear enough: The Jewish masses in Jerusalem like this Christ kid, the priests—here wearing the ritual Jewish uniform of enormous wigs of dreadlocks—are threatened by him, and the Romans—even more threatened—put him to a torturous death. But in this entirely sung-through spectacle, as Mr. Rice’s lyrics wash over you, it’s hard to pick up any nuances. Judas, whose name has for two millennia been synonymous with betrayal, seems less evil than you’d think, and also sort of in love with Jesus (who, in fairness, to some extent exists to be an object of affection, as do, here, his artfully displayed, very prominent pectoral muscles). Jesus frequently seems beatific, instead of charismatic. Mary Magdalene seems irrelevant.

Then again, Jesus Christ Superstar has always been a middling musical—with great songs. And this cast delivers. As Jesus, Paul Nolan sings with a sweet, clear tenor that makes you tempted to follow him, too. Jeremy Kushnier, playing Judas at the press preview The Observer attended, is fantastic, with an arresting, powerful voice. (Josh Young, who won praise for his Judas performance at Stratford, was out sick.) Chilina Kennedy delivers a moving, wistful “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” as Mary Magdalene. The most memorable performance of the show comes from Tom Hewitt, in a purple velvet suit as the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who gives this sometimes earnest show its only sustained bits of wit. Bruce Dow provides able comic relief in his burlesque King Herod number.

At the end, of course, our hero dies. But it’s a great moment, as he’s lifted slowly in that indelible pose, arms out and ankles crossed, and a giant cross descends from above while dozens of bright floodlights shine behind him. Downer or not, it’s an arena-rock ending, complete with guitar riffs.

IT STARTS OUT WITH GOOD omens and high hopes, but soon it’s clear that there will mostly be disappointment.

That’s true of a marriage going bad, and that’s certainly true of Regrets, a new play about four men waiting to get divorced, which opened last night at Manhattan Theatre Club’s off-Broadway space in City Center.

Matt Charman’s play is set in 1954 at a camp near Reno, Nev., where men rent small, primitive cabins to wait out the six weeks required to establish state residency for what was then considered a quickie divorce. Rachel Hauck’s hyper-detailed set, offering interior views of three cabins plus the outdoor area where the four men in residence meet for meals, games and revelations, is visible on stage from the moment the audience enters, and under Carolyn Cantor’s direction, the men begin entering before the house lights go down, without much notice or fuss.

The set alone gets you hooked, as does the premise, once it starts to become clear. It’s a great place for drama, this small, self-contained community of emotionally raw men.

As the play begins, a new guy is arriving in Cabin No. 4. He’s Caleb (Ansel Elgort, a senior at LaGuardia High), 18 years old, though he claims to be 21, and it’s unclear what’s brought him there. He’s joining Ben (Brian Hutchison, restrained, pensive and wise), a former high school teacher and wounded war vet who stayed on even after he got his divorce; Alvin (an excellent Richard Topol), a nebbishy, heartbroken pet-shop owner from Queens; and Gerald (Lucas Caleb Rooney), an angry bully who still introduces himself with his military rank. They’re joined by Mrs. Duke (Adiriane Lenox), the camp’s no-nonsense owner; Chrissie (Alexis Bledel), a local girl who dreams of leaving this small town and prostitutes herself in hopes of earning money, or a man, to help her get out; and, eventually, a manipulative, straight-arrow House Un-American Activities Committee investigator (Curt Bouril) in a dark suit and fedora.

Ms. Cantor allows things to proceed with a languid pace, as befits a group of men waiting idly for the days to pass. It’s pleasant, and interest enough, but it grows a bit tedious as it becomes clear that nothing much—even once the HUAC man arrives—is going to happen on stage. The only real drama in the play comes from these reticent men’s eventual revelations, and there’s not much to prompt them, other than the passage of time.

Even the I’m-a-married-communist plot feels insubstantial; earnest young Ben simply tells his new friends that he joined a union and “met people,” rather than providing any persuasive case about whether or not those people had a persuasive ideology, and why he signed on to it.

The most communist thing in the play is its sweet conclusion: These four solitary men realize that the only way they’ll get on with their lives is by coming together and supporting each other. It’s a fine message, and about as subversive as a summer-camp sing-along.

editorial@observer.com

Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti in 'Once.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Before reckoning with the new, exceedingly lovely, and disappointingly thin Broadway musical Once, which opened Sunday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, let us first discuss what might be called the War Horse Insufficiency.

The symptoms of this malady are stunning stagecraft and a lack of compelling story or emotional richness, a visual display so creative and impressive that the theatergoer wants to believe the play or musical he’s seeing to be great, but with a book insufficient to live up to the production. War Horse, the British story of a boy and his beloved horse at the Vivian Beaumont, is its most prominent current example: gorgeous design, breathtaking puppetry, insipid story.

Once, which offers pretty, tuneful indie-folk songs, nontraditional, dynamic staging and choreography, and a series of smart, witty directorial flourishes, alas suffers from the War Horse Insufficiency. Everything about it is lovely; nothing about it is moving.

The story of two mildly depressed musicians in Dublin whose lives are changed by a weeklong romance, Once began its life as a 2006 Irish independent film that became a sleeper hit and won the Oscar for Best Original Song. Transformed into a stage musical by the director John Tiffany and choreographer Steven Hoggett, it was an off-Broadway success at New York Theater Workshop in the fall, leading to its current Broadway engagement.

Messrs. Tiffany and Hoggett are the team behind Black Watch, the fascinating and stunning  retelling of the history of a Scottish army regiment disbanded in 2006 after hundreds of years of history and recent service in the Iraq war. (Mr. Hoggett has also choreographed the angst-ridden pop-punk musical American Idiot and the gleefully silly Peter and the Starcatcher.) When it came to St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2007, Black Watch was a powerful production, both as a document of the war’s impact on the men fighting it and as a piece of stagecraft, integrating live action and video projections with highly choreographed movements that propelled their story forward.

In Once, Messrs. Tiffany and Hoggett again use innovative and interesting movement to help tell their story, and they do it on a welcoming Irish publike set by Bob Crowley that serves with little embellishment as the various settings of the play—a musical-instrument store, a vacuum-repair shop and so on. The actors in the play are also its musicians, and they sit with their instruments along the sides of the pub set when they’re not in a scene. As the audience enters, these musicians are jamming on stage; during intermission, audience members are invited to cross the footlights and order drinks from what is transformed into a real bar. The effect is to render the play, somewhat magically, as a tale told among friends over drinks, something that happened once.

It’s acted and sung by a splendid cast led by Steve Kazee as the Guy, as he’s called in the cast of characters, a sad, brooding, guitar-slinging songwriter living with his father above the family shop and left heartbroken by a girl who’s moved to New York, and Cristin Milioti as the Girl, serious and also sad, a Czech immigrant with a young daughter, an estranged husband and an abiding love of the piano. Individually, together or backed by supporting players from the group, they sound terrific singing and playing the songs written by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who starred in the initial film.

But for all these lovely performance elements, Once doesn’t succeed in elevating itself from an interesting evening into an engaging one. Its book, adapted by Enda Walsh from John Carney’s screenplay, never succeeds in making either of its protagonists human or compelling, in making you care about them. The Guy is a passive cipher, the Girl a collection of quirks. This makes their affair an intellectual exercise, rather than a passionate pairing. For the audience, there is no connection, no engagement.

It’s pretty to watch, but, for a romance, insufficient.

“At least twice during his new show, the virtuoso monologist Mike Daisey refers to himself as an actor. Twice more, he calls himself a storyteller. He is of course both things, but the descriptors miss the true impact of what he has accomplished in his powerful piece The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which opened Monday night at the Public Theater. As much as he is a performer, Mr. Daisey is also an investigative journalist, even, in the best sense, a muckraker.” —The Observer, reviewing that show, Oct. 24, 2011.

“I stand by my work … What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.” —Mike Daisey, posting to his blog, March 16, 2012.

Mike Daisey’s reputation was destroyed last weekend. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, meted out the destruction, but the real work of it was done by Mr. Daisey himself. Through hundreds or thousands of performances over the past several years, he has presented as fact his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, purportedly an honest recounting of his visits to the factories in Shenzhen, China, where Apple products are made. “Tonight,” he would say near the end of his monologue, “we know the truth.”

But, it turned out, we didn’t. A China-based reporter for public radio’s Marketplace, rereporting a version of the monologue that aired in January on This American Life, revealed numerous falsehoods in Mr. Daisey’s story. The most troubling were the creations: people he claimed he’d met—a man disabled making iPads who’d never seen one in use until Mr. Daisey swiped on his own, a group of preteen workers—who didn’t actually exist but made for compelling moments in his performance.

As someone who was snookered, I’m angry about the snookering. But more than that, I’m angry about the damage Mr. Daisey has done to himself. I’m not convinced, as some commentators have argued, that what he says on stage need be as rigorously accurate as what appears in The Times. But I do believe that if it’s not, he may not actively present himself as a lone truth-teller, as he did. And I further believe that he cannot actively conspire to hide his evasions, as he did in misrepresenting himself to This American Life’s producers.

Now apologetic for those fact-checking lies but still defiant about his theatrical work, Mr. Daisey continues to insist that his factual manipulations are less important than the larger points he is persuasively conveying. He seems unaware that he has in fact hurt that greater cause, by allowing his opponents to dismiss his work, and that he’s damaging not only his own credibility but that of advocacy theater.

editorial@observer.com

'Tribes." (Photo by Gregory Costanzo)

Watching Tribes, a new drama about a deaf son falling in love and finding his independence amid a close-knit, hyper-articulate, constantly arguing family, a theatergoer might experience the proceedings much the way Billy, that deaf son, often views his relatives: It’s rambunctiously compelling and pleasantly intriguing, something you want to love—and yet it’s ultimately difficult to decipher.

The family is its own tribe, a self-contained, codependent, self-styled bohemian clan in an unnamed English city. Its members argue with each other, one-up each other, and mostly disdain those who aren’t up to their verbal sparring—“No hawkers, no traders and no one who doesn’t know who Dvorak as is,” as Billy eventually puts it.

Tribes, which opened Sunday night at the Barrow Street Theatre, was written by the young British playwright Nina Raine, and it earned her an Olivier nomination for best new play last year. It’s sharp and insightful, and frequently very funny. For its first two-thirds it’s totally engrossing, a probing look at people who talk constantly but don’t listen, who think themselves enlightened and empathetic but are ultimately selfish narcissists.

The youngest of three grown children living at home, Billy (Russell Harvard, a deaf actor giving a wonderfully rich performance) has been raised in the hearing world, trained to lip-read and not sign. “Out of principle,” explains Christopher (Jeff Perry), the cheerfully pedantic father. “We didn’t want to make you part of a minority world.” When Billy meets a woman, Sylvia (Susan Pourfar), who grew up with two deaf parents and is now losing her own hearing—and he finally learns sign language from her—he is exposed to a different tribe, the deaf world, where for the first time he doesn’t feel left out. He is torn between the two tribes, and he struggles to find a home in either one.

Director David Cromer, returning to the space where he wowed critics and audiences three years ago with his vibrantly cobweb-free reinterpretation of Our Town, here provides a similarly environmental production (with scenic design by Scott Pask), with a well-lived-in kitchen placed in the middle of the theater, audience surrounding it, all the better for this emotionally sprawling family to sprawl around the stage.

The play opens in the middle of a meal, with the family around a long dining table covered with books, wine glasses and bits of food, all of them simultaneously eating and talking. Most of the action takes place in this kitchen, as the family members come and go and circle each other. Christopher is trying to teach himself Chinese but has no patience for his kids. His wife, Beth (Mare Winningham), is a novelist who mostly just bickers with her husband. The oldest child, Daniel (Will Brill), is attempting, unsuccessfully, to write a dissertation about the inability to express feelings with words, while also occasionally hearing voices in his head. And Dan and Billy’s sister, Ruth (Gayle Rankin), is trying to be an opera singer but can’t find her voice. It is only Billy who can finally get everyone’s attention, and he does it by refusing to speak. The metaphors abound, layered atop each other, blending together. It’s a symphony.

But then there is that last third, after Billy has grown comfortable in the deaf world and moved away from his family—and the play’s heretofore tight construction loses its rhythm. The heretofore seemingly upstanding Billy, who has put his lip-reading skills to use transcribing video-only surveillance tapes for police, is discovered to be fabricating dialogue. Without Billy around, Daniel, who has always been devoted to his brother, develops a debilitating stutter, and his so-called “auditory hallucinations” become so frequent and loud they drown out people talking to him. Near the end, Billy and Daniel seem to speak to each other without using any words at all.

The point, it seems, is that the connections among family are stronger than the divisions over mere language. But mostly these parts feel like off notes.

Edward Albee’s The Lady From Dubuque, which was titled merely The Lady From Dubuque when it closed after 12 performances on Broadway in 1980, opened Monday night at the new Pershing Square Signature Center in its first major New York revival. It is another play full of people screaming at each other, and it is a far less pleasant one.

That’s mostly because it’s impenetrable. Much of the screaming comes from Sam (Michael Hayden), in whose house the play opens. He and his wife, Jo (Laila Robins), are hosting friends in their Room & Board-perfect suburban manse (the lovely, soaring set is by John Arnone), and a cocktail-fueled late-night game of 20 Questions turns angry. This is of course classic Albee territory—the vicious, drunken party game—though it’s hard to see what this one reveals, except that nearly all these people are odious, for various reasons, and also that Jo is terminally, painfully sick. (Thomas Jay Ryan and Catherine Curtin play Edgar and Lucinda, a married pair of bores, and C.J. Wilson and Tricia Paoluccio play Fred, an explosive menace, and Carol, his latest girlfriend, perhaps the most sensible of the bunch.)

Amid screams and tears, the friends leave. Sam and Jo go to bed, and then an elegant, older couple wanders in, dressed in all whites and light grays. They are called Elizabeth and Oscar, we will learn later, and they are played by Jane Alexander and Peter Francis James. They make themselves comfortable, to wait for Sam and Jo to wake up, and for Act II.

Once Sam happens upon the couple, Elizabeth insists she is Jo’s mother, come to visit from Dubuque. It is clear, however, that Elizabeth and Oscar instead represent death. Soon enough the friends from last night have walked in—so much angst could have been avoided, if only Sam and Jo had locked their front door—and there is much more yelling. Sam is, for a period, tied up on the floor of his living room, near the cowhide rug. Ms. Alexander and Mr. James are delightful, dignified and composed and very droll. There is more yelling. Eventually, Sam comes to accept his wife’s imminent death, and she dies.

In a recent interview with The Times, Mr. Albee acknowledged that he sees and has seen problems with the play, but that he has not addressed them for this revival, which is handsomely directed by David Esbjornson. “If you write plays because you just want them to be liked, you have to lie too much,” he said. The Signature is devoted to showcasing a full range of a playwright’s work, and in that context there’s an argument to be made for mounting a revival of a play everyone acknowledges doesn’t work. Some of us, however, prefer to enjoy what we’re watching.

editorial@observer.com

Nicholas Christopher and Corey Hawkins in 'Hurt Village.' (Photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s an odd coincidence that the two excellent plays about contemporary African-American families to arrive so far this season—both by African-American female playwrights—both liken their characters to insects under inspection.

In Stick Fly, Lydia R. Diamond’s tough but warm examination of race and class among a wealthy black family at its summer house on Martha’s Vineyard, which came and went too quickly at Broadway’s Cort Theatre this winter, the metaphor was embodied by bugs that the grad-student girlfriend of one of the family’s sons glued to sticks to study. As an entomologist, and as a less-wealthy house guest, this character was trying to understand something she was not a part of.

In Katori Hall’s raw and crackling new Hurt Village, about a struggling black family living in the North Memphis housing project of that name during the later Bush years, as the crime- and drug-ravaged complex is about to be torn down, the play’s symbolic critters are fleas. Bright, ambitious, 13-year-old Cookie (the fantastic, show-stealing Joaquina Kalukango) has been enrolled in a good school in a wealthier part of town, and one of her first homework assignments is a science project. Put a group of fleas in a lidded jar and eventually they’ll stop trying to jump out. Remove the lid, she believes, and the fleas still won’t bother jumping; they’ve been trained to think they can’t possibly escape. But her hypothesis doesn’t quite bear out. Of the nine fleas—and there are nine characters in the play—one does escape, and the sweet, slow-talking, young gangbanger Skillet (Lloyd Watts) suggests that that departed flea—the one determined enough, hard-headed enough, desperate enough, to get out—is the exception that proves the rule. The question is whether Cookie, or anyone else in her extended clan, will be able to do the same.

Ms. Hall announced her presence as a playwright this fall, when her overpraised and overripe The Mountaintop, a fantasia on Martin Luther King’s final night in Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, opened on Broadway after an award-winning run in London. The play attracted a marquee-name cast—Samuel L. Jackson as King and a heavily over-caffeinated Angela Bassett as Camae, the maid he confides in—that couldn’t mask its ham-handed history lesson. But with Hurt Village, which opened Monday at the Pershing Square Signature Center—the giant and gorgeous new off-Broadway theater complex on the far west end of 42nd Street that’s somewhat confusingly named for a hedge fund that’s named for a plaza on the east end of 42nd Street—Ms. Hall proves herself to be not just a high-profile young playwright but also a high-talent one.

Hurt Village is a haunting portrait of a family with almost nothing—little money, few hopes, no delusions, and no real way out of its situation. Like the groundbreaking HBO series The Wire, Ms. Hall’s play presents an impoverished world in which gun play and rape are facts of life, trying to play by the rules rarely works out, and drug dealing can seem the only viable career option.

Big Mama (Tonya Pinkins), Cookie’s great-grandmother, is the matriarch, scraping by with a job as an orderly at a VA hospital and dreams of the subsidized suburban housing they’ll move to in two weeks, when Hurt Village is leveled for redevelopment. They live with Cookie’s mother, Crank (Marsha Stephanie Blake), an unemployed and barely educated former drug addict who wants to earn a cosmetology license. And there are the other neighborhood characters, including Crank’s friend Toyia (a funny, outrageous Saycon Sengbloh) and her boyfriend, Cornbread (Nicholas Christopher), who works for FedEx, deals drugs on the side, and treats Cookie like she is his daughter; and Tony C (Ron Cephas Jones), the smooth, scary drug lord who runs the neighborhood and lives in the suburbs. “I sell that white to these niggahs so my lil’ boy won’t ever have to play on a playground got mo’ crack vials than blades of grass,” he tells Cookie. “If I gotsta kill a couple niggahs who was on they way out anyway, so be it. It’s for the greater good.”

And there’s Buggy (Corey Hawkins), Cookie’s father, who arrives home at the start of the play after 10 years in the Army, hailed as a hero—he was clearly the previous hope to be the flea that gets away—but eventually revealed to have been dishonorably discharged and suffering from PTSD.

Directed by Patricia McGregor on an artfully junk-strewn set designed by David Gallo, Hurt Village vividly displays the tenuousness of these lives, where a boy is murdered to make a point, where Buggy, who spent 10 years traveling the world, can’t find a way to earn money except by selling drugs, and where, in the play’s most wrenching scene, Big Mama must get down on her knees and beg to be permitted to stay in the subsidized-housing program, because the government has determined that she earns $387 too much from her menial job to remain eligible. Cookie, who hopes to be a rapper, or else a flight attendant, stays strong, but Crank, her mother, gets back on drugs, and Buggy, her father, decides he must leave again, that even with a daughter he admires, there’s not enough for him in Memphis.

And it ends on a surprising elegiac note, Cookie conjuring these relatives and neighbors as the decrepit complex—the only home she’d known—is finally razed. She’s going to the suburbs, and she may well make it out. But Hurt Village will always be with her, even if she can fly away.

If Galileo had been written not by Bertolt Brecht more than six decades ago but by a young playwright working this year, as the 2012 Republican presidential primary marches bravely into the 1950s, it might well be dismissed as too obvious and convenient. But it is, despite its timeliness, a part of the canon, and the Classic Stage Company last week opened a revival that allows a commanding and craggy F. Murray Abraham, as the titular astronomer, to make an eloquent case for the superiority of rational, scientific reason over governmental imposition of religious certitude.

“A millennium of faith is ending,” Galileo says in the play’s first moments. “This is the millennium of doubt.” And while he will ultimately be proved correct, the princes and prelates who rule Italy are not about to let him undermine their worldview—which has the sun and the other planets revolving around the Earth—so quickly. First, he will be turned over to the Inquisition, forced by religious authorities to recant his scientific discoveries, and kept alive but imprisoned for years. “I won’t be a nobody on an inconsequential star briefly twirling hither and thither,” an aged cardinal says, dismissively, articulating the establishment’s unwillingness to no longer be the center of the universe.

This production, using the 1947 translation Brecht created with the actor Charles Laughton, is gorgeous, directed with elegance, wit, and some moments of great beauty by Brian Kulick, CSC’s artistic director, and it features a talented, subtle supporting cast.

No doubt it would make Rick Santorum throw up.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Shatner. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Latter-day William Shatner—Capt. James T. Kirk boldly gone into the Priceline era, with his self-parodying pitchman’s routines and so-bad-they’re-not-so-bad, spoken-word-meets-crooner albums—is a tough one to pin down. Is he a pretentious buffoon or a canny showman, an oblivious narcissist or an in-on-the-joke ironist?

Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It, the one-man show he brought to Broadway last week, presents a strong argument for a third possibility: He is all of the above.

Commanding the stage of the Music Box, where he’s putting in a limited run of 19 performances over two and a half weeks before taking his shtick on tour, Mr. Shatner displays the wisdom, confidence, flair and, yes, burgher’s girth earned by a long and successful showbiz career. In a blazer, cardigan and pressed, voluminous jeans, he proves himself a marvelous entertainer, a charming raconteur, and a deft lampooner of his own blowhard persona, starting with that goofily grandiose title.

This is a man who knows we’re on to him, and at his best he adopts a tone of winking brio. He enters to portentous Star Trek music, followed by a lone, flickering spotlight—and then swiftly slaps away the obvious entrance. “No, no, everybody beams in,” he says, walking on from a wing. Over roughly 100 minutes, Mr. Shatner regales his enamored audience with highlights from his life story, peppering the tale with borscht-belt shtick, well-honed anecdotes and, finally, a song.

Sure, the 80-year-old actor gets tangled up on some of his lines, his jokes occasionally fail, and he might have a bit of difficulty readjusting the Aeron-like office chair he deploys throughout the show, moving it around the stage, to sit on, recline on, pop up from and, occasionally, ride like a motorcycle. But he knows his way around a joke, and, like the best pros, he keeps his audience in the palm of his hand, even when a joke is bombing. (That Aeron, incidentally, does excellent supporting work, but in this competitive season the choreographed pair in An Evening With Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin will have to win the Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Chair.)

And yet. While the man seems delightful, his show can be dull. Mr. Shatner has constructed a script, such as it is, that is a sometimes-incoherent collection of scattered biography, ample greatest-hits clips, and way too much detail on some not particularly interesting episodes in his biography. (It is directed by Scott Faris, who did Bette Midler’s The Showgirl Must Go On in Las Vegas and productions of Chicago around the world; no book writer is listed.) If he’s a charmer when he’s ad-libbing one-liners, he can be tedious when he’s telling yet another story about some forgotten moment in his career or, worse, waxing philosophical on the inevitability of death. He delivers an evening that is happy and sappy, but one that is neither insightful nor fully compelling.

In Shatner’s World, then, Mr. Shatner is both amusingly self-mocking and wildly self-indulgent. And why not? The man is vast; he contains multitudes.

I should begin any discussion of CQ/CX, the new play by Gabe McKinley that dramatizes the 2003 Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times, by stipulating that I’m sure I followed that horror story—in which a young reporter was first caught plagiarizing a story and then revealed to have fabricated his biography, whereabouts and reporting over many months, ultimately bringing down the paper’s top two editors and deeply damaging its reputation—more closely than most. I was a media reporter and commentator when Mr. Blair’s schemes unraveled and throughout the aftermath; it was my job to follow such things.

But, still, this was a major, national news story, and an even bigger one in the newspaper-reading community of New York, which presumably overlaps very strongly with the theater-going community of New York. That’s what makes somewhat inexplicable the Atlantic Theatre Company’s decision to produce Mr. McKinley’s well-crafted but nearly stenographic recounting of Mr. Blair’s rise and fall, which opened last week at the Peter Norton Space. Director David Leveaux, a five-time Tony nominee, has given the play a handsome, fast-paced production that tries hard to build brewing-catastrophe tension, and the excellent cast delivers appealingly credible performances. But CQ/CX—the title employs journo-speak for a fact that has been checked and a fact needing correction—never presents as anything more than a highly polished historical re-enactment, a well-executed but schematic retelling of events we already know about.

Mr. McKinley—a former news clerk at The Times with two brothers who are reporters for the paper—goes out of his way to underline just how closely he’s cleaving to his facts, giving his characters names either identical to those of their real-life counterparts (“Jay” is the play’s antihero; “Gerald Haynes” stands in for Gerald Boyd as the managing editor) or close to them (the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., is a character called “Junior”; executive editor Howell Raines becomes “Hal Martin”). The details of Jay’s rise and fall hew precisely to those of Jayson’s, and the few attempts the play makes to examine his psyche or motivation echo those made in previous coverage of the story.

By the play’s end, with “Hal” leaving his newsroom in disgrace, off to go fishing, just as Mr. Raines did, Mr. McKinley has revealed himself to be a romantic about the nobility of journalism and the sacred role of The Times, as true a believer as anyone in the Times’s tower or the Journalism Building at Columbia. But, paradoxically, his stubborn devotion to facts —his insistence on retelling this history rather than exploring motivations, imagining what-ifs, or using Mr. Blair’s story as a jumping-off point for a purely fictional narrative—makes CQ/CX yesterday’s news.

editorial@observer.com