The artistic director of the renowned Public Theater is known for his sometimes manic enthusiasm. He’s like the Music Man leading the parade while singing a rousing rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones”—and no particular harm in that. But in his natural exuberance, he gets things wrong. Among a number of lapses I could mention, by far the most serious is that he’s lately begun paying tribute to “the founders of the Public Theater, Joseph Papp and Bernard Gersten.”

The first time was on national TV during his excited acceptance speech when the Public won its well-deserved Tony for Hair. Then, at the recent gala dinner for the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, Mr. Eustis twice celebrated his new co-founders of the Public, Joseph Papp and Bernard Gersten.

Mr. Eustis surely means no harm—or offense—in his rewrite of theater history. But his surprising pronouncement comes as a shock to at least a few of us—including, I dare say, the good Bernard Gersten.

Mr. Gersten, the distinguished executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater, was the late Joseph Papp’s associate producer and loyal right-hand man for 18 years, and his honorable place in New York theater history is assured. But he began working for his old friend in 1960—six years after the legendary Papp dreamed up his most extraordinary achievement of free Shakespeare in the Park.

The autocratic Papp wasn’t always loved, and he wasn’t always fair. But his victorious battle with New York’s all-powerful Robert Moses for free Shakespeare and the building of the open-air Delacorte Theater in the Park has long since gone down in theater history. Mr. Eustis has only to glance at Helen Epstein’s vivid, authorized biography, Joe Papp: An American Life, to learn that Papp alone founded the New York Shakespeare Festival—which became the Public Theater—and that Mr. Gersten himself has paid generous tribute to the fact.

In his cruelest act, Papp fired Bernard Gersten for vague and paranoid reasons. Ms Epstein records how years later, Mr. Gersten described himself as Kent to Papp’s King Lear. “What would you with me, sir?” Lear asks Kent. “I would serve you, sir,” Kent replies.

Papp also fired another of his lieutenants, Merle Debusky, his loyal press man and wise counselor for 30 years. He also fell out lethally with Stuart Vaughan, his first artistic director during the 1950s. Theater has never been a relaxed place.

But the least Mr. Eustis could do is get Papp’s legacy right. He’s been gone nearly 18 years. Yet it’s only a short while ago that the theater he founded on Lafayette Street was named the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

Memory still ought to count for something—yes? It’s why we look to Oskar Eustis to do the right thing and set the record straight.

PAPP’S ORIGINAL ideal for Shakespeare was basically anti-British. He reacted passionately against the declamatory high acting style of the British thea-tah. As a Brit who was raised on Shakespeare, I’ve always been in favor of Papp’s profound belief in a refreshing American naturalism and wit. I draw the line only at the Public’s frustrating tradition of Shakespeare in the Park productions where anything goes.

The pleasure of Daniel Sullivan’s new production of Twelfth Night, subtitled by Shakespeare or What You Will (“Anything Goes,” as it were)—is in the veteran Mr. Sullivan’s mostly superior cast and unusual care in the verse-speaking. Its weakness, ironically, is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Its even, predictable pace isn’t swift or manic enough for Shakespeare’s festive, wild imaginings about an illusory Illyria where everyone falls madly in love with the wrong person. The romantic comedy’s seductive, cross-dressing eroticism is absent. In her lovely, assured Shakespeare debut as Viola disguised as a boy, Anne Hathaway makes a better boy than a girl. Her dashing disguise in drag as Cesario frees her. Ms Hathaway has it all—except, as yet, the experience that allows lyricism to breathe unhurried.

But the strange and wonderful sexual attraction between Viola/Cesario and Duke Orsino (Raúl Esparza, dripping in curls and melancholy) never begins to come to the beguiling boil. Sexual repression is a particular kind of Englishness—an England where the rain it raineth every day beyond a retractable roof.

The Olivia of Audra McDonald is at first too arch, and her yearning for Cesario, alas, too broad. David Pittu is in excellent voice as an assured Feste, although he drifts into camp. (The appealing original score is written and performed by Hem.) Julie White is swell—and great fun—as the scheming below-stairs broad, Maria. But Sir Toby Belch, that cut-price Falstaff, has always been a pickled, belching bore to me, no matter who plays him. The idiotic aristocrat, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, less so—particularly when played so amusingly by Hamish Linklater. But a Malvolio who cannot ultimately touch us in his too punished self-delusion and ambition is no Malvolio.

Twelfth Night’s Illyria is England. Whereas the new production’s Illyria appears to be a tree-lined miniature golf course with little astroturf hillocks. No matter! That’s almost comfortingly normal at the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park, where anything—usually—goes.

jheilpern@observer.com

Were the Bushes ever theatergoers? Or the Clintons? Once in a blue moon, when absolutely necessary. True, Bill Clinton is known to recite entire chunks of Macbeth by heart (“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me …”). I actually saw him at a performance of Macbeth three summers ago at Shakespeare in the Park. But Hillary wasn’t with him. “Enough already with Macbeth!” she must have told him. “What’s done is done.”

The Obamas’ date night on Broadway is a very welcome first. After all, it was only last season that Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush was winched via helicopter onto the stage of the Cort Theatre to announce cheerfully: “I said to the pilot why don’t you drop me off in the faggy theater district—and that’s what he did!” I’ve no problem with the reported cost to the taxpayer of $24,000 for the First Couple’s Broadway treat. I’m no mathematician, but that’s about average nowadays for the price of two good orchestra seats with an unobstructed view. Beside which, Mr Obama is the president. If he wants to take in a show with his wife by flying to New York on Air Force One, I say what’s the point of being president if he can’t? 

It so happens that his surprise nomination as the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts—maverick producer and race track enthusiast Rocco Landesman—created the first $480 premium ticket on Broadway, as well as the $225 ticket for all the losers who couldn’t afford $480. But none of that matters now.

Rocco’s a smart commercial producer (and Yalie) who just might revitalize the beleaguered NEA. He’s a radical choice—a refreshing departure from the usual bureaucratic suspects. He has nothing to lose. The daring appointment is designed to shake up the neutered NEA that’s been limping along as a battered victim of the cultural wars since the 1990s. It’s further evidence that the president intends to take the arts seriously.

As Michelle Obama put it when she recently opened the New American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The arts are not just a nice thing to have. They define who we are as a people.”

She also took in the opening night of the American Ballet Theatre that evening. And all of this is of a piece with the Obamas’ more culturally engaged White House, with its poetry slam and jazz night in May followed by the first of the White House music series in June. “Have fun, be loose,” said Michele, welcoming everyone to the White House from the podium.

I’m not so sure about date nights for parents, however. They don’t sound too loose to me. They sound awful. But that the Obamas’ unspontaneous date night took in Broadway is all to the good. The resentful notion that they should confine their theater outings to the Presidential Box at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., is typically provincial. Millions of tourists visit Broadway every year. Why not the Obamas?

Their choice of August Wilson’s masterful Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was a serious one. How astonishing to remind ourselves that the First Couple were there to experience this searing drama and poem about turn-of-the-century white oppression and the search for black identity in America!

Still, their choice of Joe Turner was a little predictable—as Frank Bruni, restaurant critic of The New York Times, found their night out at the excellent Blue Hill Restaurant in the Village to be a safe choice. All is fodder to the blogger, and Mr. Bruni on NYtimes.com judged the superior organic fare at Blue Hill a predictably “proper message” from the White House about how to eat “green.” 

The dyspeptic Mr Bruni wished that the president, whom he correctly described as “almost joylessly disciplined and restrained around food,” had “bust loose” with his wife to dig into “a plate of fatty lambs at Resto … that killer bone-in New York strip at Minetta Tavern; the oyster pan roast at the John Dorry.”

What show might I recommend the Obamas “bust loose” and see? If the First Couple would be prepared to gamble on the truly unexpected in theater, I’d recommend the beautiful and flawed—and insane—musical Coraline at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the Village.

With music for pianos—including several toy ones—by the eerily brilliant rock musician and lyricist Stephin Merritt, Coraline is based on Neil Gaiman’s dark and weird fairy tale for adults and children. The Obamas could take the kids! Michelle just took them to see The Lion King in London, but Coraline is no Lion King.

It’s about a child (played by the adult actress Jayne Houdyshell) who’s bored by her middle-class workaholic parents and their health-conscious diets of organic chicken basted with prunes. One day, she walks through a bricked-up door into a freer version of her own life, where she meets her Other Mother, played by the downtown genius David Greenspan like a spooky Kabuki. (Mr Greenspan also adapted the book.) 

The rough magic of this risky experimental musical, directed by the gifted Leigh Silverman, is odd, messy and wonderful. I can’t guarantee how much the Obamas would like it. But as one of its lyrics goes, “Wheee! Theater is fun!”

jheilpern@observer.com

His controversial letter raises a number of interesting points (and hackles), and at the risk of offending everyone, I’ll tiptoe with Mr. Fernandez into the minefield.

My first thought when I heard about the casting of Phylicia Rashad was that she’s surely too beautiful to be playing the screaming, zonked-out old hag of August: Osage County. My second, more cynical thought was that the producers need a star actress to bolster flagging audiences, and that ever since her Clair Huxtable on the The Cosby Show, Ms. Rashad transcends racial barriers, anyway.

I pondered on the offended Mr. Fernandez’s central argument: “It doesn’t make sense that she would have white siblings and children.”

Are plays about what makes sense? Or are they acts of the imagination between the actor and audience in a serious game of pretend?

All actors—black or white, Asian, biracial, bisexual—pretend to be someone else onstage six nights a week, plus matinees. The actor is always … acting. We willingly suspend our disbelief to collude in a grand illusion.

Andre Braugher played the white English hero of Agincourt, King Henry V, at the Public almost a generation ago, and the only concern wasn’t Mr. Braugher’s blackness but what he would make of the mythic role. (He made a great Henry.)

We’ve grown accustomed to colorblind casting over the years. Why go back in time now?

After all, it was as far back as 1936 that Orson Welles produced the first all-black Macbeth (famously known as the “Voodoo Macbeth”). And only last week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music brought us a new contemporary Arab version of Shakespeare, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy.

The only question about colorblind casting ought to be, does it work? Is the actor any good? It’s been 15 years since Nicholas Hytner—now artistic director of the National Theatre—caused a storm in a teacup in London with his celebrated Carousel, when he cast a black actor to play the adorable white character aptly named Mr. Snow.

In the end, nobody gave a damn—particularly as Clive Rowe made a swell Mr. Snow. Then again, Mr. Hytner’s Carousel at Lincoln Center upped the ante with the casting of Shirley Verrett to sing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s enduring hymn to hope and survival, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and Audra McDonald—in her breakthrough role—became the first African-American to play Carrie Pepperidge.

If Mr. Fernandez’s retrograde “blacks for black roles” were the unwritten rule, there’s abundant evidence that theater would be the worse for it. It would be an ungenerous, literal-minded place.

Are there any limits to colorblindness? There have been white Othellos (and thank God I never saw them). On the other hand, Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface in 1965 wouldn’t be acceptable today. (His eye-rolling performance shouldn’t have been acceptable then.)

In his letter protesting against casting Ms. Rashad as a white matriarch, Mr. Fernandez added in fairness, “I would be equally offended if a white actress was cast as Bess in Porgy and Bess, or in any of the black roles in Raisin in the Sun or August Wilson’s plays.”

But those plays and musicals are rooted in a specific black American identity born in the chains of slavery. In that sense, it would also be folly to cast a white performer to sing Ol’ Man River in Showboat. It would be an insult to history.

Here’s August Wilson in 1996 on the same topic—in reverse: “To mount an all-black production of Death of a Salesman or any other play conceived for white characters as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand.”

Wilson and Mr. Fernandez seem to agree in the separatist essentials! But Wilson, the finest dramatic poet of our time, frequently contradicted himself. His apparent separatism was a reaction against prejudice within American theater itself, coupled with his fierce desire to see black identity celebrated (not accommodated). He was dead right about the presumption of staging an all-black Death of a Salesman. But he spoke too soon.

The white director James Bundy has just staged an all-black Death of a Salesman, starring Charles S. Dutton as Willy Loman, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven (the original home—to add insult to injury—to so many of August Wilson’s plays).

As John Lahr pointed out in The New Yorker, the fatal flaw in the production is that the loser-dreamer Willy Loman “is driven crazy by America’s obsession with winning” in an age when “this sense of expectation and entitlement was simply not shared by African–Americans in 1949.” In James Baldwin’s chilling phrase—which was repeated by August Wilson in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone—a black American was born into a society in those days, and far beyond, as “a worthless human being.”

In the age of President Obama—a theatergoer!—the politics have changed dramatically. But some things—pace Mr. Fernandez’ letter to The Times—remain stubbornly the same.

jheilpern@observer.com

Dolly has been nominated for Best Score of a Musical for the music and lyrics of 9 to 5. She isn’t going to win. I just think Dolly’s amazing.

On a less happy note, it’s arguable that the members of the Tony Award nominating committee should resign en masse. By failing to hand even a single nomination to Ian Rickson’s raved-over production of The Seagull, starring the outstanding Kristin Scott Thomas, either the doddering Tony committee has a lamentably short memory or it doesn’t know diddly from Dolly.

Four of its five Best Actress nominees are from just two plays: Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis, God of Carnage; Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, Mary Stuart. The fifth is Jane Fonda as the valiant terminally ill heroine of 33 Variations.

No room, then, for The Seagull as Best Revival—and not for Ms. Thomas’ supreme Arkadina nor Carey Mulligan’s phenomenal performance as Nina for the Best Featured Actress category.

Twenty-five years ago in the West End, I first saw the amazing Natasha Richardson onstage: She was an ingenue then, playing the ingenue actress Nina to the Arkadina of her mother, Vanessa Redgrave. Her Nina was kissed by God and, for me, the performance has been the benchmark for the role ever since. It’s the highest compliment to say of Carey Mulligan that her blazing talent, her attack and dreaminess, reminded me of the 20-year-old Natasha Richardson.

Best Actress in a Play
Between Marcia Gay Harden and Janet McTeer-Up-the-Stage. Watch out for the heavily campaigning Jane Fonda.

Will win: Marcia Gay Harden

Best Featured Actress in a Play
Between the beloved first lady of Broadway, Angela Lansbury, for her dottily irresistible Madame Arcati in the mediocre revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, and the amazing Amanda Root for her hilariously exact portrait of British middle-class bossiness and bristling resentment in The Norman Conquests.

Will win: Angela Lansbury

Best Featured Actor in a Play
It’s a pity that, in another serious lapse by the nominating committee, John Goodman didn’t receive a nomination for the best work of his career as the sensational Pozzo in the revival of Waiting for Godot.

Will win: Roger Robinson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

If there were a best ensemble award—like the Olivier Awards have in London—the extraordinary all-British cast of The Norman Conquests would be duking it out with the extraordinary, starry all-American cast of God of Carnage. It would be a close and exciting call—and there would have been room for many other nominees in several categories.

Best Actor in a Play
A split vote between James Gandolfini and Jeff Daniels of God of Carnage. I wouldn’t rule out Mr. Gandolfini, however. I wrote of Geoffrey Rush, nominated for Exit the King, that he’s giving one of the finest virtuoso performances I’ve ever seen—but Ionesco’s absurdist romp about mortality tends to put him in the rarefied high-culture category of “He’s wonderful—but What Does It All Mean?” Then again, the gifted Raúl Esparza of Speed-the-Plow could win, though he’s in danger of becoming the Susan Lucci of the Tonys.

Will win: Geoffrey Rush

The Award for Best Play

A shoe-in. Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty has struggled to find an audience. The late Horton Foote’s admired Dividing the Estate closed too long ago for Tony voters to have seen it. The best new play of the season—this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Ruined, by Lynn Nottage—isn’t eligible. (It’s an Off Broadway production.) Which leaves 33 Variations, the Lifetime disaster movie of the week (with a dash of Amadeus for amateur musicologists), competing with the commercial hit of the season, Yasmina Reza’s 80-minute breeze of a boulevard comedy of ill manners, God of Carnage, which the pretentious Ms. Reza mistakes for Kierkegaard.

Will win: God of Carnage

Best Actor in a Musical.

In its wisdom, the nominating committee has also ruled that Tony voters need see only one of the three boys who play Billy in Billy Elliot for all three of them to win a collective Tony as Best Actor in a Musical. When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all.

Will win: David Alvarez, Trent Kowalik and Kiril Kulish, Billy Elliot

Best Revival

The new Billy Elliot rule does not apply, however, to the revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, which requires voters to swear on the holy bible of St. Ethel that they’ve seen all three. But the Tony for Best Revival usually goes to Lincoln Center, which makes everybody feel good about themselves except me. The Flintstones Waiting for Godot isn’t a strong contender. There’s no nomination for the admired—and now departed—Desire Under the Elms. The battle for Best Play Revival is therefore a close call between The Norman Conquests and Lincoln Center’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

Will win: The Norman Conquests

Best Director of a Play

Will win: Matthew Warchus, the most gifted director of farce on either side of the Atlantic, for The Norman Conquests

Best Musical?

Will win: Shock! Billy Elliot

Best Director of a Musical
Another shock!

Will win: Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot!

Best Costume, Best Set Design

Prepare yourselves for Billy Elliot all night. The British mega-musical, which created the showbiz first of coal miners dancing merrily in tutus, will sweep everything in its category (including best peanuts). The only exception I can imagine is Best Costume, and possibly Best Set Design, for Shrek. (Green is good.)

Best Actress in a Musical

Will win: Alice Ripley for her suicidally depressive heroine in Next to Normal

Best Revival of a MusicaL

Finally, the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical is between the tougher, bilingual new production of West Side Story, directed by the always modest Arthur Laurents; and the vibrant, nice, clean Brazilian wax production of Hair, directed by Diane Paulus.

Let the sunshine in!

Will win, must win: Hair, beloved tribal love-rock musical of my generation!

jheilpern@observer.com

Samuel Beckett’s seminal Modernist masterpiece—first produced in America in 1956—is famously set in a void with only a near-barren tree (a Beckett tree: one too fragile upon which to hang yourself). But I felt sunk the moment the curtain went up to reveal the stage cluttered with fake rocks and boulders arranged into some kind of plastic mountain.

Meet the Flintstones Beckett. They’re the modern Stone Age family.

The Bedrock Estragon and Vladimir of Mr. Lane and Mr. Irwin are one mismatched thing. But that ill-conceived set that the veteran British director has imposed on Godot is in direct contradiction to Beckett’s stated intentions.

Mr. Page—not an innovator, but usually a faithful director of classic texts—has made a very uncharacteristic lapse. It need not have been decisive had Santo Loquasto’s Flintstone set design worked better than any old mundane cliché, or even been relevant to the essence of the great play itself.

His un-Beckettian tree is far too sturdy. You could hang yourself from it, with ease. But his rocky landscape does not convince us half as much as the rocky landscape in the new production of the elm-free Desire Under the Elms (now nicknamed Desire Under the Rocks).

The Flintstone look is in. There was also the blasted moonscape that the British director Deborah Warner added recently to Beckett’s Happy Days, starring Fiona Shaw. O Sam, poor Sam! His spartan genius has bequeathed merely mortal directors and designers too much material to work with.

Will no one leave Beckett alone?

The new production of Waiting for Godot in London’s West End, starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, for example, takes the usual populist liberties: Beckett’s empty space has now become a hackneyed derelict theater, and the two stars—never innately funny performers in the first place—relish playing clowns too much, even singing and dancing creakily at the curtain call to the old British music-hall favorite, “Underneath the Arches.”

I trust they’re having a yabba dabba doo time.

THE DEBATE ABOUT “interpreting” sacred texts isn’t new. Nor are Shakespeare productions set in, say, the Wild West (which I’ve seen twice). Everything’s been done that mediocre directors insist on being done. Still, better a living reinterpretation of a classic play than a dusty revival of a museum piece.

I believe the plays of a precise minimalist like Beckett stand apart, however. My bias is in favor of staging his masterpieces as he intended. Let the characters and the words speak for themselves—stripped to the marrow of his lost souls damned at birth, or before.

Beckett’s notes are always musically the same; it’s a question of how you play them. Apart from the wayward stage design, Mr. Page—a traditionalist at heart—has kept conventionally to Beckett’s text for the Roundabout Theatre production at Studio 54. But Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin make a distant odd couple, whereas Estragon and Vladimir ought to be joined irrevocably at the hip.

The performers are too much themselves. Mr. Lane’s popular note of wryly comic exasperation belongs to his own familiar persona rather than to Estragon’s bleakly tragic emotionalism. Mr. Irwin—a brilliant mime, of course—makes a lightweight, fussily overintellectualized version of the cerebral Vladimir, and key line readings are disjointedly bizarre.

There’s no poetry in either of them, alas—and little of Beckett’s lament for humanity. Together, they fatally lack his tragic perspective. A generalized clownishness—with a comforting nod to Beckett’s love of music hall—only touches the reassuring surfaces of the play. It’s a tragicomedy. What in all dramatic literature could be sadder or more agonizingly hopeless than the news the child brings into the wilderness each bright new day: “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t be coming this evening but surely tomorrow.”

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I’ll grant you that”—as the mordant line goes in Beckett’s Endgame. Mr. Page’s production isn’t—thank goodness—the laugh riot of the Mike Nichols knockabout 1988 Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center (in which Mr. Irwin appeared as Lucky, and Robin Williams’ Estragon performed manic impersonations of Hollywood stars, as usual). “Every line a laugh,” Beckett commented about it dryly.

But Mr. Lane and Mr. Irwin do not take us to the anguished depths—to “how it is on this bitch of an earth.” My benchmark for Godot is the Dublin Gate Theatre production with Beckett’s greatest interpreter Barry McGovern as Vladimir, along with Johnny Murphy’s Estragon. It was directed by Walter Asmus—who assisted Beckett on his own seminal production of Godot for the Schiller Theater in Berlin.

Irish actors understand Beckett, the Irishman, in their bones. And what the masterly Dublin production revealed—beside Beckett’s essential Irish gallows humor—is Godot's trust in salvation, in tandem with an awesome sorrow "where the light gleams an instant."

There are two remarkable saving graces in the new Roundabout production, however. John Goodman’s Pozzo, the fat, bullying slave-driver with a posh British accent and the temperament of a ruined child, is a fabulous echo of Peter Bull’s original blustery Pozzo of Peter Hall’s celebrated London premier of Waiting for Godot in 1955. And the excellent John Glover’s unlucky Lucky, enslaved, beaten like Ireland, barely able to walk, exhausted, dying, could scarcely be better or more affecting.

Mr. Glover and a revelatory Mr. Goodman hit all the right notes.

jheilpern@observer.com

The first, Table Manners, is my favorite. Not only is it consistently, irresistibly funny; it contains a dinner-party scene so blissfully hilarious that I was on the floor laughing.

All three plays take place during the same absurdly traumatic country-house weekend. They can be seen separately and in no particular order, but they unfold chronologically. They reveal what’s happening from different perspectives, so that when a character exits the dining room during the first play, we see what he’s really up to in the sitting room during the second (Living Together). Or for that matter, who’s failing to seduce whom in the garden during the third (Round and Round the Garden).

The prolific Mr. Ayckbourn has always been energized by solving self-inflicted puzzles. His Intimate Exchanges (1982) is eight interconnecting plays—no less—that all open with exactly the same scene. His House and Garden (1999) is notoriously two plays performed simultaneously by the same cast in adjoining theaters! (Exit the king, as it were, who then does an insane dash to appear in a scene taking place next door.)

The Norman Conquests, with its wonderful all-British cast, comes to us via the Old Vic theater and is expertly directed by Matthew Warchus (of God of Carnage and Boeing-Boeing). I saw the triptych in a single marathon day and night, and must admit that I was flagging a bit during the third play. This isn’t, after all, Das Rheingold. This is more what Tom Stoppard might describe as “the Coast of Suburbia.”

Mr. Ayckbourn, the bard of middle-class manners, is the masterful chronicler of English suburban foibles. He conveys as no other modern British playwright can—with the exception of Alan Bennett—the national identity of emotional reticence and fumbling embarrassment (or the Brits’ insatiable appetite for awkward sex in unlikely places).

His ear for the verbal tics and rhythms of the frayed bourgeois, with its quiet neurosis and lingering grievances doting on defeat, is exact. His archetypal characters are living in partially submerged hysteria. In Mr. Ayckbourn’s hands, they commit an unpardonably un-English faux pas: They fail to keep up appearances.

The premise of The Norman Conquests is deceptively close to a typically English farce like No Sex Please, We’re British. Norman, a librarian and unlikely Casanova, is unhappily married to myopic, workaholic Ruth. Norman is all set for a dirty weekend with his wan sister-in-law, the somewhat ungroomed Annie (in whose neglected Victorian house the action takes place).

Henpecked Reg—Annie’s brother and inventor of incomprehensible adaptations of Monopoly—arrives with irritable Sarah, his bossy wife (whom Norman also fancies). Plus, there’s the hopelessly shy local vet Tom, who might be a bit slow. He’s Annie’s perpetual suitor who’s always blundering in at the wrong moment.

Still, The Norman Conquests goes beyond the norms of boulevard comedy. Mr. Ayckbourn’s recent Private Fears in Public Places (2004) touchingly reveals the playwright’s real intentions—should there have been any doubt. He’s hilariously serious.

His comedies are sly portraits of human folly. But I disagree with those critics who acclaim Mr. Ayckbourn as the British Chekhov. True, Chekhov also wrote comedies set in country houses—but does that make him the Russian Alan Ayckbourn?

The Norman Conquests is by no means a tragedy. But, like all the playwright’s best work, its comedy is underpinned by unspoken yearning and unhappiness. The trilogy reveals English lives that never quite blossomed, never quite connected. The stoic Brits soldier on, as ever. Solitude and desperation within the farcical mayhem are the outcome.

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them at the Public Theater is a black farce that’s essentially about, well, torture, and a peculiar brand of American paranoia and bigotry—and I haven’t had such fun at the theater since the recent revival of Mr. Durang’s fable about his own dysfunctional childhood, The Marriage of Bette and Boo.

In a surprising season that has brought Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King to Broadway, Mr. Durang could well be one of the last American links with the Theater of the Absurd. The treasured playwright (of Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, Beyond Therapy and Betty’s Summer Vacation) possesses a serious philosophy of life combined with a serious taste for the blissfully, unapologetically silly. (But then, the more dangerous his characters, the sillier they are.)

I’m reminded of the recent passing of the outrageous downtown dramatist and innovator Ron Tavel, who invented New York’s fabled Theater of the Ridiculous. “We have passed beyond the Absurd,” Tavel famously pronounced. “Our position is completely Ridiculous.”

Mr. Durang is a spiritual heir to Tavel’s noble cause. To even try to summarize the lunatic plot of all that goes on in Torture, however, would take several pages and a road map. Suffice to say, there’s Luella, a befuddled, sweet mom who adores the musical Wicked and knows someone who committed suicide rather than stay through the third installment of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia; her deranged right-wing husband, Leonard, who’s formed a secret shadow government that conducts “enhanced interrogation methods” in his den; and their innocent young daughter, Felicity, who must have been drunk, or drugged, when she married Zamir, an Irishman (or so he says) who’s a suspected terrorist.

Also on manic hand—Hildegarde, a middle-aged secret agent in pearls whose panties keep falling down; Reverend Mike, a porn movie director and priest (he’s a “porn-again Christian”); and someone with the code name Looney Toon who comments on the mayhem with Elmer Fudd impersonations: “Beep, beep! Wodents and wabbits! Intewwogating tewwowists!”

Christopher Durang is Jonathan Swift’s nicer, younger brother. Only he would end Why Torture Is Wrong in a heavenly version of Hooters. Meanwhile, it’s more than enough for us that this freewheeling satire of the cult of violence in a mad, mad world is a cathartic riot. Nicholas Martin has directed at exactly the right heady pace. His entire ensemble, with the hilarious Kristine Nielson, never misses a beat. And David Korins’s witty scenic design adds to our delight.

WHEN YOU'RE A JET...

I WISH I could say the same for Neil LaBute in his Broadway debut at the Lyceum. Reasons to Be Pretty is the prolific playwright’s final installment of a trilogy about our obsession with physical beauty, and one can’t help asking why it took him three plays to bring us the same old hackneyed message. Beauty Is Within, you know. (And sexist, meathead guys aren’t fair.)

It isn’t just that the now 46-year-old Mr. LaBute has been churning out the same immature ideas for years (see Fat Pig and The Shape of Things). His nagging take on beauty is the same as Ms. magazine’s a generation ago.

In Reasons to Be Pretty, the foulmouthed (yet needy) Steph erupts in fury, ending her four-year-old relationship to tactless (yet sensitive) factory worker Greg for describing her as “regular”-looking. (We know Greg’s sensitive because between shifts he reads Poe, Hawthorne and Washington Irving.) There’s also a formulaic LaBute subplot involving roughhouse male bonding and a childish chauvinist pig who’s cheating on his pretty (and pregnant) wife.

Lauded by some as evidence of a newer, gentler Neil LaBute, Reasons to Be Pretty is merely soapier. It doesn’t help at all that in the pompous “Note From the Dramatist” in Playbill, Mr. LaBute appears to review his own play favorably for making the argument—which it doesn’t make—about “being yourself and standing up for what you believe in … The future is now. It’s time to grow up and be strong.”

Oh, phooey.

NEIL'S SPIEL

MAY I GLIDE past the horribly passé ’80s jukebox musical Rock of Ages at the Brooks Atkinson? Performed mostly by second-raters to the golden oldies of Poison, Foreigner, Journey and so on, it’s a faux arena show that would be at home among Twisted Sister look-alikes in New Jersey. Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That.

It’s no West Side Story, obviously. Nor is Arthur Laurents’ revival of West Side Story at the Palace. The more I think about his modernized version, the more I miss the original show.

To have the Sharks speak Spanish is a blurry nod to the salsa heat of In the Heights. Sometimes the Sharks perform in Spanish, but sometimes, illogically, they don’t. Mr. Laurents—the original librettist as well as the revival’s director—has strongly emphasized that he wanted to make the warring gangs real this time round. He’s given them a threatening contemporary attitude—but why are they still hanging around a soda fountain politely ordering cokes?

Mr. Laurents’ libretto only seems more stuck in a sentimentalized past, not less. (“Thanks, daddy-o!”) Jerome Robbins’ 1958 ballets—re-created by Joey McKneely—are sublime; the “improvements” aren’t. They’re unnecessary.

jheilpern@observer.com

And, in the best of all possible ways, it’s a daringly old-fashioned performance—the kind we feel exceptionally lucky to witness nowadays. From his first strutting entrance as Ionesco’s 400-year-old King, Mr. Rush is not only in relaxed and riveting command of the stage; he is saying—while not exactly saying—“Watch this!”

He brings to this potentially difficult role the nearly lost art and irresistible joy of performing—and makes Ionesco wonderfully accessible in the exhilarating process.

Ionesco said of his so-called theater of the absurd—The Chairs (1952) and Rhinoceros (1959) are among his other classics—that he was influenced by the Marx brothers, Grand Guignol puppet shows and Kafka. Mr. Rush gives us the disturbing and farcical essence of all three—topping them up nicely with an expert combination of music hall, circus and Shakespeare. That his Everyman King Berenger finds a tragic Shakespearean depth of human wreckage amid the hilarity is among the miracles of a masterly performance.

The demanding role was famously originated (in its English version) by Alec Guinness, but I cannot imagine even that great actor equaling Mr. Rush’s achievement. The introverted Guinness was slyly comic, whereas Mr. Rush’s huge and grotesque interpretation is exactly in tune with what Ionesco termed the “violently comic, violently dramatic.” In the exaggerated theater of the absurd, nothing is ever quite real—except the show.

Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon (Queen Marguerite) and Lauren Ambrose (playing Marie, the other Queen) are among the strong ensemble in Neil Armfield’s splendid, near childlike production. But all eyes are forgivably drawn to Mr. Rush’s bravura King. The Australian actor (also an Academy Award winner) is a born clown. He has the face and mask of one. Peeking out from his gold paper crown, his hair is revealed as startled tufts of red—until it turns white. (Shakespeare’s clowns were traditionally red-headed.)

Mr. Rush is also a gifted mime. He falls beautifully onstage (like no one else since the 73-year-old Ralph Richardson in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land). It is a slow crumpling that his decrepit, rubbery King does, like a puppet whose wires have been cut: The landing is soft; the rise speedy and limber—until the next fall.

You never know what Mr. Rush might do next. (But then, nor does the King.) After all, Exit the King takes place in a world—Ionesco’s as well as ours—where the abnormal has become the new normal. The star actor thrives on the unpredictable, dangerous edge of theater. His energy is mercurial, electric and gleeful; his despotic King ultimately pathetic and extraordinarily humane.

And the play itself? Oh, that! In hifalutin terms, Ionesco’s renowned “anti-play” at the Ethel Barrymore is theatrically akin to a Cubist painting. In plainer terms, Exit the King is about insane self-delusion and nothing less than the futility of life. It’s about death.

But don’t let that discourage you in the least. The absurdist play has stood the test of time, and Mr. Rush’s 400-year-old King is one for the ages.

Fortunately, what Ms. Reza has done with God of Carnage, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on Broadway, is to write a welcome boulevard comedy polished to a high gloss by her frequent translator, Christopher Hampton. After the soupy pretentiousness of her last outing here, The Spanish Play, Ms. Reza has returned to the successful formula of Art: a small group of politely civilized people meet, talk and, one way or another, end up trying to kill each other.

God of Carnage concerns two sets of middle-class parents who meet to resolve a violent fight that took place between their young sons in the schoolyard—and their lives unravel accordingly. Thankfully, Ms. Reza makes only fleeting allusion to the tragedy of civil war in Darfur, while her boisterous 85-minute light comedy proves a triumph of escalating farce.

The marvelously paced production confirms—if confirmation is needed—the Brit Matthew Warchus as a leading director on both sides of the Atlantic. Last season, he breathed glorious new life into what was assumed to be a dead horse with his revival of Boeing-Boeing. (He also directed the original production of Art, among other Reza plays.) But Mr. Warchus’ supreme ensemble of actors in God of Carnage is a particular delight.

The director never relies on purely comic performers for the laughter—but on fine actors who proceed to the ridiculously farcical via a considered seriousness and politesse. The terrific James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden are one hilarious couple; the equally smashing pairing of Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis are the other. The quiet riot Ms. Davis—to whom I declared undying love and adoration over a decade ago—has returned to the New York stage at last, and her astonishing projectile vomit over the entire proceedings must be seen to be believed.

jheilpern@observer.com

Ms. Fonda, furthermore, is playing a terminally ill musicologist, Dr. Katherine Brandt, who’s dying horribly of Lou Gehrig’s disease—and she still looks wonderful! In fact, she seems to grow more and more attractive the closer her increasingly frail character comes to its last gasp. From walker to wheelchair to sayonara-it’s-been-swell, the dignified, forever beautiful Ms. Fonda resolutely endures.

That is more than can be said for the play. Written and directed by Moisés Kaufman, 33 Variations is a shamelessly manipulative stew of Lifetime Movie mixed with ghoulish biopic, pseudo-historical drama, a splash of Amadeus and faux art. And all in the name of refined Highbrow Culture at the theater!

Of all the choices Mr. Kaufman might have made, why, I wonder, did he choose a heroine dying of cancer? His ailing Dr. Brandt is obsessed with solving the mystery of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the work that obsessed the ailing composer. (Aha! They’re both sick!) She travels courageously to Germany to unlock the secret of the Variations and, in sub-Stoppardian manner, the playwright crisscrosses his drama in time, revealing Beethoven struggling for years with his ineffable “33 Variations.” (The live piano accompaniment by Diane Walsh during the action is exceptional.)

But Zach Grenier’s overripe performance as an irascible, blustery Beethoven is a loud cartoon, and Mr. Kaufman—best known for his docudramas (including The Laramie Project)—might have resisted the deaf jokes. He might also have skipped his coy—and horribly old-fashioned—romantic subplot involving Dr. Brandt’s partially estranged daughter and an emotionally dim male nurse wracked with torment about holding hands on their first date.

The intrepid Dr. Brandt’s line about Beethoven—“I didn’t know he liked soup”—only serves to remind us that the play is no Wit. Margaret Edson’s brilliant 1998 metaphysical drama of ideas, with an unforgettable performance by Kathleen Chalfant, explored a professor’s death from cancer, the life of the mind and the eternal mystery of great poetry. By comparison, I’m afraid that the arty pretensions of Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations amount to little more than showbiz.

ARE OUR TIMES too serious for Noël Coward? His patented brand of brittle flippancy for dire times is thought to be eternally witty. To sing stoically as the boat goes down is the master’s nonchalant, stiff-upper-lip credo.

“Let’s be superficial and pity the poor philosophers,” as Elyot puts it in Coward’s 1930 masterwork, Private Lives. “Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers and enjoy the party as much as we can, like small, quite idiotic schoolchildren.”

If Coward’s very idiotic 1941 Blithe Spirit were nearly as good as Private Lives, I might still be enjoying the party. But I’m not so certain that either Coward’s farce or its current revival at the Shubert Theatre are quite enough cause for celebratory trumpets and squeakers.

Michael Blakemore’s strangely subpar production opens by sending the wrong signal with a recording of “Someday I’ll Find You.” The signature Coward song from Private Lives only reminds us further of what we’re about to miss. Other musical interludes from the hallowed Coward songbook follow—accompanying quaintly captioned introductions to each big scene. But they only slow the action when it should be dancing on air—hot air—while the dated songs themselves give off the nostalgic whiff of an anemic Palm Court recital performed by three little old ladies in evening wear on a drizzly day in Frinton-on-Sea.

Coward’s self-described “very gay, very superficial comedy about a ghost” concerns marriage and infidelity, the intervention of a mad medium and a supercilious upper-class novelist who’s haunted by the ghost of his first wife (and then his second). The revival has its compensations—Angela Lansbury’s adorably nuts Madame Arcati among them—but, alas, Coward’s creaky brand of arch frivolity left me imagining a new song, titled “I’m Not So Terribly in Love With Noël Anymore.”

The master could write dialogue—as he put it happily—“by the yard,” and he wrote Blithe Spirit in six absinthe-drenched days to settle a few pressing debts. But I’m with John Gielgud (no less), who commented with customary tactlessness after seeing the show on its opening night: “I thought it was terribly overwritten. It was a good joke, but he spun it out too much.”

Mr. Blakemore—the veteran director whose production of Michael Frayn’s classic backstage farce Noises Off is legend—has faltered uncharacteristically here. Coward’s plays demand a superior carriage trade production, yet the set design of Blithe Spirit’s spiffy upper-class drawing room is forlornly drab. And Mr. Blakemore hasn’t, as yet, got the comic timing of his distinguished ensemble right. Frivolity is best taken lightly. But the pace of the piece is too labored, the comedy too broad.

Madame Arcati (the role originally played by the sublime English eccentric, Margaret Rutherford) traditionally steals the show, and Angela Lansbury’s madcap Arcati is no exception. Though very occasionally seeming uncertain, the legendary actress sails on regardless, and what appears to be her own manically balletic version of Nijinsky’s Les Noces is a riot.

But the glamorous Christine Ebersole, who possesses an innate comic flair, isn’t quite right as the ghost of the upper-class Brit, Elvira, while Jayne Atkinson’s priggish Ruth is on the earnest side. Rupert Everett, swaggering indolently about the place as supercilious Charles, is an ideal Coward actor, however. (An ideal Wildean one, too). Mr. Everett knows how to be stylishly, effortlessly superficial, as if to the manor born. Plus, he can balance a cup of tea on his knee with a piece of cake.

THERE'S JUST ROOM for a word—and a rave—about the revolutionary production of Thornton Wilder’s iconic Our Town (1938) at the Barrow Street Theatre in the Village. It’s a model of everything fine that can be achieved in a revival of a mythic play.

Its gifted director, the Chicago-based David Cromer, who also plays the Stage Manager, brought us the wonderful and modest Off Broadway musical Adding Machine last season (which reinvented Elmer Rice’s 1923 Expressionist play). Now his intimate staging of Wilder’s apparent potboiler has made the frequently staged play shatteringly fresh.

How the new production appears to exist simultaneously in time past and present is some kind of theater miracle. This is no Our Town as a comforting slice of folksy Americana. (Wilder never intended it to be that.) The production’s rhythmic, unfolding picture of small-town American life is extraordinarily real and immediate, and its abiding spirit still speaks to us. The sentiment is honestly earned; the utterly natural acting of the splendid ensemble is admirably artless.

This is a great production that takes us to the heartbeat of Thornton Wilder’s original tragic intention. And it takes us there quietly, without fuss. In its vast simplicity and force, Our Town is exhorting us all to live every minute, every second, every day of our lives as if we are blessed.

jheilpern@observer.com

If only that were true! It’s sad to report that the revival of the iconic 1950 Guys and Dolls, currently hitting us over the head with a meat cleaver at the Nederlander on Broadway, is extraordinarily disappointing. Whether the show will be a hit, only Mr. Gopnik’s penguins can say. The numbing effect it had on me was akin to listening to a fabulously witty story you adore being retold by someone with zero sense of humor.

No matter that the director, Des McAnuff (of Jersey Boys, The Who’s Tommy), has book-ended the botched production with a confusing image of Damon Runyon hunched over a typewriter, at work on—what? Guys and Dolls? The musical itself—with its hokey, fun book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, together with Frank Loesser’s gem of a score—owes only snatches of its plot directly to Runyon (except for “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown”). The show’s wellspring is the romantic old Broadway of Runyon’s lowlife guys and dolls, with their mannered argot and the elaborate politesse that gives gangsters class.

As Harry the Horse puts it to that lovable no-goodnik Nathan Detroit, “Nathan—if there is no crap game tonight I am sure Big Jule will be considerably displeased; and Big Jule does not like to be displeased, as you can find out from those citizens who at one time or another displeased him. Although I will admit it is very hard to find such citizens in view of the fact that they are no longer around and about.”

The key to any production of Guys and Dolls is the subtitle, A Musical Fable of Broadway. Yet the new production has inappropriately rooted its aggressive visual style in grim reality. The dominating gray iron trusses of set designer Robert Brill’s blighted New York cityscape are jarringly industrial. The only color I recall (apart from Paul Tazewell’s so-so costumes) is the brutalist neon signage overpowering each side of the stage and part of the auditorium.

In vividly colorful contrast, Jerry Zaks’ 1992 revival of the show—which has rightly passed into legend—was a high-water mark of stage fantasy by designer Tony Walton and his creative team. Paying tribute to the hallowed 1950 designs of Jo Mielziner and subsequently those of Oliver Smith (for the lesser 1955 screen version), Mr. Walton’s painted, Matisse-like backdrops created their own remarkable genre.

LET'S ADMIT THAT Runyon’s Manhattan never really existed. Born in Manhattan, Kan., and raised in Colorado, Runyon created a romanticized version of his adopted city; Guys and Dolls, already a step away from Runyon, is itself nostalgic for a mythic Broadway. (Well, aren’t we all?)

But any production of the show ought to have a certain style and period. This one’s a mess: The busy video work is contemporary, the props period, and the cityscape images are loudly pro-forma archival. The costumes appear to be 1930s, but Sergio Trujillo’s tense choreography presents a fiercely contemporary attitude.

The unfocused production, which ought to be easeful, assaults the audience. It’s oversold, overproduced and overmiked. The brassy sound of the hidden onstage orchestra is at times ramped up way too loud. Yet Frank Loesser’s unmatchable score possesses an innate street vitality that should speak (and sing and swoon) for itself.

Is there anywhere a lyric to beat “Adelaide’s Lament,” Loesser’s paean to curing a psychosomatic cold? “You can spray her wherever/ You figure the streptococci lurk/ You can give her a shot for whatever she’s got/ But it just won’t work.”

To be reminded of the title of more or less any Guys and Dolls song is to want to sing it:

Yes sir!

When you see a guy,

Reach for the stars in the sky,

You can bet that he’s doing it for some doll …

The wit of the Swerling-Burrows book keeps pace with Loesser. “If she hears I am running the crap game she will never set foot on me again.” “Don’t worry, honey—one of these days I’ll be in the money, and you’ll have more mink than a mink.” “She give a look that would have cooled off a moose at mating time.” “Yes, it’s too bad that a smart businessman like Nathan had to go and fall in love with his own fiancée.”

Too bad also that so much of the dialogue is recited as if the cast were struggling with a foreign language. I’m not at all certain that a performer needs to be a born musical comedian to shine in Guys and Dolls. (Sam Levene made his musical debut playing Nathan Detroit in the 1950 production; a successful 1982 National Theatre production used well-known actors.) But the quartet of performers in the engine room of the current revival isn’t sparking at all.

Oliver Platt—a favorite of mine who rarely fails to do interesting work—isn’t at his relaxed best as Nathan Detroit. When Nathan confesses he’s a heel, you’re too ready to believe him. Mr. Platt sings pleasantly and is touching in that plea bargain for love, “Sue Me” (“So sue me, sue me/ What can you do me/ I love you”). But his flair for light comedy isn’t the equal of his talent for playing desperate lost souls.

His subdued partnership with Lauren Graham’s Miss Adelaide—“the well-known fiancée”—is off-kilter. Ms. Graham (Lorelai Gilmore on the WB’s Gilmore Girls) is making her Broadway debut. We wish her well. She’s game, but she’s too pretty for the role, hits all the right notes in the wrong way and cannot read a comic lyric. I regret to say that Ms. Graham is no Adelaide.

Craig Bierko (of The Music Man revival) has his fans, and he makes a passable Sky Masterson. But he’s fatally unexciting. His awkwardly staged romantic duets with Kate Jennings Grant’s earnest and shrill Sister Sarah look strained. He makes the wonderful lyric about the quickening infatuation of falling in love—“But this is wine that’s all too strange and strong/ I’m full of foolish song”—seem bland.

There aren’t enough bruised noses among the ensemble of Runyonesque characters—least of all on the appealing baby face of Tituss Burgess’ Nicely-Nicely Johnson, who finishes “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” on a scream-out with Mary Testa’s gospelling General. Surprisingly few members of the cast possess a natural comic persona—Ms. Testa, who creates something out of practically nothing in her cameo role, is one of them.

PERHAPS WE exaggerate the virtues of great musicals we recall from the past, but I’m far from alone in thinking that the Guys and Dolls of 1992 was a benchmark. It introduced us to a new musical star, Faith Prince (as an irresistibly funny Adelaide), with Nathan Lane—in a partnership made in heaven—as her hapless Nathan Detroit. “No doubt another Broadway generation will one day find a different, equally exciting way to re-imagine this classic,” Frank Rich concluded his review in The New York Times. “But in our lifetime? Don’t bet on it.”

Big Frank was right: I’d rather bet even money on some guy taking a missionary doll to Havana.

jheilpern@observer.com