John C. McGinley (Wikipedia)

The new adaptation of Glengarry, directed by Tony winner Daniel Sullivan and produced by long-time Mamet collaborator Jeffrey Richards, has already closed on a stellar cast. Mr. Pacino will be playing Shelly Levene, the desperate Chicago salesman made famous by Jack Lemmon in the 1992 film. Bobby Cannavale  will be playing Mr. Pacino's hot-shot Ricky Roma character from the movie, while Mr. McGinnley will be tackling the disgruntled employee of the month, Dave Moss (portrayed by Ed Harris in the movie) alongside The West Wing's Richard Schiff, making his Broadway debut as  George Aaronow (Alan Alda's character). Still to be cast is the role of Blake, immortalized by Alec Baldwin with the line "Coffee is for closers."

The Broadway revival is set to preview October 16, and will open to the public November 11th. And just to refresh our memory on why you should be your tickets now:
http://youtu.be/3A6aGw4l5XQ

A match made in...somewhere (Getty Images)

Monday evening, Woody Allen announced the cast of his yet-to-be-titled film, set in San Francisco and New York. (This is different from his upcoming summer feature with Jesse Eisenberg, To Rome With Love, which is set in Rome.)

The cast is...eclectic, to say the least. To say the most would be calling it the work of either an insane genius or just a regular insane person. Let's take a look, shall we?

Woody Allen announced today the cast of his latest untitled film. Starring, in alphabetical order, are Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Emerson, Sally Hawkins and Peter Sarsgaard. Co-stars include Max Casella and Alden Ehrenreich. It is a Gravier Productions film produced by Allen’s long time producers, Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum.

The new film will be shot in New York and San Francisco this summer. This marks Allen’s second time directing in San Francisco -- his directorial debut, 1969’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, was also set there.

Of course, everyone is flipping biscuit's over the casting of Andrew Dice Clay, most recently seen playing himself on Entourage, though a close second is Louis C.K. (Though we could absolutely see the FX star as a blue-collar Woody surrogate in the feature.) But the other members of the cast are just as strange: Cate Blanchett and Alex Baldwin are the biggest names on the roster, but we just can't imagine those two with any type of neurotic sexual chemistry.

Then there's Michael Emerson, better known as the villainous Ben Linus from Lost, who absolutely should be in everything, ever. But maybe not a Woody Allen movie? Unless Andrew Dice Clay will be playing a Smoke Monster going through a mid-life sexual crisis, only to be aided by the help of his best friend, a grown-up Vincent Delpino.

Add Peter Skarsgard, and you have a farrago of stoic, emotionally-repressed character actors...and Andrew Dice Clay. Based on the casting, we're going to assume that Mr. Allen's next feature will be a tense melodrama, in the vein of Matchpoint or the one with Ewan McGregor that no one saw.

That was in 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, his first role, before his hit run on Scrubs, before his writer-director turn with Garden State. Armed with those financial and artistic successes, Mr. Braff has returned to the stage-he's done a few small parts in Public Theater Shakespeare productions-for Trust, an excellent dark comedy by Paul Weitz, which opened last week at the Second Stage Theatre. In it, Mr. Braff plays, more or less, Woody Allen.

He's good at it: In his nine years on Scrubs, he perfected the charmingly awkward thing, the antihero leading man. His Trust character, Harry, isn't the same as his Scrubs character, J.D.-there's a steely spine under Harry's neurotic exterior, and he's not nearly so goofy-but Mr. Braff has a virtuosic command of the comedy in Mr. Weitz's very funny script, with great timing, funny bits of stage business and, at least in the play's early scenes, an Allenian arsenal of pauses, stutters and double takes.

Harry opens the play as an over-analytical, overly chatty, excessively needy nebbish in a bad suit who's visiting an S&M parlor. He has sold his dot-com for $300 million and doesn't know what to do with his life. (Being rich, he explains, is "like, I don't know, deeply deflating?") His wife doesn't like him; he has no friends; he's stopped by the dungeon in hopes of feeling something. He soon realizes his dominatrix, Mistress Carol (an outstanding Sutton Foster, playing very much against her usual sweet-girl type), was a high-school classmate; they go for coffee, and for the first time in a long time, he feels a connection. It's meet-cute, sort of, but with chains and a ball gag.

(In real life, I should mention, Mr. Braff and I were friendly acquaintances in high school, though we've never had any subsequent S&M run-ins, and he never played me a Shins song that changed my life.)

Harry's wife, Aleeza (a nicely arch and caustic Ari Graynor), is a painter who can't paint, crippled by her husband's amazing and unexpected wealth, someone who doesn't need to do anything and thus can't do anything. Mistress Carol-her real name is Prudence-lives with a domineering boyfriend, Morton (Bobby Cannavale, dependably manly and, here, surprisingly skinny), who's impressed with his own intelligence and abilities but can't actually hold down a job. ("I got 1560 on my SATs," he rants to Prudence. "I should be the one with a hundred million dollars!")

Mr. Weitz-the screenwriter, director and producer behind American Pie and About a Boy, among others-has written a script that is funny, dirty, occasionally shocking, literate and intelligent and emotionally rich. (Which is to say: It is a prime example of what could be thought of as the Second Stage aesthetic, and it makes a fine companion to Leslye Headland's funny, dirty, shocking, intelligent Bachelorette, currently playing at the company's uptown space.)

It paints four distinct and compelling characters, though Harry is a touch underdeveloped: His transition from submissive dweeb to canny manipulator-suddenly, he's not Woody Allen anymore-is insufficiently explained or justified.

The cast is excellent, and under the guidance of Peter DuBois (who two seasons ago directed Second Stage's Becky Shaw, which was also smart, funny, dirty and shocking), they give finely calibrated performances. Alexander Dodge's set is pretty, simple and cleverly constructed-beds and restaurant tables slide on and off from the wings; S&M handcuffs are flown in from above-and Mr. DuBois keeps the action flowing briskly on it.

The four unhappy characters begin the play living a life that feels wrong but without any real idea of how to alter it. But the unexpected reconnection of Harry and Prudence-Harry has had a crush on her since high school, it turns out-has ramifications that show each the possibility of a different life. "It's not about fun," Prudence says of the domination-submission fantasies she acts out with her clients. "It's about accepting yourself, even if it's temporary." Eventually, and very gratifyingly, these characters do, in unexpected ways.

"I got a job. I am part of the working world," Morton announces in his final scene. "I'm managing a Mexican restaurant." He'd earlier thought he was too good, too smart for a regular job. "Turns out I'm pretty good at managing Mexican restaurants," he says. And that's good enough.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S BIG, Gay Dance Party, which arrived last week at Theatre Row after a sold-out and praised run in last summer's New York International Fringe Festival, delivers on the promise of its title in the most technical sense: There is Abraham Lincoln (indeed, a handful of them, a sort of chorus line-cum-greek chorus in beards and hats); there are gay-rights issues; and there is, in one scene, what could perhaps be termed a dance party.

But if you read the title as carrying the implicit promise of a campy historical review, of a smartly counterintuitive political argument or even of a simple evening of goofy entertainment, you'll be soundly disappointed. An intriguing title and a handful of ironic-vaudeville staging devices can't obscure the fact that Abraham Lincoln's Big, Gay Dance Party, written by Aaron Loeb and sloppily directed by Chris Smith, is a didactic and predictable message play about the virtues of tolerance, acceptance and gay rights.

It opens with a play-within-a-play, a grade-school Christmas pageant near Lincoln's Illinois hometown, in which a fourth-grader playing Abe reads from a script that mentions questions raised by historians about Lincoln's relationship with his law partner, Joshua Speed, with whom he shared a bed.

The teacher, a kindly closeted lesbian in mom jeans and knitted vests, is promptly fired and put on trial (in this world, teachers' unions apparently don't exist), and the play promptly becomes Inherit the Wind: A moralizing politician prosecutes, an old nemesis defends, a high-flying big-city journalist comes to town.

There are a few intriguing moments, as when the (black) defense attorney and (gay) big-city journalist argue about the degree to which the gay-rights movement is similar to the civil-rights movement, about the relative privilege of American gay men. "You boys live in the richest cities in the world-scratch that, the richest neighborhoods in the richest cities," the pol tells the reporter. "And yet, when someone hurts your feelings, you beautiful men with your awesome hair and expensive clothes and perfect teeth start talking like you're sharecroppers from Mississippi." But as soon as it's raised, it's abandoned. This Big, Gay Dance Party is also, briefly, an AIDS play, a coming-out story and a historical pageant, as when, from time to time, we're read a Lincoln quote about the importance of acceptance or unity.

It also has a strange take on homosexuality for gay-rights melodrama. Jazz hands are an inevitable signifier for gayness; the older, big-city gay man has his eye on the young, small-town gay boy; the happily long-partnered lesbian is deeply ashamed of her "secret."

Still, Abraham Lincoln's Big, Gay Dance Party is genial and mildly entertaining. Tolerance, acceptance and gay rights are good things. But well before the end of this two-and-half-hour sophomoric exercise, a viewer becomes a bit jealous of the titular president: At least he didn't have to wait for his play to end.

editorial@observer.com

Diminished Capacity is a harmless but monotonous trifle about a baseball card. Matthew Broderick is making too many movies and giving the same performance in all of them. This time, he’s a Chicago newspaper editor named Cooper who suffers a brain concussion and gets demoted to proofreading comic strips. His neurologist says he’s got what they call “diminished capacity,” but he no longer throws up when he drives a car, so he goes home to visit his mother (the wonderful Lois Smith) and discovers that everyone in his hometown has diminished capacity, too—especially his Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda). Mom has reserved a room for him in a local loony bin, but there’s a waiting list. Sure, he’s crazy as a bedbug, but he’s also got a rare, valuable Chicago Cubs baseball card that is worth six figures. So Cooper, Uncle Rollie, Cooper’s old high-school girlfriend Charlotte (Virginia Madsen) and her precocious son pile into a station wagon and head for a nostalgia convention at Wrigley Field. Compared with artifacts like Hank Aaron’s autograph and the shoelaces Joe DiMaggio wore when he hit in 56 straight games, Uncle Rollie’s card is so priceless it has to be displayed behind glass. The rest of the movie is about the bidding war between a demented fan named Mad Dog McClure (Dylan Baker) and a crooked con man named Lee Vivyan (Bobby Cannavale). It’s as innocent and benign as a weenie roast, but the direction by Steppenwolf co-founder Terry Kinney shows some signs of intelligent life. As a devotee of the TV series Oz, I know what a dynamic actor Mr. Kinney is. And anyone who saw his recent production of Neil LaBute’s brilliant play Reasons to Be Pretty is well aware of his power as a stage director. But movies are a different ball game, and this is his first time at bat. He is heading for success, but in the future, I am hoping for something meatier than Diminished Capacity. It’s a start, but building an entire movie on a baseball card is like basing a modeling career on a facial mole.

rreed@observer.com

Terry Kinney’s Diminished Capacity, from a screenplay by Sherwood Kiraly, is based on Mr. Kiraly’s gentle and yet hilariously hectic novel spoofing the insane predilections of people entangled in the mania surrounding the hunt for an obscure baseball card of a Chicago Cubs player from the early days of our national pastime. Again, as with The Wackness, for a low-budget project, Diminished Capacity is blessed with a blue-ribbon cast. Most notably, Matthew Broderick as brain-damaged Cooper, a downward-drifting Chicago journalist, and Virginia Madsen as Charlotte, a spunky, divorced mother of one and Cooper’s former flame in their hometown, LaPorte, Mo.—naturally a stronghold of St. Louis Cardinal fans. The Cardinals, unlike the Cubs, have long been the winningest National League team against the American League. Alan Alda completes the trio of top performers as Cooper’s terminally demented Uncle Rollie, who believes that fish pulling on the strings attached to the keys of his typewriter, which is perched on the banks of the Mississippi River, will somehow serendipitously produce readable poetry.

Cooper’s mother, Belle (Lois Smith), wants to put Uncle Rollie in a nursing home for his own protection, and asks Cooper to come back home from Chicago to help her persuade him. And then there is Wendell (Tom Aldredge), the completely senile neighbor of Uncle Rollie and Belle, in a trailer he protects zealously with a shotgun against any strangers who might come to arrest him for some ancient misdemeanor everyone in LaPorte has forgotten.

The very title, Diminished Capacity, played as it is for uneasy laughs, may initially disturb viewers like me with memory-loss problems of our own. Yet by the time the film is over, with its redemptive ending for Cooper, Uncle Rollie, and the indispensably clear-minded Charlotte, one realizes that one does not have to be afflicted with “diminished capacity” to do crazy things beyond the realm of reason in the service of some seemingly trivial mania. Dylan Baker and Bobby Cannevale as Mad Dog McClure and the very dangerous Lee Vivyan (particularly when he is mockingly misnamed Vivien Leigh) both exemplify two sides of this midsummer madness connected, as it is, to masochistic memories of the Chicago Cubs in all their inglorious ineptitude, which seems to be extended to this season.

asarris@observer.com