Underneath all the layers of synthetic beading, there was some serious talent on show, and the high kicking Rockettes’ collective prowess is impressive. An expertly choreographed section where the ladies took on the roles of toy soldiers helped to showcase some of that skill, and revisiting the group’s wardrobe highlights of the past few decades was a nice touch. It is the show’s 85th year, after all, and there is something to be said for their pulling power and ability to still create a buzz almost a century after their debut.

There is also, however, something to be said for not getting too carried away, and it seemed a little like director, choreographer and conceptualist Linda Haberman had forgotten this during the final scene. In a freakish concluding parade, where a donkey, the Rockettes, children, live sheep, little people (err elves) and two live camels lined the stage, it was hard to decide what to be most offended by. The show did bring a lot of (premature) Christmas cheer to New York, and that almost made us feel warm and fuzzy inside. But one last look at those poor withered camels onstage, and the fake blizzard ensuing outside the venue on our departure, and those near fuzzy feelings all but vanished into the faux snowy ether.

'Grace' star Paul Rudd

Chaplin

Barrymore Theatre

Opens September 10

In the footsteps of the Judy Garland biographical play End of the Rainbow tramps Chaplin, a musical about the life of Chaplin. Unlike other attempts to illuminate the lives of showbiz legends--a subgenre that also includes Master Class’s portrayal of Maria Callas--Chaplin is to have a cast of 22 in what surely will be splashy musical numbers. Rob McClure, previously of Avenue Q and, well, the La Jolla out-of-town tryout for Chaplin, takes on Charlie in a production that is likely to showcase every element of the actor’s legendary film career but for the silence.

Grace

Cort Theatre

Opens October 4

Paul Rudd, suddenly more prolific than he’s ever been with TV and film gigs, is headed back to Broadway. (He previously played second fiddle to Julia Roberts in Three Days of Rain--but now he’s the star!) Mr. Rudd is to play one-half of an innocent couple moving to Florida in order to start religious-themed motels; his better half is to be played by Kate Arrington, whose real-life partner, Oscar nominee Michael Shannon, joins the fracas as the pair’s new neighbor, while legendary TV fixture Ed Asner plays an exterminator. (With all these mainstream stars, is this a Broadway show or the SAG Awards?)

Cyrano de Bergerac

American Airlines Theatre

Opens October 11

It’s been five years since the last Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac, and theater writers have been storing up nasal puns since then. (Who nose if this will be a success? We’ll be sniffing for hints from the producers! Etc.) Tony-winner Douglas Hodge straps on the prosthetic nose for the title role of the lovesick, prohibitively ugly French nobleman, while Clémence Poésy is to allure as Roxane, the not-so-obscure object of desire, and onetime Spider-Man villain Patrick Page makes us all glad he survived that production as he plays Cyrano’s erstwhile ally Comte De Guiche. We smell a good night at the theater!

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Booth Theatre

October 13

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Edward Albee’s rollicking domestic nightmare, the New York stage welcomes a production by way of Chicago and Washington. Tracy Letts, who moonlights as a Pulitzer-winning playwright, is to take on George, while Steppenwolf star Amy Morton (previously, too, a Tony nominee for Mr. Letts’s August: Osage County) has been honing her piercing shriek as Martha. Both actors appeared in the original production, which earned raves from local critics--and surely they’re ready for the big time--the three-hour play is the sort of marathon you can only really train for by two years and three cities’ worth of practice.

'Dead Accounts' star Katie Holmes

The Heiress

Walter Kerr Theatre

Opens November 1

Taking over the role of Olivia de Havilland and Cherry Jones? That’d be ultra-fast-rising starlet Jessica Chastain, who, like Paul Rudd, is taking a break from her prolific film career to portray Catherine Sloper. Catherine, originally a character in Henry James’s novel Washington Square, possesses that Jamesian fragility, shyness, and moth-to-flame attraction to callous villains; the character is set to inherit an enormous fortune, but is so taken aback at the love of a churlish fellow that she may just squander it all. Ms. Chastain’s Broadway debut will be watched closely by all those who love and/or envy her, but with support including castmate David Straitharn and director Moisés Kaufman, Ms. Chastain may not return to her day job anytime soon.

Annie

Palace Theatre

Opens November 8

Little girls of New York, begin beseeching your parents for tickets. After a long search, the producers of what may become the season’s most lucrative revival found their girl--preteen brunette Lilla Crawford is to strap on the red wig and belt out “Tomorrow” in the latest Annie. Though it’s toured the U.S. frequently, the saccharine show hasn’t been seen on Broadway since its 1997 revival. It’s not entirely for kids: James Lapine, a frequent collaborator of Stephen Sondheim’s, is to direct the production, while two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran assays the role of Miss Hannigan. Ms. Crawford, get former red-wig-wearer Sarah Jessica Parker on the phone to discuss how to be deal with newfound fame!

Glengarry Glen Ross

Schoenfeld Theatre

Opens November 11

Al Pacino, who starred in the film production of Glengarry Glen Ross as young, robust Ricky Roma, is showing his age: he’s coming to Broadway this season as Shelley Levene. Levene, scholars of David Mamet will surely recall, is the once-great real estate salesman who has grown unable to generate good leads (much as an actor of Al Pacino’s caliber has, for years until just now, been unable to get a lead on a role that required much more than senseless bellowing). The cast is rounded out by the high-toned likes of Bobby Cannavale and Richard Schiff; the “Coffee’s for closers” monologue is from the film and not the play, but we can dream it’ll be included.

Rebecca

Broadhurst Theatre

Opens November 18

Daphne du Maurier via Alfred Hitchcock via Christopher Hampton! The well-loved playwright and screenwriter has adapted into English the book of a musical that played Vienna in the mid-2000s, recounting the twice-told tale of a second wife who must confront the ghost of her new, controlling husband’s former wife. As in du Maurier’s novel, the naive protagonist is never named but for “I”; Jill Paice is to attempt to make a name for herself in the role. The directors are about as prestigious as Mr. Hampton; Michael Blakemore won two Tonys for directing a play and a musical in the same year back in the day, while Francesca Zambello is an opera director with, one presumes and hopes, a flair for the dramatic.

Dead Accounts

Music Box Theatre

Opening Date November 29

When we think about Broadway’s breakout ingenues of the past decade, our minds don’t immediately leap to Katie Holmes’s turn in All My Sons in 2008. She was... fine? Certainly her time in New York, and exposure to paparazzi therein, engendered a high-water mark in the sales of “boyfriend jeans” nationwide. But the stage is apparently a safe place for Ms. Holmes, as it’s to Broadway she returns for her first new role post-extremely-notable-divorce. The midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents is to play a midwestern woman trying to start over while living with her parents. Well, Ms. Holmes is from Toledo and her character’s from Cincinnati. And her parents, we read, are in off and on. No matter--the play’s by super-prolific Theresa Rebeck, and could allow for a Kidmanian career renaissance.

The Anarchist

Lyceum Theatre

Opens December 2

A new work on Broadway playing blocks away from a revival of his best-loved work, and a daughter who’s one of those TV Girls? Could things get sweeter for David Mamet? Well, there was the little matter of actress Laurie Metcalf dropping out of the role of a women’s-prison warden in The Anarchist, the newer of his two currently produced plays--but no matter. Debra Winger removed herself from exile to drop in for the role, and Patti LuPone, playing a radical prisoner pleading for her own parole. Mr. Mamet’s neoconservative bent may well inform just how we see the role of the anarchist played out onstage, but we’d forgive Mr. Mamet anything!

"I was not using my Social Security Number and I was not to be found," said Mr. Hyman, who'd struggled with drugs. "I was off the radar. I wasn't working. I was living a street life--how's that?" Mr. Hyman's brother got in touch and connected the pair--who are about to put on Bullet for Adolf, a play they co-wrote, at New World Stages (opening August 8).

Said Mr. Harrelson: "We've been hanging out the whole time, but 1993 was the first time we got together after not hanging for ten years... He had written this journal in rehab, and there was really some great stuff in there. And I was like, Frankie, you should write, and we should write this together. I had wanted to write this play, but hunger really helps a writer, and I wasn't hungry. Maybe a little flabby."

The play is about their shared experience working construction in Houston for a summer. Said Mr. Hyman: "We kind of had the same experience, he had had one black friend and I had had one white friend my entire life."

Mr. Harrelson is already planning ahead for the sequel, picking up the story ten years after the pair's shared summer, "but that's presumptuous, because if New York don't go for this, there won't be a sequel."

How do they relate to one another? The Hunger Games star shrugged off the question. "Most of my friends are anonymous and poor. It's not like I'm hanging out with the jet set."

And during that review, he somehow managed to note the Occupy movement as terrorists.

Apparently, some guy started giving Bill a hard time leaving The Theatre. Usually, people get harassed at the theatre because they didn't turn off their cell phone. We have no proof Bill O'Reilly didn't turn off his cell phone. We also have no proof that he did.

Anyway, the money quote:

"This Occupy Wall Street movement is now very coordinated and they are terrorists. They are trying to create trouble, that’s what terrorists do.”

Now, some people might take umbrage with this definition—like Occupy Wall Street and civil rights advocates—who'd argue that they're using their first amendment to practice free speech, who could then—based on O'Reilly's logic—reasonably equivocate blowing up buildings with free speech.

But that wouldn't make sense, because Occupy Wall Street hasn't killed anyone.

They have, however, had more cayenne pepper sprayed in their face than two weeks worth of pretty decent tamales. They also did not sink the global economy. So they've got that going for them.

Want to see? Of course you do.

Here. His ditty starts at about 1:34:

http://youtu.be/spE6yBn0xzo

More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Bill O'Reilly saw Jesus Christ Superstar.

This musical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AIRBpW1drE

On Broadway.

Bill O'Reilly hates Jesus.

[Via ANIMAL NY]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Via The Beacon School.

The Scene: A bunch of high schoolers, in a room full of their parents, teachers, and friends, performing a musical. In the musical, they play a bunch of teenagers not too unlike themselves.

And they are simulating masturbation, unprotected sex, abortion, teenage homosexuality, teenage lesbianism, group masturbation, masochism, child abuse, insubordination, and out-and-out total adolescent rebellion, all to the rapturous tune of musical numbers with titles like "The Bitch of Living" and "Totally Fucked."

Oh, if Tipper Gore could see them now.

So went the very first uncut high school production of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's adaptation of Spring Awakening, the unlikely 2007 musical that took Broadway by storm. The show won the Tony for Best Musical, but one problem persisted: Musicals' legacies are often defined by their ability to exist in places far from The Great White Way, especially high school drama programs. At a time when funding for the arts—let alone high school extra-curricular activities, and racy ones at that—are consistently being truncated, would the show go on? Let's face it: Oklahoma , this ain't.

But then again, neither is the Upper West Side, and six years after debuting on Broadway, The Beacon School—an "alternative public high school" right around the corner from Lincoln Center, which bills itself as focusing on "aesthetics, arts and technology"—proved itself about as far from Oklahoma as a high school theater program could be.

Granted, it may be only twenty or so blocks from the theater in which the Tony award-winning musical originally debuted on Broadway in 2006, but it's still a high school, and this is still—by all accounts—pretty racy content for teens. Except for the nudity (naturally), everything from the original production was intact. The premiere on Thursday received the reception one would expect: A student seated next to The Transom clasped her hands over her mouth when one character begged another—her crush, of course—to beat her from behind, after hiking up her skirt. A kiss between two boys and a teenager feverishly masturbating while trying to obscure it from his parents garnered waves of laughs. And you could've heard a pin drop during the first act closer, when the two leads consummated their teenage lust.

Despite the parents all having signed off on permission forms for their kids even to audition, a rehearsal and a staging are two entirely different matters. Come intermission, had the parents been sufficiently mortified?

Donna Fish, whose daughter Nicole played Wendela—the character who had just been deflowered not moments before—couldn't have been more proud.

"It's phenomenal," she raved. "I had taken my kids to see Spring Awakening when Nicole was in 8th Grade. She'd wanted to play that role ever since. We're pretty open with each other, so [the content] wasn't a big deal." It also rang true: "We just went through the college process, and it's interesting to watch the pressure on the kid [in the show] who's worried about failing out, and Nicole's anxiety about getting into school."

Kathleen Cullen, whose daughter Caitlin played Martha, explained that part of being a parent is empathizing with those anxieties. "To be honest, it's nothing we haven't ever been through before," she noted, "and wanted to talk about, and maybe haven't.

"I knew it was going to be in very good hands," she added. "I knew Jo Ann"—that's Jo Ann Cimato, the show's director and de facto producer—"would treat this with dignity. I pushed Caitlin to do this, but I'm not sure I'd do it with anybody else."

Ms. Cimato, who both the students and parents spoke of glowingly, held her students in high regard as well. "We're so grateful that they're so artistically aware and astute," she explained, "that it is like working with professionals." And they kids are indeed talented: The production was fiery, engaging, and lacking the cheesy artifice that makes most people cringe when they think back to their own high school's attempts at theater.

They are also undoubtedly mature. Ms. Fish's daughter has a line in her showbill biography about her desire for the other parents in the audience to go home and educated their children on the show's themes, "because if they don't, Rick Santorum will."

That said, Ms. Fish explained, "Nicole was more embarrassed for us to see [the sex scene] than we were to see it."

After the show finished, the giddy students told a different story.

Isabel Schnall, a senior on her way to Ms. Cimato's alma mater, Boston University, thought the parents were more embarrassed than the kids. She played Ilse, the outcast. "We know these things," she said with a laugh. "We're in high school. They're more scared of them."

"It's more embarrassing for them," agreed Brooke Shilling. "The whole show is about their job, as parents."

"They know the basics [of the show]," explained Zachary Kuskal—who played Moritz, one of the leads—of his parents, "but I don't think they're prepared for it."

And yes, despite the forthrightness of the parents The Transom encountered, some indeed had moments of discomfort, initially.

"I mean, my mom did, when she heard I was doing a masturbation scene," noted Kaya Simmons. "She was like, 'Ohhhhh, mygod.' But once I explained what was happening, I had her full support."

"Some of the parents wanted a little bit of an explanation, but most of them were happy to do it," recalled Ms. Shilling.

Everyone agreed on one thing: Their favorite number in the show: "Totally Fucked."

Ah, to be young again.

"The musical director and I, we leave rehearsal with them every day," Ms. Cimato noted. "They run away into the twilight, and we're both like, Thank God we're not sixteen anymore," she laughed.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

“Started as a copy boy 43 years ago in March,” the old-timer brags as he fetches Jayson a Glenlivet. “Only job I ever had.”

Mistaking Jayson for a news clerk—one rung above the copy boy—the editor can hardly believe such a young man had written all those page one stories. (For good reason, it turned out.)

“Used to take years to get a byline,” he remarks. “Now they hand them out like candy.”

Well, maybe not that easy. But cultural changes at The Times over the past 20 years mean the newsroom grunts probably aren’t angling for bylines, anyway. Job openings dwindled with the economy, hiring scrutiny ramped up (thanks, Jayson), and the career track that gave the Times copy boy job its retroactive glamour (Arthur Gelb, Gay Talese and Robert Rosenthal all did stints) ceased to exist.

As a result, the Times clerical department—once a gilded cage for Phi Beta Kappas with Pulitzers in their eyes (but unwilling to move to Hartford or Newark to accumulate the clips required for a full-blown reporting job)—is staffed by men and women who harbor artistic, not journalistic, ambitions.

In fact, CQ/CX was written by one such underling. Gabe McKinley spent 12 happy years as a Times subordinate.

“I needed a day job while I was rolling around on the floor in acting classes at Tisch,” Mr. McKinley told The Observer from Los Angeles, where he was taking meetings for a CQ/CX movie.

For Mr. McKinley’s older brothers James and Jesse—a Times culture writer and national correspondent, respectively—clerking was the first step in following in the career trajectory of their father, a writer for Esquire and Playboy. For Gabe, it was just a gig.

“News assistants can write, they have opportunities,” Mr. McKinley said, “but the paper would rather have people who lack ambition in that industry but are competent at doing things that need to be done.”

He wasn’t the only creative type drawn to the job’s late call times and union wages.

“You meet a lot of artists,” he said. “It’s a good job for that. You can work at night and the pay is good. With overtime you can make an existence.”

And because they’re not frantic careerists, spending every spare moment hustling on a story that might get them noticed for a promotion, a content inertia has settled over the department. It’s the kind of job one could really settle into.

“You go in thinking, ‘It’s just a job, it’s better than waiting tables,’” Mr. McKinley said. “And then you walk out of the building 12 years later.”

On a recent Thursday night, a Times news assistant named Chris Harcum opened Rabbit Island, a one-hour comedy put on by the Frigid Festival, in the dusty Kraine Theater above KGB bar. The same night, 500 yards away, singer-songwriter and Times news assistant Alfonso Velez played a show at Joe’s Pub.

Another, Mathew Warren, recently raised $15,000 to make a documentary about Latin boogaloo music, We Like It Like That, on Kickstarter. Justin Sullivan, a temping Times clerk, just left the department to go to L.A. to record an album with his band, the Babies, which also features Cassie Ramone from Vivian Girls and Kevin Morby from Woods.

The Times’s artsy subaltern has found a sympathetic leader in Steven McElroy, the head of the clerical department, who came to the Times in 1995 as an actor looking for a temp job.

While working off and on at the paper, Mr. McElroy put on Chekhov and Shakespeare off-Broadway, adapted Sartre for the stage, and directed a play about Coyote Ugly (post-GQ article, pre-Tyra Banks movie) and a one-woman show about body image that was a huge hit on the college circuit. It’s called Size Ate and it is written and performed by Margaux Laskey, now the deputy head of the Times’s clerical department.

When he didn’t have one foot in the theater, Mr. McElroy wrote about it for the Arts & Leisure section and the Arts Beat blog.

“I became sort of enamored of The New York Times,” Mr. McElroy said, “It turned into a real career for me.”

Five years ago, Mr. Harcum was wrapping up a puppet theater gig when his costar said she was off to her other job, at The Times. He asked her to call him if she heard about any other openings up there, and it wasn’t long before Mr. McElroy called him in.

“I immediately recognized him and said, ‘You were in this play with my friend,’” Mr. Harcum recalled. “We just started talking about theater for 20 minutes.”

Mr. McElroy said that when hiring clerks and news assistants he looks for someone who has a good attention to detail and who is not going to be put out by having to do support work. Some news assistants do research or fact-checking, others compile data for entertainment listings, best-sellers lists and weather reporting, most make copies and answer phones.

“I don’t care if they’re actors, reporters, painters—we have a painter, or we used to—or whatever,” he said, “but I do care if they care about the quality of The New York Times.”

These days, one news assistant will get tapped for a probationary “8i” reporting job every few years. (Maureen Dowd’s assistants have a good batting average.) The others post their extracurricular achievements—a short story published in an anthology, a new show going up—to the internal “Ahead of the Times” online bulletin board.

“No matter who it is, acting is a part-time job,” Mr. Harcum said. “Even if you’re famous, you’re working on being famous. That’s more your job than your acting is. You have to do something, and this is the best job I’ve had outside of anything I’ve done with my art.

“They would say whenever you’re catering or waiting tables, ‘It’s like you’re performing!’ But, honestly, putting the paper up is the closest thing I’ve had to putting up a production,” he said.

“Almost any close can seem just like an opening night in a way,” he went on, “where you’re sure something could go wrong or at the last minute you have to change something out.”

Mr. Harcum was forced to cut 40 pages from the script of Rabbit Island in the days before it went up to meet the festival’s strict 60-minute time limit. He also added a nonspeaking role, which he played. He kept a straight face while the actors nailed punch lines that had flopped in rehearsal and swiftly changed the set between scenes.

And the music that played while he was rearranging cubes? It was written by Scott Garapolo, a fellow news assistant who trained Mr. Harcum on the Week in Review section.

Although Times clerical jobs have changed, one of the gig’s evergreen perks is the insider’s view it affords of The Times, if you’re into that sort of thing.

“When I look back, my fondest, most meaningful memories come from that grunt’s-eye view of the place,” said Todd Purdum, Vanity Fair editor and former Times copy boy.

Mr. Purdum officially learned the editors’ names by bringing them print-outs of wire copy, but his duties sometimes extended to hand-delivering Abe Rosenthal’s briefcase to his Central Park West apartment, so that he could go to dinner unencumbered.

For Mr. McKinley, it afforded a front-row seat overlooking one of the paper’s greatest scandals.

“I remember Jayson walking into Gerald Boyd’s office and thinking, ‘Uh oh,’” said the playwright, who was then charged with compiling the Page 2 news summaries.

He and Mr. Blair became friendly, and their late nights out informed the tone of the dialogue.

“Jayson spent a lot of time with the clerks because we were closer in age to him and, later, because the clerks always know everything that’s going on at the paper,” he said. (Indeed, Mr. Gelb started the paper’s first internal newsletter, Times Talk, while working as a copy boy.)

Such privileged access didn’t escape the notice of Times higher-ups.

“The entire masthead has seen the play, past and present,” he added, including Jill Abramson, Al Siegal and Craig Whitney. “I think they want to know if they’re in it.”

kstoeffel@observer.com

Happy New Year! (Robin Roemer Photography)

Nothing screams "The Mayans will be proven wrong this year!" quite like watching a young man swing from the rafters after hanging himself in a very loose adaptation of Macbeth, but for fans of the interactive production Sleep No More, there was no better way to ring in 2012. After getting an invitation from the Thane himself asking for our attendance a special gold and silver party at the McKittrick Hotel--where Sleep No More has been in residence since March with co-production companies PunchDrunk and Emursive--we arrived up not knowing quite what to expect.

Would we be allowed to remove our Eyes Wide Shut Italian Renaissance-style masks and talk after midnight, or, going with the show's traditional rule, would we be forced into an anonymous silent cheer when the countdown reached zero?

We shouldn't have worried: Emursive and Punchdrunk have done nothing except usurp the expected, and when the audience was corralled into the ballroom at 11 p.m., it wasn't just Macbeth's body that dropped: suddenly, the drapery from one wall descended, revealing a fully-stocked open bar. A strange, Zoolander-ish DJ appeared from one of the box seats, piping in DJ-remixes of dancehall music...1920's dancehall, that is. (Anyone looking for a dubstep version of ragtime classics should look into hiring this gentleman for their next event; he was marvelous.) It was a full fantasy played out on three levels of the hotel: besides the ballroom, bars were open in the faux-lobby "scene" room and in the cabaret that serves as the entrance to the show. Neat trick, not having to pay $8 for a drink (as the usual scotch and soda in the  cash-only bar in caberet will cost you).

And perhaps this was just something we missed during our first visit to the McKittrick, but did Sleep No More always have a hard candy emporium room, or was that just a special little kickback to the guests who paid $125 a ticket to come to the pre-show? (Those wanting entrance at 12:30 could make it for only $100...only $20 over regular admission price, but without the cost of having to be silent for three hours.) The males in our company had a delightful time stuffing their pockets full of hard licorice sweets, while the ladies--sans clothing holes to hoard things in--had to suffice by shoving a bunch of old mints into their cheeks and saving them for later; like chipmunks expecting a cold front.

Midnight was count down by cast members dressed up as different numbers, and when a working clock that read "Happy New Year" reached its final "r," several peacocked dancers in shimmering skivvies and flesh-colored leotards jumped up on what was previously the banquet table and proceeded to can-can. We finagled our way into the VIP lounge, where we shared a whiskey with the father-in-law of one of the producers, who, much like another tragic Shakespearean king, was affectionately showing off his three daughters to friends and close relations.

Before the bell struck twelve, we overheard the performer who had played our Macbeth engaging friends by dropping his sulking leer for a more fay posture, while the bartenders retained their English brogue throughout the course of the evening. (Now we know why none of the characters in the show talk...it would totally ruin the effect!)

As we were wished a solicitous New Year's Eve by a young woman serving drinks with a Scottish lilt, we tried to decipher whether her accent was real, or, like so many other things in Sleep No More, a pure fabrication. Either way, we agreed, it had the desired effect of keeping us in the realm of the source material for the rest of the evening...Shakespeare by way of Hitchcock; the perfect dreaded doomsday fantasy to ring in the end of days.

Irvine.

Steven Spielberg at the top of his powers as one of the most successful and creative film directors of the past century is the best reason I can think of to get off your duff and head for the cinema on Christmas Day. You will not believe the epic splendor, sweeping drama and heart-stopping passion he brings to War Horse. It’s a rare and genuine movie masterpiece that deserves the label in a thousand ways.

Turning a beloved play into a movie is a job for either a fool or a daredevil. Mr. Spielberg is neither, but he is a visionary with unflinching faith in his own instincts. He must have known going in that he couldn’t satisfy the myriad fans of the London and Broadway hit about the cruel things the British did to their horses in World War I. On the stage, the familiar theme of a boy’s unshakable love for his horse was innovative in its use of life-size puppets with real feelings and expressions that moved like Tinker Toys. The film uses actual horses to tell the story of a colt named Joey, sold to the cavalry to lug the cannons of war through the German trenches, and a farmboy named Albert Narracott, who enlisted to travel halfway across Europe to rescue him from the front lines. On screen, Albert is played by impossibly handsome newcomer Jeremy Irvine, whose career is already reaching rocket force (he follows War Horse as Pip in the new production of Dickens’s Great Expectations). Instead of puppets, Joey is played by 15 different horses, but the one featured most prominently is American equine Finder, who starred in Seabiscuit. Finder is a four-legged superstar who can do everything but talk, even though he has a way of communicating with Albert that is awesome. What he goes through in War Horse is so rending that never before has the disclaimer “No animals were harmed in the filming of this motion picture” carried so much badly needed reassurance. Finder deserves an Oscar for—well, for being the best and most beautiful horse on the screen.

Based on the 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, War Horse is an elegiac film that clocks in at two hours and 20 minutes, but I treasured every single second. Mr. Spielberg brings so much decency and integrity to the familiar theme of a boy in love with a horse that I didn’t miss the puppets at all. The humor and spirit that had such a profound impact on audiences young and old are not only preserved, but enhanced by the personalities of real animals. The careful result is a personalized experience that inspires the same kind of love audiences used to have for Lassie.

The vast and sprawling screenplay by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis respects the story enough to leave it unchanged, without embellishment. A hardscrabble sharecropper named Ted Narracott goes to auction to buy a plow horse, but instead he arrogantly outbids his greedy, mean-spirited landlord (David Thewlis) for a magnificent animal of no real value to a crop planter, bringing down the wrath of his pragmatic, long-suffering wife, Rose (Emily Watson). Their besotted son, Albie, names the horse Joey and vows to teach him how to pull his weight and till the soil. Joey is stubborn and willful with a mind of his own, and when the crops fail, the only way to pay the rent is to sell Joey to the military. The next hour is told from the horse’s point of view as the camera follows him through the French battlefields in 1914, where he is cared for by a kind British officer, to enemy lines, where he bonds with a headstrong black stallion, a German deserter and a Dutch girl who protects him by hiding him in a windmill. Captured by the enemy, Joey finally ends up in the Somme where Albie sees combat at last. In one particularly sensational sequence, Joey is trapped in barbed wife and rescued by two soldiers, one German and one British, who momentarily put aside their differences through a mutual compassion for an injured animal, use wire cutters to save the horse’s life, and take a minute to share memories of their homes on opposite sides of the conflict. If you are not moved to tears by that scene, or by Albie’s eventual reunion with his horse, then you need to see a doctor.

The logistics are overwhelming. According to the Imperial War Museum, more than four million horses perished in the so-called Great War, and Mr. Spielberg puts you right into the middle of their pain and terror in sequences using as many as 5,800 extras and 280 horses without computer-generated images. What an accomplishment. Like the play, the emotional high point of the film is when Albie finally finds Joey. By this time, you’re so weary from the gas masks, the grenades, the rats and the cannon fire that you can hardly summon the strength for tears, but when Albie, blinded by mortar, and Joey, lame and half-dead, reach the green pastures and rose gardens of Devon, the tears are evident without coaxing.  Will Rogers always said, “Horses are smarter than humans. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.” True, but when Albie and Joey reunite, two wounded soldiers of war going home together, you feel the values horses and humans can share through love, loyalty, persistence and understanding. It left me emotionally wrecked.

War Horse is a don’t-miss Spielberg classic that reaches true perfection. It’s as good as movies can get, and one of the greatest triumphs of this or any other year. For maximum enjoyment, I recommend both a box of tissues and a box of popcorn.

rreed@observer.com

WAR HORSE

Running Time 146 minutes

Written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson and David Thewlis

4/4

The Observer spoke with Mr. Flynn, and with the actor Gabriel Byrne, who is making his theater-directorial debut with James X, currently showing at New York’s The Culture Project.

Leaning on a seat next to the stage after a breathtaking performance, Mr. Flynn explained the sort of effect he is looking to have on the audience, or, as he prefers to call it, the public.  “We’re not here to confront them or to traumatize them, we’re not here to soak them down or to give them a sentimentalized version of the Magdalene Laundries.”

In the play James X – a pseudonym given to protect his identity – sits in the foyer of a courtroom, where the play takes place, waiting to be called in to give evidence to the “Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse” (a real Commission set up in 1999 by the Irish Government). James recounts the story of his life, using a legal file that chronicles his time in and out of various institutions; occasionally he glances forebodingly in the direction of the courtroom.

Mr. Flynn characterized the investigation into child abuse in Ireland as “a trauma turned into a big tragedy, because everybody loves a tragedy.”

In telling his story, he mimics nuns, priest, and judges, and re-embodies his former self: a young boy taken far away from his parents and admitted to Letterfrack industrial school for stealing a toy. He was put in jail as a teenager and then, later, admitted to a mental institution, and reached adulthood as an unstable alcoholic.

When it was finally published in 2009, the report from the actual Commission – commonly called the ‘Ryan report’ – was much-criticized. Mr. Flynn calls it a “whitewash”. No prosecutions arose from what some called Ireland’s Holocaust. He believes the essence of the report is wrong to begin with. “Essential they’re saying ‘it’s not all bad’,” he said. “Well it is, there’s nothing good in it.”

He would know. He spent 18 months at Letterfrack industrial school, the same school the fictional James X is sent to as an adolescent. Although it’s a work of fiction, Mr. Flynn said, James X has “a certain measure of truth in my life, but it’s made up of the consummate of other people.”

The play is as exhausting as it is brilliant. Throughout his harrowing monologue, Mr. Flynn wreaths on the floor, runs in circles and loudly clenches his teeth.

In drama, subjects like child abuse often tend to devolve into pathos, but James X never strays into that territory. Mr. Flynn’s breakneck delivery is almost rap-like in its cadences: “We are fretting, crying, upset. Half-awake, half-asleep. Scattered sheep of Little Bo Peep. My little Brother’s got his shoes on the wrong feet. Me sister forgot to put her knickers on. Her communion dress is in the pawn. The bell for school is long since gone.”

You can almost smell the black smoke and feel the wind in your face as he recalls running through Dublin and hopping on the backs of trucks: “I run and I dash. Run faster than birds. Faster than the fastest fast.”

As James’ time in court approaches, the rigidness builds in his physicality and you get a feeling that the stream of conscious life story is not what it seems to be. He abruptly stops telling it, and shifts gears. “This is my statement,” he says solemnly, “This is my truth. The real story. The story I came to tell.” Stepping forward, towards the audience, he reads the account of what really happened to him. In that moment he undergoes a transformation: from court jester to real person. When finished telling us – the public - his statement, he turns and leaves the foyer.

“It’s exciting for me as a performer, exciting for me as a artist, as a politician and as an advocate of the rights of children and the rights of those who were wronged,” Mr. Flynn told The Observer, “to be able to bring that issue out into the open clearly honestly with integrity without them becoming ‘victims’, ‘survivors’ or any of the old bullshit tags they attach to people.”

It’s fitting that a play dealing with some uncomfortable facts of Ireland’s past should be directed by Mr. Byrne, the country’s cultural ambassador. “If you want to connect with an audience you can’t go down the road of using sentiment,” he said, in a telephone interview, of the play’s rawness. (Presumably he would know a bit about psychological nuance, from starring as the therapist protagonist in the HBO series In Treatment.) For James X is the latest in a long line of work that he has helped create in his ambassadorial role, including conceiving and curating the first Irish film retrospective at The Met. It is a job that Mr. Byrne does virtually for free, taking only a small stipend for travel expenses.

“There’s no equivalent to him in New York,” Mr. Byrne said of Mr. Flynn. “Its like Kristin Quinn morphing into Eric Bogosian.”

Various incarnations of James X have existed down the years, including a stand-up routine,  Mr. Flynn believes that at the core it’s “the honest truth of the story that’s most important.” After performing this piece over an extended period of time, in hindsight does art help fill a gap in any small way, where the Ryan report and others have failed? “Art passes the message on to the public,” Mr. Flynn said. “It’s a companion, but art doesn’t heal you.”

Mr. Byrne puts it more directly. “When I go to see a play, most of the time I say to myself ‘Yeah it’s a good performance but its not the truth.’ What you got last night [at the play] was the truth. That’s what people want from theatre. They want to come out saying: ‘Fucking hell what was that?!’”

sduffy@observer.com

(Chad Batka/The New York Times)

The New York Times Company has begun shopping around for tech acquisitions for the first time since 2008, CEO Janet Robinson told Bloomberg News last week. But that doesn’t mean the paper is neglecting the mother ship.

The New York Times is in the midst of adding a slew of interactive bells and whistles, including e-commerce, to its online Theater section.

The home of critics Charles Isherwood and Ben Brantley has revamped its listings and added an interactive show finder that refines listings based on mood and audience (adults-only tragedies, please) called the “Show Tuner.” Get it?

Reviews now have a “Buy Tickets” link powered by Ticketmaster and integrate deals from TicketWatch, the paper’s discount ticket newsletter. The site will also syndicate video content from the Broadway Channel.

“We’ve tried to make the Theater section a more useful and appealing place for readers,” culture editor Jonathan Landman said in a press release. “We’ve learned over the years that people use our reviews, articles and multimedia to guide their ticket-buying choices.”

Such programs raise an ethical issue, however. If The Times takes a little off the top each time a critic “guides [readers’] ticket-buying choices,” can readers trust the paper to honestly assess real theatrical atrocities (yes, Relatively Speaking, we’re looking at you)?

“The business side of The New York Times is entirely separate from the newsroom,” a Times spokesperson told us. “Such arrangements have no influence on what our reviewers or journalists write.”