Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry reports on THE BOOK OF MORMON, PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT, ANYTHING GOES, HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, WONDERLAND, SISTER ACT, TOMORROW MORNING, A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN and HELLO AGAIN.

A bunch of new musicals and plays (and some revivals) have opened in the last two weeks, all desperately hoping to win the Tony Sweepstakes. This week, I’m telling you about all the musicals I’ve seen so far.

Fans of “South Park” have much to cheer with the arrival of The Book of Mormon, at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. SP’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker have crafted a hilarious book – the funniest since The Producers — the story of two naïve young Mormon missionaries who get sent to Uganda where they have the difficult task of converting people in a small rural village to the gospel according to Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni. It’s a hopeless task, made even more hopeless by the fact that have to contend with a local warlord with an unprintable name (even for me) who is going around snipping the clits of every woman he can catch.

Yes, this is wildly funny; but it’s also incredibly raunchy. I think the show’s creators went too far; but then, I’m an old fuddy-duddy. I will admit, I laughed a lot (guiltily, though), and I loved Matthew Lopez’ score. Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad are both wonderful as the clueless missionaries, as is Nikki M. James as a young woman with the last intact clitoris in the village.

I also had a good time at Priscilla, Queen of The Desert, at the Palace Theatre, an adaptation of the Australian film about three drag queens on a cross-country journey from Sidney into the outback. Alan Scott and Stephan Elliott have crafted a delightful book, into which they have grafted pop songs from the disco era, such as “It’s Raining Men” and the Village People’s “Go West.” Yes, folks, this is a “jukebox musical;” you know, like Mamma Mia. I loved it. I loved the performances by the three leads (Will Swenson, Tony Shelton and Nick Adams – particularly, Shelton, who is touching as the lovelorn Bernadette). Most of all, I loved Tim Chappel’s and Lizzy Gardiner’s spectacular costumes, which are shoo-ins for the Tony Award.

Here’s how much I loved Priscilla, Queen of The Desert: I would pay to see it again, and as soon as possible.

The Roundabout has mounted a stylish, de-lovely revival of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, starring Sutton Foster as Reno Sweeney. I assume you know the cornball plot about romance on a voyage to England, so let me just say that the production, which is directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, is absolutely marvelous.

As for the Star of the Show, Sutton Foster, what can I say other than this is Yet Another demonstration of why she is the biggest female musical comedy star of her generation. Fortunately, she is ably supported by a fine cast which includes John McMartin as the jolly tippler Elisha Whitney, Laura Osnes as the ingénue Hope Harcourt, Colin Donnell as Billy Crocker and Adam Godley as Lord Evelyn Oakley. I wasn’t wild about Joel Grey as Moonface Martin, but I seem to be in the minority.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, at the Hirschfeld Theatre, is also quite delightful. The satire of corporate culture holds up well, and Rob Ashford’s direction and choreography are quite witty. Surprisingly, Daniel Radcliffe has the requisite skills to pull off the role of Finch, the young nobody who climbs the corporate ladder to the very top of the heap. He sings and dances well, and he acts the role with tongue-in-cheek aplomb. John Larroquette is perfectly pompous as Bigley, and Rose Hemingway is charming as Rosemary. Of the other supporting players my favorite performance is Tammy Blanchard’s as Hedy LaRue, Bigley’s bimbo mistress who, like Finch, is trying to climb the corporate ladder – which is even harder for her because she’s trying to do this on her back. Blanchard is absolutely hilarious.

Both Anything Goes and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying are first-rate revivals as well as great fun. Don’t miss either one.

I had high hopes for Catch Me if You Can, at the Neil Simon Theatre. The book is by Terrence McNally, one of my favorite playwrights, and the songs are by Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman, who wrote the songs for Hairspray. But it just didn’t grab me. I think part of the problem is that its creators have decided to use the device of a tacky 1960s variety show to tell their story, which includes the inevitable chorus line of leggy cuties which even I found tiresome after a while. I kept waiting for Dean Martin to wander in, drink in hand, to sing “That’s Amore.” Once trapped in this concept, they can do little to escape it.

Aaron Tveit, as young con man Frank Abagnale, Jr., sings well but he never is able to break out of the constraint imposed upon him by the authors. What should have been a breakout star turn just seems rather bland, particularly when compared with the performance of a real Broadway star, Norbert Leo Butz, as the FBI agent leading the team which is trying to catch Frank. Butz has one of show’s two best songs, “Don’t Break the Rules,” with which he stops the show. The other song is a beautiful ballad “Fly, Fly Away,” sung by Kerry Butler, who appears briefly as the nurse Frank almost marries, before he has to go once again on the lam.

I’m not saying that Catch Me if You Can is bad – it’s not. A lot of the time it’s quite delightful. It’s just that it has to compete for your dollar with The Book of Mormon and Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Anything Goes and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and Sister Act (which I’ll get to shortly), as well as Baby It’s You and The People in the Picture (neither of which I’ve seen yet, so no comment). Compared to those, for pure entertainment value it can’t compete. Musical comedy fans should definitely see it. Civilians, you could miss it.

Whenever I write about a show, I try to imagine who might like it and then write for that person. I sat there at Wonderland, the new Frank Wildhorn musical at the Marquis Theatre, trying to envision that person. An “American Idol” fan, maybe? A Wildhorn fanatic? A Jekkie? If you’re one of these, by all means go. You’ll encounter a pretty witless attempt to modernize Alice in Wonderland, by re-imagining Alice as a soon-to-be single Mom (she’s separated from her husband because he has lost his job, which makes her an unsympathetic character for 49% of the population — i.e., men) and sending her down the service elevator in the apartment building where she is staying with her so-to-be ex’s mother into a tacky “wonderland” where the Caterpillar is a jivin’ dude and the Mad Hatter a demonic dominatrix. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, all Alice wants to do is find her way home, and she’s helped to that end by the White Knight, here envisioned as a comic book superhero wannabe. She also has a daughter named Chloe who’s kidnapped by the Mad Hatter’s fearsome minions as part of her plot to depose the Queen of Hearts.

Janet Dacal is OK as Alice, in a part which could have used some star wattage (I kept imagining what Sutton Foster might have done with the part). Carly Rose Sonenclar, as Chloe, is the reincarnation of Andrea McArdle as Annie. What a voice! I kept wishing she’d sing “Tomorrow.” I also enjoyed Darren Ritchie as the charmingly goofy White Night. His performance of one of the best songs in the show, “One Knight,” done with backup superhero sidekicks like a boy band, stops the show.

Wonderland tries really hard to be another Wicked. I’m sure that’s how they sold it to investors who, sadly, are gonna lose their dough on this misfire.

Sister Act, at the Broadway Theatre, is a musical version of the popular Whoopi Goldberg film. I have no idea how it compares to the film, which I haven’t seen, so all I can say is that on its own it is great fun. Alan Menken’s music is loaded with Broadway pizzazz and Alan Slater’s lyrics are very witty. Director Jerry Zaks keeps things spinning along at a hilarious clip, and the show features a Star Is Born performance by Patina Miller as a wannabe singer who finds herself in a convent where she has to hide out from her ex-boyfriend, who’s trying to kill her as she witnessed him commit a murder. Broadway stalwart Victoria Clark is also delightful as the Mother Superior.

Off Broadway, there’s a charming little musical by the York Theatre at Theatre at. St. Peter’s called Tomorrow Morning, The characters are two couples, one at the start of their relationship and the other at the end, who turn out to be the same people ten years apart. Laurence Marc Whyte wrote the whole shebang, and his score consists of one lovely song after another. This show has been derided as shamelessly sentimental, in that it doesn’t wind up being cynical about love and romance. I’m an old softie who still believes in both, so I found the show very poignant. All four performers are terrific, too.

I wasn’t wild about Peccadillo’s revival of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which has closed after a very successful run at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. The songs by Arthur Schwartz and Dorothy Fields were the best part, but the show itself just seemed too old-fashioned, and Peccadillo’s production looked like community theatre. Don’t feel bad if you missed this.

Also closed is the Transport Group’s revival of the Michael John LaChiusa musical Hello Again, based on Schnitzler’s La Ronde, which was done as “environmental theatre” in a large loft. You sat at a table and the action took place all around you, and sometimes right there on the table. This action involved a lot of, well, fucking, which I found distasteful (but then, I’m a prude – when the actors in a film I’m seeing start going at it, I go out for popcorn). The performers were excellent, but the main problem for me with this show was LaChiusa’s music, which I have never liked and which in this show was as boring as all his other scores.

Hello Again was a Hot Ticket. Don’t feel bad, though, if you missed it.

THE BOOK OF MORMON. Eugene O’Neill Theatre, 230 W. 49^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT. Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway

TICKETS: www.ticketmaster.com or (877) 250-2929/(800) 755-4000

ANYTHING GOES. Stephen Sondheim Theatre, 124 W. 43^rd St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING.

Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. Neil Simon Theatre, 250 W. 52^nd St.

TICKETS: www.ticketmaster.com or (877) 250-2929

WONDERLAND. Marquis Theatre, 1534 Broadway

TICKETS: www.ticketmaster.com or (877) 250-2929/(800) 755-4000

SISTER ACT. Broadway Theatre, 1681 Broadway\

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

TOMORROW MORNING. Theatre at St. Peter’s, 619 Lexington Ave (Citicorp Center)

TICKETS: 212-935-5820 or www.yorktheatre.org

A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. Closed

HELLO AGAIN. Closed

It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

“On the Aisle with Larry”

Lawrence Harbison,The Playfixer, usually brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. In this column, Larry tells you about this year’s Humana Festival.

Actors Theatre of Louisville Artistic Director Marc Masterson, who is moving on to helm South Coast Rep after this season, has really gone out with a bang. This year’s Humana Festival, the 35^th annual edition, has easily the strongest lineup of any of the 10 Masterson has produced.

I started this year’s Humana Marathon off on the right foot with A. Rey Pamatmat’s engaging Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them, about a pair of teens, Edith and Kenny (brother and sister), who have been pretty much abandoned by their father, who has moved out and is living with his girlfriend. He puts money in the bank for them, but that’s about the extent of his involvement in their lives. Their mother is dead. Also in the mix is another teen, Benji, a gawky youth who is in love with Kenny. Edith is a crack shot with her bee-bee gun. One night Dad and his girlfriend show up; but before they can enter Edith shoots her. She winds up in the hospital and Edith winds up in reform school. Meanwhile, Benji is thrown out of his home when his mom discovers he’s gay. He goes to live with Kenny. Eventually, after Edith makes a daring escape from reform school, the three teens become a sort of family. Teresa Avia Lim (Edith), John Norman Schneider (Kenny) and Cory Michael Smith (Benji) were all wonderful. May Adrales’ direction was wonderful. Everyone seemed to love this play, me included.

Pretty much everyone also loved Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Bob, too, even though it was a tad too long (but that’s fixable). The play is a surreal biography, covering the life from birth to death of Bob, who is abandoned as a baby in the ladies’ room of a White Castle and who rises, in a series of hilarious steps, to become wealthy and famous. Jeffrey Binder was wonderful as Bob, and Aysan Celik, Polly Lee, Danny Schele and Lou Sumrall were delightful as multiple characters Bob meets on his life’s journey. Sean Daniels’ direction was clever and inventive.

Anne Washburn’s A Devil at Noon was a play which mystified pretty much everyone I talked to. Washburn tried to juggle multiple plot strands, but none of them made much sense. One seemed to involved covert surveillance of a novelist who I am told was based on Philip K. Dick. Who knew? Washburn’s obtuse, NYC “downtown theatre” sensibility went over like a pregnant pole-vaulter. There were multiple ditches at the intermission.

Adam Rapp’s The Edge of Our Bodies was the Surprise Hit this year. Of course, every play is a surprise; but I call this one the Surprise Hit because it’s a narrative monologue. The audience started out game to endure it and wound out being completely captivated by this tale of a 16 year-old girl named Bernadette who plays hooky from her Connecticut prep school to journey into Manhattan to tell her 19 year-old boyfriend that she’s pregnant. She meets his Dad, who’s dying of cancer, and has a strange encounter with a man who picks her up at a bar, but she never finds her boyfriend, as it becomes increasingly obvious that he is ducking her.

Rapp’s writing was very compelling (as always); but what really made this piece was the exquisite performance by Catherine Combs as Bernadette. When we see this play in NYC, as I think we will, I hope she gets to recreate her performance.

Jordan Harrison’s Maple and Vine was also a crowd-pleaser. It was about a couple who decide to join a community comprised of people who live as if it were the 1950s, a much less complicated time than our harried era. Of course, this utopia turns out to have its dark underside, which emerges as the play progresses. Harrison’s writing was witty and fresh, and Anne Kaufman’s staging was superb. Unfortunately, Harrison built to what should have been a powerful ending and then pooped out. But most of the play was wonderful.

Molly Smith Metzler’s Elemeno Pea was the most conventional play in the Festival. It was also a Festival Fave, especially for me. It was set on an estate on Martha’s Vineyard, owned by a fabulously wealthy couple. The central character is Simone, personal assistant to trophy wife Michaela. She has invited her sister Devon for the weekend, and Devon is appalled by the excess she sees. Meanwhile, it soon emerges that Michaela’s husband is dumping her.

The play is extremely funny and I hear there are plans for a commercial production, most likely with stars. Of all the plays in this year’s Humana Festival, this one has I think the strongest legs.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about PETER AND THE STARCATCHER, THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON, GOOD PEOPLE, THE HALLWAY TRILOGY, SPY GARBO, CACTUS FLOWER, COMPULSION, TREASURE ISLAND, INVASION, THE DIARY OF A MADMAN, TIMON OF ATHENS, THINNER THAN WATER, A PERFECT FUTURE, WHEN I COME TO DIE, WHITE PEOPLE and BEAUTIFUL BURNOUT.

As you have noticed from the list above, I have been going to the theatre a lot lately. As a member of the Drama Desk Nominating Committee, I am obligated to see everything which qualifies for award consideration, and everyone is rushing to open before the cut-off dates of the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Tony Awards. I am booked for almost every available slot, going evenings and matinees, until the end of April. If you love the theatre, you have a lot to choose from this time of year.

Peter and the Starcatcher, at NY Theatre Workshop, in an adaptation by Rick Elice of the popular children’s novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, which imagines in a wonderfully whimsical way the antecedent events which led up to the story of Peter Pan. It’s all been put together onstage by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, whose magical direction is a thrill from start to finish. Three orphan boys are on a ship to a faraway land, where they are to be slaves of the local muckety-muck. On another ship, a young girl named Molly is travelling with her father and a sea chest whose contents are a great mystery. Turns out, it contains a magical substance which comes from falling stars, and everyone wants it, including a crew of pirates led by their delightfully wicked captain, Black Stache.

Black Stache captures and Molly and the three boys, one of whom has no name. Stache names him “Peter.” Molly and Peter manage to escape the pirates’ clutches and foil their dastardly attempt to capture the treasure chest. She makes it home to England with her father, where eventually she will give birth to a daughter named Wendy; while Peter and his two companions remain on a mysterious island, there to do battle with Black Stache and his pirates forever. Did I mention that Black Stache loses his hand trying to open the treasure chest, and it’s fed to an enormous crocodile? Of course, we’ll know Stache as the nefarious Captain Hook.

Rees and Timbers have an endless stream of theatrical tricks flowing from their sleeves, so in a very real sense they celebrate, and we celebrate with them, the magic of the theatre. Their wonderful ensemble plays multiple roles, but three stand out: Christian Borle, who plays Black Stache with a Groucho-like flair which is hilarious; Celia Keenan Bolger, whose Molly manages to be both heroic and endearing; and Adam Chanler-Borat who morphs from a scared, hapless orphan with no name into the heroic Peter Pan.

You won’t encounter a more theatrical and fun evening in the theatre this season than Peter and the Starcatcher.

The original production of Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning That Championship Season was one of the first shows I saw on Broadway, when I came here as a tourist in 1973. It knocked me out then, and it’s done it again in its current revival at the Jacobs Theatre. It’s a well-constructed piece of great American realism, the sort of play one rarely sees anymore because it’s anathema to all the major critics. Silly me – I still like a realistic play, particularly if it’s as good as this one is.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the play, it’s set in a small city in Pennsylvania not unlike Scranton, Miller’s home town, in the home of the retired coach of the local high school basketball team. Twenty years ago, the coach’s boys won the state championship. Now, four of the starting five are having a reunion to celebrate that feat. One team member is missing. I guess the scrubs weren’t invited. During a long night of heavy drinking, the men get down and dirty with each other, baring their anger and their resentment at the way their lives turned out. The shocking revelation in the end has to do with why their 5^th teammate is not present.

Gregory Mosher’s direction is brilliantly invisible (as good direction in a realistic play must be), and his actors are all superb. I particularly enjoyed Brian Cox, all bullish and Teddy Roosevelt-like as the Coach, and Jason Patric as a laconic drunk. His performance was all the more poignant for me because his father was the playwright, who basically wrecked his career and his health due to his alcoholism.

I was not surprised by the rather dismissive reviews this production has received (see the first paragraph of these comments), but don’t pay any attention. Both play and production are a corker.

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, fared better than That Championship Season even though it too is a realistic play (go figure), although most of the raves were for Frances McDormand’s performance. Still, there was an undercurrent of uneasiness, basically a grudging acceptance that this one is pretty good, even though it’s a realistic play.

McDormand plays a poor woman who grew up in and still lives in Southie, an economically depressed area in Boston. She has struggled all her life to support herself, a struggle made even more difficult by the fact that she has a severely retarded daughter. Her life has been nothing but bad choices and hard luck. She loses her job as a cashier in a dollar store, and can’t find another. She decides to go see an old beau who is now a successful doctor. He has nothing for her but he happens to mention that he is throwing a party at his house for some friends, and Our Heroine manages to wheedle and invitation, hoping that one of the friends might have a job for her. That’s the set-up, and what transpires from this is heart-breaking.

Frances McDormand is brilliant, but there is also excellent work here from all the other actors, under Daniel Sullivan’s fine direction.

This one’s a don’t-miss.

As is Adam Rapp’s The Hallway Trilogy at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, three 90-minute dramas all set in the hallway of a run-down apartment house. In the first play, Rosa, a young aspiring actress hopes to meet Eugene O’Neill, who she thinks lives in the building. O’Neill’s death has just been reported, but she thinks it’s a fake. The second play, Paraffin, is a slice of life play mostly centering on a drug addict and his pregnant wife. The final play, Nursing, is set far in the future. All diseases have been eradicated and a sort of disease museum has been set up in what was once the hallway of the first two plays. People can watch through a one-way glass-mirror window as a volunteer is injected with various horrific bacteria, such as plague and cholera. They then get to watch him suffer before he is injected with an antidote.

I found the final play to be farfetched and completely unbelievable; but on the plus side it does feature an amazing performance by Logan Marshall-Green as the volunteer victim. A repertory company of actors plays in all three plays (well-most are in at least two), and all are terrific. My faves were Katherine Waterston as Rosa, the aspiring actress, Green, and William Apps is the drug addict in the second play.

Spy Garbo, at 3LD Art & Technology Center, takes place in “The Limbo of History,” where two spies from World War II and Francisco Franco debate their places in history. They are all in some way connected to another spy, a double agent for both Britain and Germany, whose code name was Garbo.

The play itself is stultifying. The actors do their best, but they’re really swimming upstream. What makes the evening worthwhile are the astounding projections by Aaron Harrow, Jeff Morey and Peter Norrman. Most of the time I just tuned out the play and watched the multi-media show happening all around it.

For Some Strange Reason, Daryl Roth has revived Abe Burrows’ long-running 1960s comedy Cactus Flower at the Westside Arts. It’s a rather lame-brained farce about a womanizing dentist who tells his girlfriends right up front that he is married so they won’t want to marry him. If you can buy that ruse, I have a bridge to Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. The catch is that he really isn’t married. Anyway, he decides that he wants to marry his latest paramour, but she won’t marry him unless she gets to meet his wife – so, he has to come up with a wife. He asks his receptionist to impersonate the wife, blithely unaware that she is in love with him. The machinations get more and more unbelievable, including the conventional “Happy Ending.” Michael Bush’s direction is Just Plain Silly, and poor Max Caulfield is hopelessly miscast as the dentist.

This one is eminently missable.

Sorry it took me so long to get around to telling you about the following shows, all of which have closed.

Rinne Groff’s Compulsion at the Public Theater, which has now closed, was a fascinating play based on the true story of a writer named Meyer Levin (here called “Sid Silver”), who was instrumental in getting Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl published in the U.S. Silver has a handshake agreement with Otto Frank, Anne’s father, to dramatize the book for the stage; but he loses out when the Broadway producers decide his dramatization is not “universal” enough – i.e., it’s too Jewish – and Frank sells him out. So begins Silver’s lifelong crusade to get recognition for his contribution to bringing Anne’s story to light, and to get his own dramatization produced. The play might better be called Obsession, because Silver is truly obsessed – to the point of insanity.

Groff and director Oskar Eustis made extensive use of puppets to tell their story. Anne Frank, for instance, is very much an important character in the play, even though she is represented as a puppet, and the scenes between her and Silver achieved an extraordinary poignancy.

Mandy Patinkin would have seemed an excellent choice to play the manic madman Sid Silver, and in many of the quieter scenes, mostly with Anne, he is very touching. In his many towering-rage scenes, however, Patinkin goes well over the top, becoming bombastic beyond belief. I wished Eustis could have turned him down more than a notch or two, but I suspect that was an impossible task. Personally, I found too much of this performance wince-inducing and unwatchable, but the critics seem to have liked it so maybe it was just me.

I hope you got a chance to see Geoffrey Rush’s astounding performance in an adaptation of Gogol’s The Diarv of a Madman, wherein Rush played a crazy office drone who becomes crazier and crazier as the play goes on, eventually becoming convinced that he is the rightful King of Spain.

Acclaimed fight choreographer BH Barry’s staging of Robert Lois Stevenson’s Treasure Island, at Irondale Theatre Ensemble in Fort Greene Brooklyn was also great fun, and featuring another great pirate performance (the other being Christian Borle’s in Peter and the Starcatcher – see above), this one by Tom Hewitt as Long John Silver. Barry’s fight choreography was as phenomenal as you would expect it to be – after all, he’s the best in the world.

The Play Company has been concentrating for the past couple of seasons on presenting plays by foreign playwrights. Their latest was Invasion, by Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri, a weird mish-mosh mostly having to do with the identity of a middle eastern man named Abul Kasem, who is either a terrorist mastermind or a hapless victim of our own paranoia. At the start of the play, two actors playing moronic teens started a disruption in the audience, which carried onto the stage in a fight with the actors who were performing the “play” we were watching. It’s been a long while since I got into a really good fight, so I leapt up and rushed the stage – only to be halted by an usher who informed me that it was part of the play. Darn! I coulda called my column “On the Floor with Larry” this week! Fans of weird theatre (and there are many) would have fun much to like about Invasion. As for me, I found it insufferable, though blessedly brief.

The Public Theater offered a wonderful production, whose run was all too short, of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, a dark play about a wealthy man who finds himself broke as he has given away his fortune to his “friends,” leaches all, who desert him once he’s broke. Timon becomes a misanthropic hermit and eventually kills himself. I know: bummer. Right? What made the evening memorable was Richard Thomas’ titanic performance in the title role – but all the actors were wonderful under Barry Edelstein’s astute direction. My only quibble was the insertion by Edelstein of lines not written by Shakespeare, which is all too common in Shakespearean production both at the Public Theatre and at the Delacorte. One of the parasites says, “For 500 talents, she better get naked. Somehow, I don’t think that was written by Shakespeare.

Thinner than Water, presented by LaByrinth at the Cherry Pit, was an auspicious debut by Melissa Ross about three warring siblings who come together for their father’s funeral and basically have at each other. Mimi O’Donnell’s direction was pitch-perfect and all the actors were great. I hope you got a chance to see this. I’m sorry if you didn’t.

Daniel Hay’s A Perfect Future, briefly at the Cherry Lane Theatre, was a real rarity – a commercial off Broadway production not a transfer from somewhere else. Its failure is probably the last nail in the coffin for such productions, which makes me sad. What also makes me sad is that this play was a lot better than the reviews would have made you believe. The actors were all excellent (Donna Bullock even more so).

When I Come to Die, produced by LCT3 at the Duke Theatre, was a drama about a death row inmate who miraculously survives a lethal injection. Most of the drama is then about whether or not he is gong to be allowed to live. I felt the playwright, Nathan Louis Jackson, shilly-shallied around the real subject of his play, which was whether or not an actual miracle had occurred. Ultimately, I didn’t buy the play, but I did love Chris Chalk’s superb performance as the doomed inmate.

Neil Cuthbert’s White People, at Ensemble Studio Theatre, was a well-done but rather inconsequential family comedy about a mother trying to hold her family together. Her husband’s a drunk, her oldest son has dropped out of college and sits around all day in his pajamas writing an idiotic sci-fi novel, her younger son is brain-fried from drugs and her daughter is an “exotic dancer: who has been impregnated by the bartender at the club where she works. His name is Boo Boo. In the hands of a Chris Durang, this could have been wildly funny. Cuthbert’s approach was more conventional. Which made the play seem ultimately rather inconsequential, though the performances were all pretty good.

Finally, St. Ann’s Warehouse presented a production by the National Theatre of Scotland of Bryony Lavery’s Beautiful Burnout, which was about wannabe boxers training for what they hope might be a sot at the big time. Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett co-directed as well as co-choreographer the boxing sequences, which were amazing. I hope you got a chance to see this one.

PETER AND THE STARCATCHER. NY Theatre Workshop, 83 E. 4^th St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com, 212-279-4200

THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON. Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W.

45^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com, 212-239-6200

GOOD PEOPLE. Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com, 212-239-6200

THE HALLWAY TRILOGY. Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, 224 Waverly Pl.

TICKETS: www.smarttix.com, 212-868-4444

SPY GARBO. 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St.

TICKETS: 212-352-3101; 866-811-4111

CACTUS FLOWER. Westside Arts, 407 W. 43^rd St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com, 212-239-6200

Alas, the following have all closed:

COMPULSION, TREASURE ISLAND, INVASION, THE DIARY OF A MADMAN, TIMON OF ATHENS, THINNER THAN WATER, A PERFECT FUTURE, WHEN I COME TO DIE, WHITE PEOPLE and BEAUTIFUL BURNOUT.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about BLACK TIE, WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS, THE WITCH OF EDMONTON, APPLE COVE, NEWSICAL, THE MAN WHO ATE MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER and THE WHIPPING MAN.

A. R. Gurney made his reputation with his satiric depictions of the mores of WASP America, in plays such as The Dining Room. In his latest, Black Tie at Primary Stages, Gurney has returned to these roots. We are in a rather tacky hotel in the Adirondacks, where a middle-aged man named Curtis is preparing for his son’s wedding. Curtis gets a lot of advice about how to stage a proper wedding from his father, a dapper man in a tuxedo who, it turns out, is a ghost.

There’s nothing earth-shaking in this play – it’s “merely” a genial and very witty comedy poking fun at the old ways vs. the new. Mark Lamos’ direction is pitch-perfect, as are all the performances – particularly, those of Gregg Edelman as Curtis, Carolyn McCormick as his frazzled wife Mimi, and Daniel Davis as the ghostly Dear Old Dad.

I hear the play is sold out for its originally-announced run but that Primary Stages has extended one week – so there may be tickets. Go – you’ll have a great time.

The Mint Theatre has another fine production of a forgotten play on their boards, Arnold Bennett’s What the Public Wants, a comedy about a forerunner of Rupert Murdoch who runs a string of what would now be considered “tabloid” newspapers. This may be what the dumbed-down public wants – but is it journalism?

I wouldn’t say that the Mint’s production makes a case for this play as a Lost Classic; but it is undeniably relevant to our own dumbed-down times, is well-constructed and engaging, and features a slew of fine performances under Matthew Arbour’s fine direction. My faves were Rob Breckenridge as the media mogul and Mark Vietor as his quizzical, skeptical brother; but all the performances are, as is usual at the Mint, Mighty Fine.

Like the Mint, Red Bull Theatre specializes in productions of forgotten old plays. Whereas the Mint’s plays largely come from the early years of the 20^th Century, though, Red Bull’s come from the early years of the 17^th. Red Bull has been around for a while, but I had never seen any of their productions until I went over to St. Clement’s to see The Witch of Edmonton, a collaboration, it is believed, between Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley originally produced in 1621.

The plays tells the dual stories of the persecution for witchcraft of an old woman, and of a young man who is forced to marry a woman for economic reasons, though he loves another. Both come to a bad end, and both stories are dark and disturbing, about the darker side of human nature, which was common in plays of that era. One of the fascinating aspects of the play is the presence onstage of the Devil, in the shape of a dog, who manipulates both stories with evil intent.

The production, directed by Red Bull’s Artistic Director Jesse Berger, is astounding, and features a large cast of wonderful actors, most of whom are classically-trained. My faves were Charlayne Woodard as the old witch lady and Derek Smith as the Devil Dog.

I’ll say this: I do not plan to miss another Red Bull production. Don’t miss this one.

The Women’s Project has finally gotten their season going with a wild satire by Lynn Rosen called Apple Cove, at the Julia Miles Theatre, which lampoons the new comformity of people who live in “gated” communities. Giovanna Sardelli’s production starts broad and gets broader, but the actors go with it and make it enjoyable even though the play is I think rather silly. If you’re in the mood for silly, though, this one’s for you.

Newsical, at the Kirk Theatre is also pretty silly. It’s a musical review which riffs on current events. It’s kinda like the Capital Steps, though not quite as inventive or funny; but the performers are great fun to watch and the singing is terrific. Rick Crom’s book, music and lyrics are fun, and Mark Waldrop’s direction witty and wild.

Jeff Cohen’s The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller, at ArcLight, definitely falls into the category of Not The Same Old Thing. It imagines what might have happened to the young son of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who disappeared without a trace in Papua New Guinea. Cohen dramatizes the story from the natives’ point of view. His central character, Designing Man, is the tribe’s resident artist, who accepts a commission from Rockefeller is create wood carvings which the young anthropologist plans to bring back to New York to display in a museum he is building.

Cohen handles the dialogue between the various members of the Asmat tribe in a wonderfully anachronistic, contemporary-slangy way, and all the actors are amazing, absolutely convincing as these primitive people. Alfred Preisser’s direction is amazing, too.

If you’re in the mood for Something Completely Different, check this one out.

I also loved Matthew Lopez’ gripping The Whipping Man at Manhattan Theatre Club. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is one of the best plays of the season.

It takes place in a burnt-out house near Richmond, just at the end of the Civil War. An injured soldier named Caleb staggers in, and we find that he is the son of the owner of the house. Everyone’s gone except for a slave named Simon, who quickly ascertains that Caleb’s leg is gangrenous and needs to be amputated, which he does with the help of another former slave named John who shows up out of the blue.

This is not your usual southern family. Since the whites are Jewish, the slaves are too, and one of the high points of the play is at the end, when Simon officiates at a makeshift seder.

There are big surprises in the play, which Lopez handles brilliantly, and which pack quite a whallop. Doug Hughes, the director, is at the top of his game and the three actors, André Braugher (Simon), Jay Wilkison (Caleb) and André Holland (John) are all excellent.

This one’s a don’t-miss.

BLACK TIE. Primary Stage, 59 E. 59^th St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

WHAT THE PUBLIC WANTS. Mint Theatre Co., 311 W. 43^rd St.

TICKETS: 212-315-0231

THE WITCH OF EDMONTON. Theatre at St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46^th St.

TICKETS: 212-352-3101

APPLE COVE. Women’s Project @ Julia Miles Theatre, 424 W. 55^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

NEWSICAL. Kirk Theatre, 416 W. 42^nd St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

THE MAN WHO ATE MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER. ArcLight Theatre, 152 W.  71^st St.

TICKETS: www.smarttix.com or 212-868-4444

THE WHIPPING MAN. Manhattan Theatre Club, 131 W. 55^th St.

TICKETS: 212-581-1212

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about THE ROAD TO QATAR, THREE SISTERS, THE NEW YORK IDEA, THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE, GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES and MOLLY SWEENEY

Ordinarily, I begin my column with my thoughts on my favorite show of the week; but this week I’m breaking that rule by starting off with The Road to Qatar at the York Theatre Co. I have been going to the York for many years. Many of their shows I have liked, a few I haven’t liked; but until last week I had never seen a Total Turkey there. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Apparently, a few years ago librettist Stephen Cole and composer David Krane were contacted out of the blue, via the internet, by a rich guy from Qatar who wanted to hire then to create a big, flashy, Broadway-style musical to premiere there, offering them a huge amount of money. The Road to Qatar is about the creation of that musical. Cole and Krane try very hard to imitate the style of the Hope-Crosby “Road to” movies, but Cole’s book and lyrics are so witless, with one lame joke and terrible rhyme after another, and Krane’s music so mediocre, that what we experience is 90 minutes of Pure Torture.

The actors, under Philip George’s way-too-broad direction, try their best to make this at least bearable, but it’s a lost cause.

How could this have found its way to the stage of the York Theatre? Could it be because they have had to do a show which came with “enhancement” money? Looks that way. Oh by the way guys: “Qatar” is pronounced “cutter,” not “catarrh.” Come to think of it, The Road to Catarrh is a much more appropriate title for this terrible show.

Much, much better is CSC’s fine production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, beautifully directed by Austin Pendleton and featuring a uniformly fine cast headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal (Masha), Jessica Hecht (Olga) and Juliet Rylance (Irena). As good as these ladies are, though, they are matched by the supporting players, especially Marin Ireland (Natasha) and Josh Hamilton (Andrey). The Paul Schmidt translation they are using seemed a little too contemporary American for my tastes, but this is a small quibble with what is one of the finest productions of this beautiful play I have ever seen. It’s a don’t-miss.

Also good is Atlantic Theatre Co.’s production of Langdon Mitchell’s The New York Idea, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. It’s a different play, though, than it was in 1909 when it premiered. Then, it was a rather shocking play about a controversial subject: divorce. Now, divorce is universally acceptable, so the play seems much more of a light comedy, particularly as here adapted by David Auburn.

The two central characters are (gasp) divorced women, one of whom, Cynthia Karslake, is about to remarry, to a stuffy middle-aged judge who is the exact opposite of her ex-husband John Karslake, a charming profligate. Meanwhile, the judge’s ex-wife Vida is a flamboyant “New Woman” – Sex and the City, 1909-style. She even smokes! Also in the mix is a dashing British lord who falls for Cynthia and tries to lure her away from him, on her wedding day no less.

I have never seen a production of Mitchell’s play but I’ve read it, and Auburn’s version is much funnier. Mark Brokaw’s production is fast-paced and witty, and all his actors are splendid. I particularly enjoyed Jaime Ray Newman as Cynthia and Francesca Faridany as Vida. My only quibble is that both ladies are stylish “Gibson girls,” but neither has the hairstyle of one. This is particularly noticeable when you look at the program cover, which features a photograph of an actual Gibson girl of the era.

Aside from this quibble, I loved this show. It’s hilarious.

Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which flopped not once but twice on Broadway in the early 1960s, has now been revived by Roundabout at their Off Broadway venue, the Laura Pels Theatre. Apparently, Olympia Dukakis, who stars in it, and the director Michael Wilson went through Williams’ many drafts and tried to create a coherent play out of them. The result is a fascinating mish-mosh, which almost succeeds.

It’s about an elderly, wealthy woman, famous for being famous, who is dying in her villa on an island off Capri. Her name is Flora Goforth, and she knows she is soon to go forth into that proverbial undiscovered country, so she is feverishly trying to finish her memoir, with the help of a young American woman named Frances. A mystery man shows up on her island. His name is Christopher Flanders, and he’s a failed artist who goes about from elderly woman to elderly woman; sponging off them, yes – but also providing some comfort in their end days. Flora decides that Christopher may not be the “Angel of Death,” as he is known all over Europe, but rather her salvation.

I still can’t decide if Olympia Dukakis’ performance is Totally Brilliant or Totally Ridiculous. I lean towards the latter. She employs a strange attempted-Southern accent and she speaks as if she has a mouth full of cotton balls. Darren Pettie is hunky as Christopher, but he has no charisma, no passion, no desperation.

There’s an eccentric called The Witch of Capri who comes to visit from time. Here, the Witch of Capri is played by Edward Hibbert, a wonderfully swishy British actor who appears as if he’s wandered in from a Paul Rudnick play. He’s delightful; but he’s in the wrong play.

If you’re a big Tennessee William fan, you should take the opportunity to see this play. Anyone else, be prepared for a lot of eye-rolling.

Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries, a two-hander at Second Stage, is a poignant story of unrealized love. Kayleen and Doug have been BFFs since they were kids. As their lives progress, she gets more and more disturbed and he gets more and more banged up. Doug is incredibly accident prone, but somehow Kayleen is able to heal his wounds. Kaylee’s wounds are internal ones, and Doug is unable to save her from them. Pablo Schreiber and Jennifer Carpenter are very compelling as these two lost souls.

This one is worth seeing, particularly for the work of these two fine actors.

Finally, Irish Rep has revived Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. The title character is a woman who has been blind since she was a baby, and has been perfectly happy – until, that is, an American doctor operates on her and is able to restore her sight.

The story is told in interlocking monologues, given by Molly, her husband and the doctor. Friel’s writing is exquisite – but it’s narrative writing, not dramatic. What puts this over are the fine performances, particularly by Geraldine Hughes as Molly and Ciarán O’Reilly as her husband, Frank.

THE ROAD TO QATAR. Theatre at St. Peter’s, 619 Lexington Ave.

TICKETS: 212-935-5820

THREE SISTERS. CSC, 136 E. 13^th St.

TICKETS: 212-677-4210

THE NEW YORK IDEA. Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE. Laura Pels           Theatre, 111 W. 46^th St.

TICKETS: 212-719-1300

GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES. Second Stage, 305 W. 43^rd St.

TICKETS: 212-246-4422

MOLLY SWEENEY. Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 W. 22^nd St.

TICKETS: 212-727-2737

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about OTHER DESERT CITIES, SCREENPLAY, HONEY BROWN EYES, BLOOD FROM A STONE, THE MISANTHROPE and CARNIVAL ROUND THE CENTRAL FIGURE.

For two decades, Jon Robin Baitz has been threatening to crack the A-List of playwrights. Although he has received productions of his plays at major New York theatres such as Second Stage, Roundabout and Playwrights Horizons, all of which have been pretty much well-reviewed, he has never had that breakthrough play which catapults him to that rarefied list of Major American Playwrights – until now, that is. His Other Desert Cities, currently at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre but moving to Broadway in the fall, is that play. Hallelujah!

We are in a stylish living room in Palm Springs, in the home Lyman and Polly Wyeth. Lyman was a B-List movie star before he retired, and Polly was in films too – although mostly she’s a socialite and political activist. The politics which she and her husband espouse is conservatism; they are leading lights of Hollywood Republicanism, and Lyman even served as an ambassador, appointed by their dear friend Ronnie.

Their two adult children, Trip and Brooke, have come for a visit at Christmastime. Trip’s a TV producer – he has a hit running that’s a “reality” courtroom show. Brooke, a novelist, is coming off a nervous breakdown and has written a new book – which turns out to be a memoir about her family in which she accuses her parents of causing the breakdown and suicide of her brother Henry, and in which she confronts them about their awful political views (from her point of view). Needless to say, this does not sit well with Mom and Dad, and the play becomes a knock down drag out verbal boxing match. Brooke is egged on by her mother’s sister, who was once a successful screenwriter but who has pretty much drunk away her money and her career. Polly and Lyman want Brooke to cancel publication, while Aunt Silda wants her to go full speed ahead. What will Brooke decide? The play has a shocking, surprise ending which caught me completely by surprise but which is in no way contrived or not credible, and which packs quite a punch.

Joe Mantello’s direction is first-rate and his cast is comprised of some of our finest stage actors. Stockard Channing and the marvelous Elizabeth Marvel have never been better, and there is wonderful work too from Stacy Keach (Lyman) and Thomas Sadoski as Trip. Linda Lavin is very funny but also very sad as Silda.

Other Desert Cities is one of the best new plays of this season. Expect both play and production to be multiple award-winners.

Scott Brook’s Screenplay, at 59 E 59 Theatres, is a fascinating play about three former college chums. Dean and Graham are failed screenwriters. Graham moved to London, went into finance and has become very wealthy. He returns to the States and plans to buy his way into the film business. He reunites with Dean at a party and Dean gives him a screenplay he has just written. Graham flips out over it and sees in it his ticket to the big time. He offers Dean a huge amount of money for the rights; but there’s a catch – he wants Dean to relinquish writer credit so that Graham can claim the screenplay as his work. Dean is conflicted, but he’s also poor; so he takes the dough and has to watch as the film becomes a hit, receiving on Oscar nomination. Also in the mix is Lisa, the girl they both wanted in college who is now back in both their lives and who has issues of her own.

The plot gets a little far-fetched at times but if you can buy the premise you’ll enjoy the play; and, like Other Desert Cities, it has a surprise at the end, the perfect ending to this tale of greed and desperation in La-La Land. It’s a fine production, too. The reviews haven’t been all that good. Disregard them – Screenplay is well worth seeing.

Stefanie Zadravec’s Honey Brown Eyes, at the Clurman Theatre, is a hard-edged drama about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and its particularly gruesome effect on women. It’s strong stuff, and awfully hard to watch at times; but Erica Schmidt’s production is very well-done and all the actors are mighty fine.

Also in the category of hard-to-watch strong stuff is Tommy Nohilly’s Blood from a Stone, produced by the New Group at the Acorn Theatre. It’s about a blue collar Connecticut family which makes the Wyeths of Other Desert Cities look like the Brady Bunch. Everybody’s well on the way to wrecking his/her life. Mom and Dad hate each other. Their house is falling apart. The son Matt is a gambling addict and pathological liar who is leaving his wife and kids to take up with a women with a husband and kids.

Into this maelstrom comes Travis, the eldest son, a pill-popper who has quit his job and is stopping over before heading out, God knows where. All the roles are meaty, and all the actors are terrific; but it’s just not enough. If you’re an Ethan Hawke fan, go – he’s wonderful as Travis; but the play is a mess and even Scott Elliott’s strong direction can’t save it.

The Pearl Theatre’s production of Moliére’s The Misanthrope is a classic Pearl show – stylish sets and costumes, strong acting but no more than stolid direction. Still, it’s worth seeing – particularly for the acting of Sean McCall in the title role and Janie Brookshire as Célimène. Director Joseph Henreddy has moved the play to the reign of Louis XVI, For Some Strange Reason, but there’s nary an indication of the revolution in the wind. This allows for much more attractive costumes; but other than that it made no sense to me.

Still, if you haven’t ever seen this classic satire, you could do a lot worse that the Pearl’s take on it.

Diana Amsterdam’s Carnival Round the Central Figure, at the IRT Theatre, is a harrowing/fascinating/maddening absurdist meditation on Death. As a man lies dying on a hospital bed his wife, his friends, a televangelist with gospel choir, a psychologist and a particularly sinister nurse swirl around him, until he finally kicks the bucket.

Surprisingly, Amsterdam manages to find humor, if of the extremely mordant variety, in this ghastly situation, helped greatly by Karen Kohlhaas’ whirling/swirling, inventive direction.

OTHER DESERT CITIES. Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, Lincoln Center

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

SCREENPLAY. 59 E. 59 Theatre, 59 E. 59^th St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

HONEY BROWN EYES. Harold Clurman Theatre, 410 W. 42^nd St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

BLOOD FROM A STONE. Acorn Theatre, 410 W. 42^nd St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

THE MISANTHROPE. City Center Stage II, 155 W. 55^th St

TICKETS: 212- 581-1212

CARNIVAL ROUND THE CENTRAL FIGURE. IRT Theatre, 154 Christopher St.

TICKETS: 212-352-3101

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, A SMALL FIRE, PANTS ON FIRE’S METAMORHPOSIS, JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, RESERVOIR and DRACULA.

Roundabout currently has on the boards a fine revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, at the American Airlines Theatre, directed by Brian Bedford and starring Mr. Bedford as that great Victorian battleaxe, Lady Bracknell. I could quibble here and there (and, in fact, I will) but this is definitely one of the best productions of the play of the many I have seen over the years.

The production has been handsomely designed by Desmond Heeley, who did both the sets and costumes; and the latter are particularly exquisite. As for the actors, they are uniformly splendid. David Furr is perfectly stuffy as John Worthing and his partner in Bunburying, Algernon Moncrieff, is played with wonderfully foppish charm by Santino Fontana. Paxton Whitehead is perfect, as usual, as Canon Chasuble. As for the ladies, Sara Topham is an enchanting kewpie doll of a Gwendolyn and Charlotte Parry a delightfully goofy Cecily who put me in mind, more than once, of a young Georgia Engel. Also wonderful is Dana Ivey’s prim and proper, though decidedly hot-to-trot, Miss Prism; though I quibble with her decision to play the small stain in the famous handbag as if it were actually “caused by the explosion of a temperance beverage” when, I think, it was a more potent brew which caused the telling stain.

And now, on to Mr. Bedford’s performance. Wisely, he foregoes camp and plays Lady Bracknell as a little more subdued than others I have seen in the role. It used to be said of actors in great roles that “he hit all his points.” Bedford hits them all, and wonderfully, with the glaring exception of the famous “handbag” line with which, inexplicably, he does nothing, merely tossing it away. I was dumbstruck. Aside from this glaring omission, though, he’s great.

This production will, I think, be much-honored at the end of the season, at awards time. Don’t miss it.

Adam Bock’s latest, A Small Fire at Playwrights Horizons, is a short drama about a woman who, inexplicably, loses her various senses one at a time, beginning with her senses of smell and taste and ending with the loss of her sight. Emily is a tough-as-nails owner of a small construction company; her husband, John, has a human resources office job but he is clearly not the main breadwinner. At home, he spends most of his time trying to mollify Emily, who treats him like crap, which means he comes across as kind of a wimp. Of course, the dynamic of this rather unhappy marriage changes as Emily, formerly a completely self-sufficient and rather heartless woman, finds herself completely dependent on her husband.

It seemed to me that Bock rather wrote himself into a corner with this play, which he chose to end with a rather distasteful sex scene (predictably, with Emily on top). This is one of those plays in which the parts are better than the whole; but there is terrific work from Michelle Pawk and Old Reliable Reed Birney as Emily and John, and good supporting work from Celia Keenan-Bolger, as their daughter, and from Victor Williams as the foreman at Emily’s business.

Although A Small Fire isn’t Bock’s best work, it is nonetheless well-worth seeing.

Pants on Fire’s Metamorphosis, at the Flea Theatre, is an import from last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival., brought over by Carol Tambor, who each year chooses the production she feels was the best of the Fringe. It’s a delightful, spoofy take on Ovid’s Metamorphosis by Peter Bramley, in collaboration with the Pants on Fire actors, done in a style which put me in mind of Emma Rice’s Kneehigh Theatre, setting the stories in wartime Britain and incorporating goofy songs which sound like ones of the period, in addition to the standard torch song “Am I Blue?” all staged simply but highly imaginatively by Brantley.

This is a wonderfully theatrical evening in the theatre. I highly recommend it.

I have never read Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, and have never even seen a production, so I had no preconceptions when I saw the current production of the play, in an adaptation by the Irish playwright Frank McGuiness, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre. The play is about a disgraced former banker, who did five years in prison for embezzlement and who has spent the past eight years in his home, estranged from his cold, angry wife, who blames him for the disgrace of the family name. Out of the blue, the wife’s sister shows up. It turns out, she is a wealthy woman who bought the Borkman home at auction after the trial and has allowed her sister, Borkman and their son to live there. It also turns out that she figured prominently in the bad choices Borkman made, and she now wants pay-back.

The play’s a little creaky in places; but still, it’s a real corker – particularly as here staged by James Macdonald on a set, by Tom Pye, which looks like a house set on a frozen pond framed by huge snow drifts of the sort with which we have been afflicted the past couple of weeks. Fiona Shaw and Lindsay Duncan are magnificent as the two warring sisters, and Alan Rickman is tragically pathetic as Borkman, who paces back and forth alone upstairs, in total denial of his crimes, hoping to think of some way to return to power.

WHY is this great play so rarely produced? Perhaps McGuinness solved whatever flaws other versions had. I don’t know. I only know that this production should be at the top of your must-see list.

Eric Henry Sanders’ Reservoir, which has just closed at the Drilling Company, was a modern take on Buchner’s Woyzeck, casting the first great anti-hero of dramatic literature as a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder. Alessandro Colla was both chilling and heartbreaking as the Woyzeck character, here named Pvt. Frank Hasek. I also enjoyed the sensitive performance by Karla Hendrick, as a psychiatrist who tries to save the doomed Hasek. Hamilton Clancy’s production was bare-bones but his work with the actors was excellent, with the exception of the actor who played a buddy of Hasek’s, also probably suffering from PTSD, who appeared to think he was in a movie, as he spoke so faintly that he was largely unintelligible.

Aside from these quibbles, though, this was a terrific production of a powerful play. Sorry you missed it.

Dracula, a revival of the John Balderstone and Hamilton Deane potboiler based on Bram Stoker’s classic chiller-diller novel, at the Little Shubert Theatre, has also closed. The reviews were pretty dreadful, and were by and large deserved. It would have taken a much more stylish and inventive approach to make this clunky old play hold the stage today, which was way beyond the ability of director Paul Alexander and his mostly inadequate cast led by Italian actor Michel Altieri, awkwardly swooping around in the title role. There were a few good moments, many of them supplied by John Buffalo Mailer as an Americanized Renfield, but for the most part this was painful to watch and is deservedly gone.

I couldn’t help but wonder, why is this gem of a theatre booked so rarely? The official explanation is that the economics of Off Broadway tanked shortly after the theatre was built. So sayeth the Shubert Organization, which built and operates the theatre. My guess is that the real reason is that the “The Shuberts” charge way too much for the use of this theatre. Apparently, they would rather it be dark than rented at a lower rate. It’s a real shame.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42^nd St.

TICKETS: 212-719-1300

A SMALL FIRE. Playwrights Horizons, 410 W. 42^nd St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

PANTS ON FIRE’S METAMORPHOSIS. Flea Theatre, 41 White St.

TICKETS: 212-352-3101 or 866-811-4111

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN. Harvey Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn.

TICKETS: 718-636-4100

RESERVOIR. Drilling Company. Alas, closed

DRACULA. Little Shubert Theatre. Closed.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about A FREE  MAN OF COLOR, HYSTERIA, THREE PIANOS, THE COLLECTION & A KIND OF ALASKA and IN THE FOOTPRINT.

“What a week I’m having!” – Eugene Levy, in Splash.

As those of you who read my column know, I am not exactly known for being a critical critic. My tastes are broad and eclectic; and I try, whenever I write about something I’ve seen, to imagine who might like it, and write my “review” for that person. Imagine my surprise (and, no doubt, yours) that this week I regret I must tell you about three shows which more or less totally suck.

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Lincoln Center Theatre has mounted a production of John Guare’s new play, A Free Man of Color, in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, directed by George C. Wolfe. The play takes place mostly in New Orleans in 1803, and its central character is one of the city’s wealthiest citizens who, amazingly, is a black man whose name is Jacques Cornet. Everybody who’s everybody comes to Cornet’s house, mostly to score a loan but also because the town’s best prostitutes are there. He’s apparently so wealthy, and so well-endowed, that he doesn’t have to go to them – they come to him.

Essentially, the play is about how the Louisiana Purchase came to be made, and the subsequent ramifications this had for our country. This is an interesting subject, and I must say it was a pleasure to see a stage peopled with 26 actors, most playing multiple roles. However, watching the play I thought of Ben Jonson’s famous crack when someone said that Shakespeare’s plays were perfect and ready to go as soon as he had finished them, and that he never changed a line. “Would that he had blotted a thousand,” quipped Ben. To call this play “overstuffed” is an understatement. And all too many of the “jokes” fall flat.

The main reason, though, that the jokes fall flat and indeed, much of the evening, is Wolfe’s direction. Although the play is set in 1803, most of it is staged as though it were a Restoration comedy, done by a director and actors who think that “period style” means hamming it up and acting in general as artificially as possible. Some of this is Guare’s fault, but a lot of it is Wolfe’s.

What annoyed me about A Free Man of Color was that it coulda/shoulda been much better – if Guare had taken his story seriously and Wolfe had taken the play seriously. It also would have been a lot funnier.

By and large, the plays in the annual Brits Off Broadway Festival at 59 E 59 are pretty good. In fact, almost everything at 59 E 59 is pretty good, due to the astute artistic stewardship of Elizabeth Kleinhans over there. This season’s Festival includes not one but two productions by an experimental theatre troupe called Inspector Sands. I saw one of the two, Hysteria. I was hoping that Inspector Sands would be another Knee High Theatre, Emma Rice’s troupe which gave us Brief Encounter and The Red Shoes. No such luck.

Hysteria was about 60 minutes of nonsense about a couple on a first date. There’s also a waiter, who is expressionless and never speaks, sort of like Buster Keaton but not funny. About the only thing I can say for Hysteria is that it is Blessedly Brief.

That’s in contrast to Three Pianos, at NY Theatre Workshop which, like Hysteria, owes much to bad 1960’s experimental theatre. It’s about three piano-playing buds. On a cold winter’s night, they try to buck up one of their number, who’s depressed, so they start playing a depressing cycle of songs by Schubert (Oh, that’s a good choice …) and go back and forth between the present and the past, in which Schubert himself and his buds have a grand old time talking, singing and playing games.

The three performers and pretty good ivory-tinklers but mediocre singers and actors. We are forced to spend over two interminable, intermissionless hours with them. Three Pianos is on my short-list for Bomb of the Year. It’s definitely a must-miss.

Lest you think I must have been in a dyspeptic frame of mind last week, I did see two shows I really liked. Alas, though, they both have closed.

Atlantic Theatre Co., in tandem with CSC, revived two one-act plays by the late Harold Pinter, The Collection and A Kind of Alaska, at CSC. Pinter was a master of mysterious comedies of menace, which is impressively on view with The Collection, one of his earliest plays. It’s about a man who thinks his wife has had it on with a man on a business trip. She may have. She may have not. Pinter leaves a lot to our imagination. A Kind of Alaska, one of his last plays, is about a middle-aged woman who wakes out of a coma in which she has been for 29 years and struggles to understand what has happened to her. Larry Bryggman was terrific in both plays, as was Rebecca Henderson, while Matt McGrath and Darren Pettie were impressive in The Collection. The real standout performance of the evening, though, came from Lisa Emery as the woman who’s been in a coma. Karen Kohlhaas’ direction was perfectly, delicately modulated. I’d love to see what she’d do with Pinter’s Old Times.

If you saw this, lucky you; if not, bummer.

The Civilians’ latest show, In the Footprint at the Irondale Theatre in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has closed unfortunately. Taking a cue from Moises Kaufman’s The Techtonic Project, The Civilians decide on an issue which interests them, interview all the participants, and then create a play, largely composed of monologues and songs. In the Footprint was about the controversy surrounding the Atlantic Yards construction project. It dealt with the pros and the cons, but wound up damning the developer, a man with a name that sounds like he’s a character in a Restoration comedy (his name is Ratner) and various government officials who allowed him to run rough-shod over anybody who got in his way. Mayor Bloomberg and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz both came across badly. Imagine my surprise …

I wouldn’t be surprised if this terrific docudrama resurfaces somewhere.

A FREE MAN OF COLOR. Vivian Beaumont Theatre, Lincoln Center

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

HYSTERIA. 59 E. 59.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

THREE PIANOS. NY Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4^th St.

TICKETS: 212-460-5475

THE COLLECTION & A KIND OF ALASKA. CSC,

TICKETS: Alas, this just closed. I hope you got to see it.

IN THE FOOTPRINT. Irondale Theatre Ensemble, Fort Greene Brooklyn.

Alas, closed.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about THE BREAK OF NOON, HAUNTED, MISTAKES WERE MADE, THE RED SHOES, ROSMERSHOLM, PLAY DEAD, BEING SELLERS, NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND, GHOSTS IN THE COTTONWOODS and LINGUA FRANCA.

In Neil LaBute’s The Break of  Noon,  which is running until 22 December at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, a flawed everyman named John Smith finds himself the sole survivor of a horrific mass-killing where he works. A deranged man came in and started shooting, murdering 37 people. As the play begins, he’s telling an unseen police interrogator what happened. It seems that he heard the voice of none other than God, reassuring him that he would be  saved from death. I know, I know — ridiculous, right? That’s what they said when Saul came back from Damascus, changed his name to Paul and started raving that the late Mr. Christ appeared to him.

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Smith decides that God wants him to try and be a better person and to go out into the world and exhort his fellow man (and woman) to do the same. He starts with his estranged wife. She is unwilling to forgive and forget. He moves on to his mistress, who thinks he’s crazy. He makes the rounds of TV talk shows, where he is ridiculed, of course – because as we all know (and if we don’t, we should), belief in God is the delusion of people who live in Red States, who are a bunch of dimwits.

The Break of Noon is an incredibly daring play to be putting on in Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson, because it asks us to believe that God does exist, and that He still cares about the human race, enough to speak directly (as opposed to metaphorically) to someone, and ask him to tell others what happened to him. Predictably, the reviews have to varying degrees ridiculed the play (as in, “Is he kidding?”), just as John Smith is ridiculed. Imagine my surprise …

Jo Bonney’s production is Just Plain Brilliant. David Duchovny plays Smith with an appealing mixture of bewilderment and passion, and Amanda Peet, Tracee Chimo and John Earl Jelks – each playing two roles – are excellent.

At the end Smith, speaking to an unseen group of people who have come to hear him preach, reveals the full, miraculous details of what happened to him on that fateful day, and what I can only describe as a miracle occurs, laughable if you think the play is laughable but jaw-droppingly moving if you do not.

The Break of Noon is the best new play of the season.

Haunted, by Irish novelist/playwright Edna O’Brien (at 59 E 59), is pretty damn good, too. It’s a, well, haunting portrait of a man who can’t stop lying to his wife and, ultimately, to himself. Mr. Berry, a pensioner, sits home with little to do but tend his garden, read his Shakespeare and fantasize while his wife is off at work. He meets a charming young woman and takes her under his wing, so to speak. This becomes an obsession, as he lies to her (he tells her is wife is dead) and to his wife, digging himself in deeper and deeper until, finally, he’s found out.

Mr. Berry could be perceived as rather creepy – but not in Niall Buggy’s moving performance. Also terrific are Brenda Blethyn as Mrs. Berry and Beth Cooke as Hazel, the object of Mr. Berry’s obsession. Braham Murray’s production is brilliant. This one’s a don’t-miss.

Craig Wright’s Mistakes Were Made, at the Barrow St. Theatre, is essentially a one-man play about a Broadway producer named Felix Artifex whose current project is an epic about the French Revolution. He spends all his time on the phone, trying to get a Hollywood star to commit to the project, dealing with his ridiculous demands for re-writes, and trying to persuade the playwright (who lives in the Midwest somewhere) to make said re-writes. He also has to deal with a crisis situation going on in the Middle East involving his far-fletched plan to come up with the financing for the play.

The problem with the play is that it reflects a Broadway reality that simply doesn’t exist. There are no Felix Artifexes anymore, and there haven’t been for decades – wheeler-dealer showmen who single-handedly put shows on Broadway. The director, Dexter Bullard, and the set designer, Tom Burch, appear to be aware of this, as the set looks like the kind of office a Broadway producer in the 1920s might have inhabited. The only thing that sets the play in the present is Our Hero’s wireless telephone headset, the crisis happening offstage involving shadowy Muslim insurgents and the producer’s desperation to woo the movie star by hook or by crook.

So, Mistakes were Made requires a huge suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience; but what makes the evening work ultimately is the hilariously manic performance by Michael Shannon as Felix Artifex.

Emma Rice and Knee High are back at St. Ann’s Warehouse with a weird rendition of the classic Andersen story The Red Shoes. This couldn’t be more different in tone than Brief Encounter, also directed by Rice, but it’s equally visually arresting. Her The Red Shoes is most dark and disturbing – nothing like the classic film. It’s like Andersen’s story as adapted by Samuel Beckett.

You would think that a play by a Great Playwright which requires only six actors and a single set would be produced regularly; yet the Pearl Theatre’s production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm is the first production I have seen of the play in many years of theatre-going. There’s a reason why the play is so rarely produced.

Rosmersholm is about the head of a great, long-prominent family. Rosmer has recently given up the priesthood and finds himself the rope in political tug of war between the conservatives in his town and the progressives. The political debate in the first act gives the play a startling contemporary relevance; but unfortunately, the play descends into melodrama in the second act and has an ending second only to The Master Builder in awfulness. The climax happens offstage as the housekeeper says to the audience, Oh my goodness – guess what’s happening offstage! D-minus in Playwriting 101, Henrik!

Director Elinor Renfield has done a pretty good job, though, with this creaky, ultimately ridiculous play, and all the actors are excellent.

If you go to see Play Dead, at the Players Theatre, don’t expect a play. What you’ll get is an engaging grand guignol show, performed by a charmingly creepy fellow named Todd Robbins, who wrote it in tandem with Teller, who has directed. Since Teller’s involved, you know you’re going to get some great illusions, and Robbins and Teller do not disappoint. Audience members are invited/dragged up on stage to participate in many of the illusions, which involve several ghosts and a lot of blood.

If you’re in the mood to be creeped-out, Play Dead’s your show.

Being Sellers, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival which also includes Haunted, is a one-man play by Carl Caulfield about the late British film actor Peter Sellers. It is set in a hospital room on the last day of Sellers’ life. David Boyle, who plays Sellers, looks a little like him, though at a younger age. Sellers is obsessed with his mother, to whom he carries on a running monologue, as he relates/enacts various events in his life. The portrait of Sellers which emerges is of a deeply-troubled, rather unpleasant man.

You would think a play about Peter Sellers would be funny, but this one isn’t particularly, partially due to Boyle’s performance. To put it bluntly, Boyle is no Peter Sellers.

This closes Sunday, 12 December. If you missed it, you didn’t miss much.

You also didn’t miss much if you missed Notes from the Underground at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, adapted by Bill Camp and Robert Woodruff (who also directed) from Dostoevsky’s novella. It was mostly narrated, and was about a thoroughly unpleasant fellow who is universally loathed. You know why? Because he’s loathsome and insufferable. He wouldn’t have been sufferable for 10 minutes, let alone the almost two hours this evening took before it was finally, thankfully, over.

There was weird music, performed live, as well as weird projections. None of this helped. The evening was interminable. Its one saving grace was the performance of Merritt Janson. She was one of her onstage musicians for most of the play but, briefly, she left her station to play a pathetic prostitute who is used and abused by the narrator character. She broke my heart, even though Woodruff completely botched the staging of the scene when she comes out of the brothel to the narrator’s lodgings in hopes that he’ll save her from a life of despair, only to have to endure a horrifyingly abusive rant from this asshole. When you have an actor with the kind of haunting, tremendously expressive eyes of a Merritt Janson, Bob, you don’t have her facing upstage as her brief candle of hope is brutally, callously snuffed out.

Adam Rapp’s Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, presented by The Amoralists at Theatre 80, also closes on Sunday 12 December. It’s an early Rapp play, directed by the author, about a poor woman who lives in a cabin in the titular woods with her son. They are awaiting the return of her older son, who has escaped from prison. When he arrives, there is a horrifying climax.

Rapp’s direction is excellent, and there are fine performances from all the actors, with the exception of the actor who plays the younger son, who speaks so quickly and so quietly and with such poor diction that he is unintelligible most of the time.

Peter Nichols’ Lingua Franca, also part of the Brits Off Broadway Festival at 59 E 59 and now closed, was a wonderful play about teachers at an English language school in Florence in the 1950s. Beautifully directed by Michael Gieleta, it featured a cast of top-notch British actors, all of whom were superb.

If you saw this, lucky you. If you missed it – bummer.

THE BREAK OF NOON. Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

HAUNTED. 59 E 59 Theatre A, 59 E. 59^th St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

MISTAKES WERE MADE. Barrow St. Theatre, 27 Barrow St.

TICKETS: www.smarttix.com or 212-868-4444

THE RED SHOES. St. Anne’s Warehouse, 38 Water ST., Brooklyn

TICKETS: 866-811-4111

ROSMERSHOLM. City Center Stage II, 130 W. 56^th St.

TICKETS: 212-581-1212.

PLAY DEAD. Players Theatre, 115 McDougall St.

TICKETS: 800-745-3000.

BEING SELLERS. 59 E 59 Theatre C, 59 E. 59^th St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND. Baryshnikov Arts Center. Closed.

GHOSTS IN THE COTTONWOODS. Theatre 80, 80 St. Mark’s Pl.

TICKETS: 212-388-0388

LINGUA FRANCA. 59 E 59. Alas, closed.

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will

Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer,  brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York. This week, Larry tells you about ELF, ANGELS IN AMERICA, COLIN QUINN:  LONG STORY SHORT, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ELLING, AFTER THE REVOLUTION, THAT HOPEY CHANGEY THING, THERE ARE NO MORE BIG SECRETS, TIGERS BE STILL, SPIRIT CONTROL and MIDDLETOWN.

I didn’t see the movie Elf when it first came out but I caught up with it recently on DVD on the recommendation of my son. It’s a charming film, brimming with droll wit and Christmas good cheer. The musical version of Elf, at the Hirschfeld Theatre, keeps all of the cheer but excises most of the drollery. It’s good family fun as long as you don’t go expecting it to be like the movie.

The story concerns one Buddy, a human who’s raised at the North Pole to think he’s one of Santa’s elves. When he realizes he’s human, he decides to travel to New York to find his father, a man named Walter Hobbs who is an executive with a children’s book publisher, whose office is in the Empire State Building and who doesn’t know he exists. Dad is a workaholic sourpuss, but this does not deter our hero from trying to win his love. Nobody believes in The Meaning of Christmas in NYC (can you believe it?); but gradually, Our Hero changes all of that, and finds romance as well.

The book writers, Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin, follow the plot of the film pretty much, though two favorite characters have been cut – Papa Elf, who supplies most of the exposition in the film, and the vile children’s book author who it is hoped by Hobbs will save his skin by letting his company publish his new book. I missed them both. The songs (music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin) are cheerful and fun.

As for the performers, Sebastian Arcelus makes a fine Buddy, and there is excellent work from Matthew Gumley, as Buddy’s half brother Michael, and from Mark Jacoby as Buddy’s Dad. Jacoby looks and sounds astonishingly like James Caan in the film. Beth Leavel is rather wasted in the role of Buddy’s step-mom Emily. She’s a wonderfully quirky actress who doesn’t get much chance to break out into quirkiness. Don’t get me wrong, though, she’s fine in this rather generic role.

Elf is a charming, feel-good show. If you’re in the mood for this kind of thing, by all means go.

Signature Theatre Company is celebrating the work of Tony Kushner this season, with revivals of Angels in America and Kushner’s translation of Corneille’s The Illusion. Angels in America is running now, but good luck scoring a ticket as the entire limited run is sold out.

Kushner’s epic drama about America in the throes of the AIDS crisis still packs a punch, particularly as we suffer through the re-ascendancy of Reaganite conservativism. I was glad to have the chance to see the play again, though Michael Greif’s production didn’t make me forget George C. Woolf’s original on Broadway.

All of the actors are good, but two crucial roles seemed to me to be miscast. Bill Heck plays Joe Pitt, the conservative Mormon who’s a protégé of the evil Roy Cohn, and Zoe Kazan plays his wife Harper. Heck is a tall handsome hunk who reads mid-30s; Kazan, a sprite who reads about 16. In this production, Harper looks more like Joe’s daughter than his wife. Also, I had a hard time believing that Joe is gay, because Heck is so straight in his manner, unlike David Marshall Grant in the Broadway production. Robin Bartlett is even better than was Kathleen Chalfant in her several roles, the most important of which are Hannah (Joe’s mother) and Ethel Rosenberg. The real surprise for me was Frank Wood’s Roy Cohn. I’ve usually seen him in mild-mannered roles; here, he’s maniacally demonic. I do wish he had better diction, though. He barks out his lines like he’s a machine gun, and too much of them are unintelligible. Still, he’s fantastic – if you can understand what he’s saying.  Christian Borle is terrific as Prior Walter, as is Zachary Quinto as Louis. Borle looks astonishingly like Joe Mantello, who played Louis in the Broadway production. I was startled when I saw him for the first time, and assumed they had cast a Mantello lookalike as Louis, only to realize that in fact he was playing Prior.

Most of Greif’s staging is wonderful; but he botches the climax of the first part, Millenium Approaches. The Angel is rolled in looking like the dry cleaning, and this climactic scene is played stage left, when it certainly should be center stage. I don’t usually tell an artist what he should have done; but this was just terrible.

If this extends, maybe you’ll be able to score a ticket. With all its flaws, this is overall a fine production of one of the greatest American plays.

Colin Quinn:  Long Story Short started out last summer Off Broadway, where it was a sold-out hit, and has transferred to Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre. It’s basically about 80 minutes of stand-up comedy in which Quinn comments caustically on the history of ideas. I was unfamiliar with Quinn, so I had no preconceptions. He’s essentially a working class bloke, the sort of guy you might meet at a bar. He’s pretty funny; but, like Frank Wood he has terrible diction and speaks in machine gun bursts, so all too much of his act is unintelligible. And he’s miked!

My main problem with this show was that I just don’t think it belongs in a Broadway theatre, even one as small as the Helen Hayes, at Broadway prices. But if you’re a Quinn fan, by all means go. If you’re not, you could skip this one.

Don’t, however, miss Daniel Sullivan’s wonderful production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock. This is one of the greatest Shakespearean productions I’ve ever seen, and Pacino is, truly, the Jew which Shakespeare drew. He’s unforgettable, as is Lily Rabe as Portia.

Elling, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, is an import from London, where it won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Brendan Fraser and Denis O’Hare star as two lunatics who first share a bedroom in an asylum, and later a flat in the outside world.

Fraser and O’Hare are hilarious, as is Jennifer Coolidge is various roles; but it’s not enough to save this loopy, terribly thin play, which is basically just a plotless series of episodes.

You could give this one a miss, unless you just can’t bear to miss Fraser and O’Hare.

This seems to be Open Season on lefties, for some reason. Amy Herzog’s  After the Revolution, at Playwrights Horizons, is a terrific drama about the adult children and grandchildren of a man who was blacklisted in the 1950s. His granddaughter, Emma, has established a foundation is his name to fight government oppression. She’s the last to know, though, that Grandpa actually was a spy for the Soviets, which means everything she has been brought up to believe is a lie.

Carolyn Cantor’s production is excellent overall, but the set just doesn’t work. It’s basically a living room which is supposed to represent different living rooms. No good. The actors, however, are great. My faves were Katherine Powell as Emma and Peter Friedman as her father, Ben. Friedman is one of our greatest stage actors, and is here seen in one of his finest roles.

My only quibble with the play is the anticlimactic last scene, wherein Emma tells her step-grandmother what she has decided to do about her foundation. The climax of the play is her confrontation with her father in the preceding scene, and it is here that her decision should have been revealed.

Aside from these quibbles, After the Revolution is a don’t-miss.

Richard Nelson’s That Hopey Changey Thing, which has just closed at the Public Theater, took a hard look at knee-jerk liberalism. It was about a family of liberal ideologues. The brother, played with his usual flair by Jay O. Sanders, is starting to veer to the right, and when he takes on his sisters’ liberal views, the sparks begin to fly.

Essentially, this was more extended debate than real play; but the debate was engaging and all the actors were terrific. I hope you saw it; but if you didn’t, you missed a humdinger.

Heidi Schreck’s There Are No More Big Secrets, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, is a gripping drama about a Russian journalist and her American husband who come to visit old friends. She’s on the lam from mysterious forces which want to kill her. He’s the ex-lover of his host’s wife.

Like That Hopey Changey Thing, this play is long on talk; but there’s enough action to keep you engaged, and the performers are terrific. There’s even a possibly supernatural mystery thrown into the mix, which I found fascinating.

Definitely check this one out.

Kim Rosenstock’s Tigers Be Still, which has just closed at the Roundabout Underground, was a compelling comic drama about a young woman who’s a tutor for a surly teenaged boy. She lives with her sister, who’s dreadfully depressed about her breakup with her boyfriend, and who spends all day sitting on the sofa drinking Jack Daniels and watching Top Gun.

Rosenstock’s writing was fresh and witty, and Sam Gold’s production captured her quirky style perfectly. All the actors were wonderful. I hope you had the chance to see this. Rosenstock is a real comer.

Spirit Control, at Manhattan Theatre Club, is strangely compelling play by Beau Willimon about an air traffic controller named Adam who tries but fails to help a distraught women land a plane whose pilot has died of a heart attack. This is so traumatic for him that he winds up losing his family after having an affair with a woman he meets in a bar. Or does he? This is one of those plays which seems like its central character is in the funhouse, gazing at endless reflections of himself. What’s real, and what’s fantasy? As it gets cleverer and cleverer, it gets weirder and weirder.

What sustains the evening is the brilliant performance by Jeremy Sisto as Adam. Mia Barron, as the mysterious Woman in the Bar, is also great. This one is definitely worth seeing.

Middletown, at the Vineyard Theatre, is a full length play by Will Eno, whose one-man play Thom Paine (About Nothing – as it certainly was) pretty much annoyed everyone to death excerpt The Times’ Charles Isherwood, who has raved about this new Eno play. I have to admit, it’s not nearly as annoying as Thom Paine, but that’s about the best I can say for it.

Eno sets his play in Middletown, sort of a generic small town in Middle America, and makes it a kind of contemporary Grovers Corners. His writing, a snarky imitation of Thornton Wilder with none of Wilder’s compassion and empathy for his characters, posits that the denizens of this “typical American town” are all either loopy or suffering from alienation and despair. Imagine Grovers Corners peopled with nothing but Simon Stimsons.

You could skip Middletown.

ELF. Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

ANGELS IN AMERICA. Signature Theatre Co., 555 W. 42^nd St.

TICKETS: 212-244-7529 (good luck …)

COLIN QUINN:  LONG STORY SHORT. Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W.44^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

ELLING. Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47^th St.

TICKETS: www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200

AFTER THE REVOLUTION. Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42^nd St.

TICKETS: www.ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200

THAT HOPEY CHANGEY THING. Public Theater. Alas, closed

THERE ARE NO MORE BIG SECRETS. Rattlestick Theatre, 224 Waverly Pl.

TICKETS: www.smarttix.xom or 212-868-4444

TIGERS BE STILL. Roundabout Underground. Alas, closed

SPIRIT CONTROL. Manhattan Theatre Club. City Center, 131 W. 55^th St.

TICKETS: 212-581-1212

MIDDLETOWN. Vineyard Theatre, 109 E. 15^th St.

TICKETS: 212-353-0303

“It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.”

—– George F. Will