On the Stage: What to See on Broadway Right Now

KEVIN SESSUMS

Kevin Sessums recently interviewed Jane Fonda and Moises Kaufman about the new play '33 Variations' for Towleroad, and recently reviewed the plays Our Town, The American Plan, and Ruined. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

I have been remiss lately writing my theatre reviews. I’ve been quite busy with other work as well as planning a five-week trek in northern Spain. Before I leave today for the trek, I thought I’d let you know about some of the great performances I’ve seen lately. I can’t remember a theatre season in which there have been so many stunningly good performances, both individual ones as well as those given by a play’s or musical’s ensemble.

First off, ensembles to catch:

There is no more ... well .. blissful time to be had on Broadway than the “happening” going on at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre where the revival of Hair is playing to packed houses. As a kid I listened to the original cast album over and over and over and I realized, while smiling through this revival, that I still know every lyric in the score. Sexy and moving and great fun, it will send you home dancing in the streets. It will bring back your own memories of listening to the score, I’m sure, or create new ones for you by seeing this wonderful revival. My sweetest one involved my grandmother, who raised me, always complaining about how dirty the lyrics were as I blasted them from the stereo in our country home back in Mississippi and asking me to turn off the record every time I played it. But then — quietly, unhurriedly — I’d hear her humming the Hair score to herself when she was shelling peas from our garden or reading her daily Bible passage. Go to the Hirshfeld and — quietly? unhurriedly? — let your own sun shine in. And just for the record: I adore Gavin Creel who plays Claude.

A totally different evening is Neil LaBute’s slightly kinder version of his off-Broadway hit, Reasons to be Pretty. The cast has been reconfigured since its off-Broadway run but it’s even better than before. Marin Ireland and Thomas Sadoski are particularly funny and surprisingly touching as the woman who isn’t pretty enough because the man she loves says so. It been beautifully directed by Terry Kinny.

God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza’s latest French boulevard comedy (translated by Christopher Hampton) may be the play with the best ensemble on Broadway. Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, and especially the great Marcia Gay Harden are giving an acting lesson in comic timing in this rather slight play. Indeed, I think Reza is the empress-with-no-clothes. Without these actors and the expert direction of Matthew Warchus, the play would be quite tiresome and a chore to sit through, much like her Art and Life x 3. The cast, however, is sublime. I’ve never laughed out loud so much at such hoary setups. It’s the hit of the season. Ninety intermissionless minutes of urbane savagery.

The emperor who majestically wore the clothes - playwright August Wilson - is receiving a production of his greatest play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, at the Belasco that again is an acting lesson as we watch the play’s ensemble do its work. I might give the God of Carnage crew a bit more credit since they have to deal with overcoming the play. The ensemble at Joe Turner have to rise to their play’s level and are able to ride its greatness which, at first blush, is found in its language. Whereas, the cast of God of Carnage is giving us a jazzlike fugue of marital mayhem, the cast of Joe Turner is a symphonic orchestra of history and religion and some August region past heartbreak that seers the soul.

Another master, Eugene O’Neill, is represented on Broadway in a literally stripped-down version of his Desire Under the Elms. Director Robert Falls has trimmed it to a carnal 100 minutes. The three leads - Brian Dennehy, Carla Gugino, and Pablo Schreiber — are giving volcanic performances. They have to in order to fill the St. James Theatre’s vastness. The set would look at home on the Met’s stage as would those performances. It’s basically a play about greed but in this production the physical desire is amped up. And Pablo Schreiber — for those of you who, like me, find him incredibly sexy — keeps his shirt off most of the time and his nude scene got me in touch with my own greedy desires. It’s the kind of production that takes the time — though it’s set in the 1920s — to pipe in a whole Bob Dylan song as the cast goes about its expert business on stage. As odd as it is, it’s a better use of Dylan than anything Twyla Tharp came up with in her disastrous musical a few seasons back based on his music.

Much more, AFTER THE JUMP...

Closeted Gay Politicians Hung Out to Dry in Outrage

Last night I had the opportunity to see the first final cut of Outrage shown to the public, before its opening at the Tribeca Film Festival. For those who have not yet heard of Outrage, it's a documentary by Kirby Dick (This Film is Not Yet Rated) about closeted Republican hypocrites and the way their hypocrisy damages lives — not only their personal lives but the millions of gays and lesbians their homophobic policymaking affects.

It's a well-packaged effort covering the Reagan years and the birth of the religious right to the present, wrapping up the stories of Idaho Senator Larry Craig, Virginia Rep. Ed Schrock, former NJ Governor Jim McGreevey, Mark Foley, former NYC Mayor Ed Koch, 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign manager Ed Mehlman, former GOP National Field Director Dan Gurley, former Arizona congressman Jim Kolbe, former Louisiana congressman Jim McCrery, and current congressman David Dreier, into a tightly wound exposé of closeted D.C.

It's the first major piece of media which has painted such a comprehensive, unflinching look at the GOP's closet.

The film shines an especially unflattering spotlight on Florida Governor Charlie Crist, devoting much of its time to the stories that have already been told (by alternative press) about the governor, and his various relationships with women which have fallen conveniently during campaign periods. It also asks why mainstream media has refused to cover them.

The filmmakers attempted to talk to Kelly Heyniger (pictured, with Crist), Crist's last girlfriend before marrying wife Carole Rome in the run-up to McCain's VP pick. His relationship with Heyniger ended in 2007. The filmmakers wanted to ask her about his sexuality.

Heyniger told them: "I think I'll just keep my mouth shut...call me in 10 years and I'll tell you a story."

The early efforts of Michelangelo Signorile in outing politicians, and the crusades of blogger Mike Rogers (blogactive) are also highlighted.

Dick's deft layering of audio tapes, interviews, and sexual confessions against the anti-gay votes these politicians have made reveals how journalists and the mainstream media, which the film ultimately damns for its refusal to expose hypocrisy, have been complicit in keeping public figures in the closet.

And the tragic and horrific effect the closet has had on LGBT rights and public policy is made all the more clear.

The film features interviews with Jim McGreevey, Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff (who tells the story of how he met FOX News anchor Shepard Smith in a gay bar), Idaho statesman reporter Dan Popkey, former Luxembourg ambassador Jim Hormel, David Phillips, the D.C. IT technologist who tells his story about sleeping with Larry Craig in graphic detail, DC City Council member David Catania, former HRC director Elizabeth Birch, BlogActive blogger Mike Rogers, Gurley, Andrew Sullivan, congressman Barney Frank, Michelangelo Signorile, Hilary Rosen, former LCR exec. director Rich Tafel, Tammy Baldwin, Tony Kushner, and many more.

The film opens May 8.

On the Stage: Our Town, The American Plan, and Ruined

KEVIN SESSUMS

Kevin Sessums recently interviewed Jane Fonda and Moises Kaufman about the new play '33 Variations' for Towleroad, and recently reviewed the plays Becky Sharp and The Third Story. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

Before I write about three plays I’ve seen recently, I must sadly pay homage to a couple of theatre greats — first the playwright Horton Foote, who lived a long life and died at 92, and the actress, Natasha Richardson, who lived much too short a life and died this week at age 45.

I didn’t get around to reviewing Foote’s last play on Broadway before it closed — the divine comedy Dividing the Estate — but it was one of the most pleasurable evenings I spent in the theatre this season. When I was a young man trying to find my way in New York City I got a job being a reader of scripts for a big-time movie company and offering my written critiques of them. As a first assignment I was handed a script titled Tender Mercies by someone I, at that point, had never heard of named Horton Foote.

Much more glib than knowledgeable or wise, I wrote a horridly mean critique of the script, which went on to be made anyway and to win a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Foote. I’ve spent all the years since realizing what a boob I was for writing that critique of a man who has been rightly described as the Texas Chekhov. His actress daughter Hallie, who gave one of the season’s funniest and fiercest performances in Dividing the Estate, was her father’s favorite interpreter. My deeply felt condolences go out to her and the entire Foote family.

As they do to Natasha’s family and friends. I met Natasha several times at parties and baby showers because we shared some of those same friends. You always knew what part of the room she was in because of the sound of her throaty laughter. Always kindhearted and concerned about your well-being, she was instrumental in helping one of my best friends finally kick his cigarette habit when none of us could get him to do it. Yet I was often a bit cowed in her presence — and I am not the cowed type — because of my memories of seeing her onstage as the title character in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie opposite her husband, Liam Neeson; as Anna in Closer (the role Julia Roberts played in the Mike Nichols film of the Patrick Marber play); as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire; and, most thrillingly, as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. I never thought anyone could obliterate the image of Liza Minnelli in the film version of that role, but Natasha certainly did. It was one of the most devastating and heartbreaking performances I’ve ever seen. I never went back to see other actresses in the part during the musical’s long run because I didn’t want to sully the memory of her in the role.

She was, as Alexander Woollcott wrote in 1921 of the original production of Anna Christie, "singularly engrossing." As enthralling as she was on the stage, she was even more so off one. Jane Fonda has a lovely remembrance of her as a small girl on the set of Julia in which Fonda co-starred with her mother, Vanessa Redgrave. You can find it on Fonda’s blog. And she grew up to be more than just an actress. Because her father, the director Tony Richardson, died of complications from AIDS, she also was a tireless activist and fundraiser regarding HIV/AIDS.

Again, as Woollcott wrote of Anna Christie: "It came to the chronic playgoers like a swig of strong, black coffee to one who has been sipping pink lemonade." That was what it was like to be in Natasha’s presence. She was so invigorating and vibrant and full of life that it is hard to fathom that such a woman has so suddenly been taken from us.

My heart breaks for her children and for her husband and for her whole family, especially her mother, who last appeared on Broadway playing the role of Joan Didion. In that role in the one-woman show based on Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking, Redgrave played a grief-stricken woman who has to watch her daughter slip into a coma and then slip away forever. The mind boggles at the Pirandello-like aspect of all of this. But it mustn’t all get too theatrical when discussing this most theatrical of families. This is real life. And it is truly tragic.

 ***OUR TOWN

The most truthful and tragic of all American plays is Our Town. In fact, I consider it the greatest American play of the 20th Century and it is appropriate to be writing about it when discussing the fragility of life, which is one of its main themes. There are arguments to be made for O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night or Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire or Tony Kushner’s Angels in America or Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but I think Thornton Wilder’s Our Town trumps them all with its incongruous simplicity as it taps into each chronic playgoers complexity of emotions regarding his or her own life’s experiences. It is the most resonant of American dramas.

An aside: I interviewed Edward Albee recently for the sequel to my memoir, Mississippi Sissy. We got to talking about Wilder, who was a kind of mentor to him. "I started out writing poems when I was about eleven," Edward told me. "I stopped writing poems when I started writing plays when I was 27. I showed some of my poems to Thornton Wilder. I knew him rather well, though he was a very, very closeted and tortured gay man. Very closeted. You could say it was the times. But it was the man too. He read the poems and offered some succint advice: 'Perhaps, Edward, you should write plays.'"

The emotional succinctness of Our Town is certainly highlighted in the revelatory production it is now receiving at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village. It is one of the most stunning productions I have seen in years and if you love the theatre you would be remiss if you skipped it because of memories of being bored by other productions of the play — in high school or college or community theatre. This production, which was originally staged at Chicago’s Hypocrites Theatre, by director David Cromer, will shake away the cobwebs of any bad memories you have of thinking the play is hackneyed or dated. Cromer — who did such a stunningly effective job of directing the musical of The Adding Machine last season — even plays the Stage Manager himself in this production. "This is the way we were," he recites Wilder’s lines but has staged it to remind us that this is the way most decidedly are. Indeed, Cromer’s name is as big as Wilder’s on the front of the program — and rightly so. He has taken the play and mined it for its essential truths. He has also cast it exquisitely. The actors could not be bettered. And, at the end, there is a coup de theatre that is so organic to Wilder’s intentions and yet so surprising it will take your breath away.

I’ll admit I began to cry during the choir rehearsal in the first act and was teary the rest of the play. By the end, I was close to sobs. I don’t want to spoil it for you with too much description or to be too over-blown with my praise. But any reader out there who loves the theatre should get down to Barrow Street promptly. Because of the demand for tickets in the small space, the run has been extended already through September. But be warned — be prepared to experience the play, not just to watch it.

T T T T (out of 4 possible T's)

Our Town, Barrow Street Theatre, 27 Barrow Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***THE AMERICAN PLAN

There are two other productions worth catching — both produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club. At first, I thought that the two plays could not be more different. But then I realized at their roots they are about survival and how, at times, the most beastly of maternal influences can be the very impetus that propels us to survive.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

On the Stage: Becky Shaw and The Third Story

KEVIN SESSUMS

Kevin Sessums recently reviewed 'Pal Joey' and 'Hedda Gabbler' as well as 'Billy Elliot', 'Shrek', '13', and 'Prayer for My Enemy' for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

In my review of Hedda Gabbler last week, I mentioned the great late 19th/ early 20th Century actress Minnie Maddern Fiske. Mrs. Fiske’s most famous title role, however, was that of Becky Sharp back in 1899, a play she revived in 1904 and 1911 — and a role for which Miriam Hopkins received an Oscar nomination in 1936. A bit more trivia: Billie Burke — many most fondly recall her as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz or as the wife of Flo Ziegfeld or, as I do, the harried hostess Millicent Jordon in George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight — played Lady Bareacres in that same Hopkins movie based on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

Such trivial thoughts went through my own harried mind during the early longueurs of Becky Shaw, the new comedy at Second Stage that purposefully recalls that earlier Becky who cunningly made her way up through British society of the early 19th century. This Becky (Annie Parisse) — who doesn’t turn up in this play until half way through it — is just as cunning but much more passive/aggressive, as befits the 21st Century. (Myrna Loy starred as Becky Sharp in her own updating of the novel to the 20th Century in a 1932 movie that borrowed the title of the novel — and, yes, I’m choosing to ignore Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick-like take on the part.) Two other characters in Becky Shaw possess this same passive/aggressive trait - Suzanna (Emily Bergl) and her feminist husband Andrew (now played by Daniel Eaves), who fix up Becky on a blind date with Suzanna’s adoptive brother Max (David Wilson Barnes).

The unflinchingly unsentimental Max and Susanna’s mother, the acerbic Susan who gallantly copes with a case of multiple sclerosis (Kelly Bishop) are anything but passive/aggressive. At first these two — Max and Susan — seem the villains in the piece and yet by the end it is their gimlet-eyed take on romance and life itself that endears us to them as the other three characters are bleary eyed from gazing at their own navels. All the characters share a lacerating neediness but it is Max and Susan who take that neediness and fashion an outward toughness that masks the only true tenderness to be found in this comedy that can be downright mean when reaching for its punchlines — which is not to say I did not laugh a lot and out loud.

David Wilson Barnes almost steals the show as Max. He plays the part as if he is the long-lost son of Kevin Spacey and Vince Vaughn. There is a glibness he is able to call forth that seems to be fomented by equal parts anger and anguish. I say almost steals the show because it is Kelly Bishop — the original Sheila in A Chorus Line — who walks stiffly away with it in her two fiendishly funny scenes that begin and end the play.

One of the problems, however, seems to be that the playwright Gina Gionfriddo, took the other part of Thackeray’s title — A Novel Without A Hero — too literally. There is no one finally to root for in this comedy of bad manners, directed by Peter DuBois. The text keeps changing focus. The audience, like the characters themselves, seems a bit lost at the end of the evening.

T T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

Becky Shaw, 2econd Stage Theatre, 307 w. 43rd Street, New York. Ticket information here (closes March 15th.

***THE THIRD STORY

I’d love to see the great Charles Busch adapt or update Vanity Fair and play either Becky Sharp or Lady Bareacres. It might be a bit more entertaining than watching his labored efforts at portraying his latest creations — Queenie Bartlett, an Ida-Lupino-like B-movie gangstress and Baba Yaga, a crone-like witch in the grimmest of fairy tales — in his play, The Third Story, which was originally produced at the La Jolla Playhouse and is now having its New York premiere at MCC Theater’s outpost at the Lucille Lortel on Christopher Street.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

On the Stage: Pal Joey and Hedda Gabbler

KEVIN SESSUMS

Kevin Sessums recently reviewed 'Billy Elliot', 'Shrek', '13', and 'Prayer for My Enemy' as well as 'Back Back Back' and 'Farragut North' for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

Before I begin, I’d like to address the controversy of my knowing some of the people involved in shows that I review. There were some pretty heated comments after my last posting regarding my mentioning I was friends with Shrek’s director, Jason Moore, as well as two of the founders of Dreamworks, the main producer of the musical. My ethics were called into question. I feel, however, it would have been unethical if I had kept those friendships a secret under the specific circumstances that arose for this production so was very clear in the review re: those friendships, opening myself up for the harshness of the comments that followed. After living in this city for 34 years and having good friends in the theatre community, I have often known people involved in many of the shows I cover for Towleroad. I have given bad reviews to some of them, good reviews to others. Additionally, this is not the New York Times. There is no second or third theatre critic to whom to hand an assignment when these issues arise.

One of the very first reviews I did for Towleroad was for Fuerzabruta which was produced by another good buddy of mine, David Binder. I was even a guest of his at that show on one occasion. I certainly was not kind to that. Some might even characterize that review as overly snarky and dismissive. Another example: I was in the first Tales of the City with Laura Linney, which didn’t make me pull my punches when I, for the first time, had to admit I thought she was giving a bad performance in the Roundabout’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

The Roundabout's current two productions — Pal Joey and Hedda Gabler — have mostly been the recipients of critical opprobrium. I found Pal Joey more mediocre than bad and am in the minority regarding my opinion of Hedda, which I found rather brave in its utter outlandishness. Indeed, I haven’t found one friend who agrees with me about Hedda. It seems to be universally hated.

First Pal Joey. It is the most famous of Rodgers and Hart musicals and is based on a series of The New Yorker short stories written by John O’Hara which tells the sweet yet sordid saga of Joey Evans, a Chicago gangster-era gigolo. Richard Rodgers himself once said that Joey wasn’t "disreputable because he was mean, but because he had too much imagination to behave himself, and because he was a little weak."

Richard Greenberg has refashioned the John O’Hara book for the 1940 musical, a book that was “influenced” by the show’s first director, George Abbott, during the show’s out of town tryouts when O’Hara was absent — which was most of the time. Greenberg adds a gay subplot to the book and most notably deletes the female reporter from Act II — Melba — who was portrayed by Elaine Stritch in the show’s premiere. For those of you who saw her one-woman show on Broadway, you must remember Stritch’s breakneck anecdote about singing “Zip,” her showstopper from the musical. Greenberg has now combined the character with Gladys, the hard-knock chorine, originally played by June Havoc in the 1940 production. Havoc, now 95, is Gypsy Rose Lee’s little sister and the real Baby June of Gyspy fame. The role of Gladys has now been taken over by the brilliant Martha Plimpton (above, right). She steals the show and I kept thinking in twenty years she’d make a great Mama Rose in, yes, yet another revival of that show I’ve always wondered if Havoc must secretly hate.

The role of Joey was originated by Gene Kelly. Others who have played him are Bob Fosse, Peter Gallagher, Chris Chadman, and, in the 1957 film version, Frank Sinatra. There is a bit of a Shirley-MacLaine-as-Cinderella story to this production’s Joey getting the job. Matthew Risch was the understudy for Christian Hoff, who was first cast in the role until he sustained an injury during the previews and director Joe Mantello decided to go with Risch all the way. There is also a bit of a real gay subplot regarding Risch’s taking the role. He is openly gay and Joey’s stock-and-trade is his blatant heterosexuality. Gay men have had to watch avowedly straight men play gay characters over and over and over, so it’s nice to see an openly gay man play so blatantly a straight one. (Neil Patrick Harris has started a trend perhaps.) But, to use Rodgers’ phrase, Risch is a little weak where star quality is concerned. It is a fine performance — though not a great one. And Joey needs to wow an audience just as he so viscerally wows Vera, the society doyenne who beds and bankrolls him. Joey lives to seduce. It’s as effortless to him as breathing. Risch shows us too much of the effort.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

On the Stage: Billy Elliot, Shrek, 13, and Prayer for My Enemy

Kevin Sessums recently reviewed 'Back Back Back' and 'Farragut North' as well as 'Streamers' and 'The Language of Trees' for Towleroad. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

If you have family in town this holiday season or just want to treat yourself and a friend or lover to a Broadway musical, then here are three of the season’s top choices if you’re looking for stories that focus on being an outsider — which, let’s face it, is more often than not the coming-of-age tale that most gay men and lesbians live through and survive as best we can. Such tales leave some of us with emotional scars. Others with an overly sardonic sense of humor. And most with a love of escapism that first finds its tap-happy footing in the soundtracks of the Broadway musicals we listened to as children when we chose to check out Angela Lansbury’s latest Sondheim solo or more easily hummable Jerry Herman number instead of spending a Saturday afternoon facing the fear of others finding out that throwing a piece of spherical sports equipment didn’t come as naturally to us as discovering just the right gesture while lip-synching “Rose’s Turn,” along with Lansbury’s recording of Gypsy or “We Need a Little Christmas” from Mame. I know. I know. That’s not a universal truth so all you jism-lovin’ jocks and lesbians who love a free-throw line keep your comments to yourself.

Yet we all — jocks and lesbians and lip-synchers alike — need a little Christmas right about now. Let’s start with Billy Elliot. Based on the 2000 movie of the same title, the idea for the musicalization of the film was first suggested by Elton John’s partner, David Furnish, after they saw the premiere of the movie at the Cannes Film Festival, which gives the already gay-friendly story even more gay middle-brow bona fides. Friends with Stephen Daldry, who is the director of the film as well as the musical, Furnish and John convinced him it was worth a try. They were right. Though the musical doesn’t work as well as the movie, it is still a laudable achievement in its own right.

The story of a working-class boy whose father and brother are in the midst of a 1984 coal mining strike in union-buster Margaret Thatcher’s England, Billy Elliot is filled with politics as well as pirouettes. Billy’s mother is dead and his grandmother is helping raise him. When he discovers his love of dance, his dad at first forbids him from taking classes but finally finds it in his hardened strike-weary heart to allow his son to audition for the Royal Ballet school where he is accepted.

Billy is played, in rotation, by three young actor/singer/dancers. The night I saw it the role was magnificently filled by Trent Kowalik, a local kid from Long Island, who has also appeared in the role on the West End in London. He finds just the combination of fierce athleticism, prepubescent sensitivity, and a sad sweetness that transforms into a transcendent kind of artistry right before our eyes. Gregory Jbara touches any hardened heart as the father and Carole Shelley, as the grandmother, has a show-stopping first-act number, “We’d Go Dancing.” But it is the first act’s final number titled “Angry Dance,” in which all the story’s elements coalesce into one of the most stunning musical numbers I’ve ever seen.

The show could use a bit more of that anger for it often veers off rather treacherously into treacle — especially in the fantasy segments when Billy, while dancing with his adult self, literally takes flight as if Peter Martins is playing Peter Pan. Yet whenever its at its treacly worst, Daldry and the musical’s lyricist and book writer, Lee Hall — who was also the screenwriter of the film — have the cynical good sense to bring back onstage the ballet teacher in the gangly form of Haydn Gwynne. She finds all the hard-knock humor and heartbreak in the role of the middle-aged harridan who dares Billy to dream his dreams even if she has ceased to dream hers. And the night I saw the show, the role of Michael, Billy’s young cross-dressing best friend was played by Frank Dolce, a little fireplug who doesn’t have a treacly bone in his body, even when it's outfitted in the most flowery of dresses. Incongruously — and brilliantly — he played the role more as a toughened rascal than a pitiable little pantywaiste. The number he performed with Kowalik, “Expressing Yourself,” brought the house down.

Elton John has bragged that he wrote the music for the show in two weeks — and all I can say to that is thank God for the orchestrations of Martin Koch. The exhuberant, inventive and often moving choreography is by Peter Darling, whose surname just may explain why he went so eye-rollingly overboard in that homage to Peter Pan.

T T T 1/2 (out of 4 possible T's)

Billy Elliot, Imperial Theatre, 249 W 45th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***SHREK

Another outsider shaking up Broadway — and dividing critics pro and con — is the title character of the Dreamworks interpretation of cartoonist William Steig’s singular creation, Shrek, that green ogre who scares the story’s townspeople but delights children, as they say, of all ages. The Yiddish word “shrek,” means “alarm or fright” and the Broadway musical is frightfully good. It is also the gayest show on Broadway — except, perhaps, for Liza’s concert now at the Palace. The original movie was irreverent, but the musical takes that irreverence and revs it up a few notches. And there are inside theatre-maven jokes throughout. The show borders on being high camp and yet the innocent laughter of the kids in the audience loudly laces the more jaded howls of delight of the adults accompanying them into a lovely melange of ... well ... enchantment.

I must admit that Jason Moore, the show’s director, is an old friend of mine and he asked me to see the show early on and give him my thoughts about it. I was also his guest on opening night. And I’ve known Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen — two of Dreamworks founders — even longer than I’ve known Jason. So take my praise of the show with many grains of salt. But I honestly can say that after seeing it twice now that it is one of the most delightful evenings on Broadway. It is, in a word, a hoot.

The idea for making a Broadway musical out of the movie of Shrek was director Sam Mendes’s. He talked Katzenberg into doing it and Mendes’s company, Aurora Productions, is listed as one of the show’s producers. Katzenberg and Mendes are known as hands-on types of guys and I’m sure they had a lot of say regarding the final shape of the show. And yet it is obvious that the creators were given much leeway since the source material wasn’t viewed as sacrosanct. The music by Jeanine Tesori, whose previous credits include Caroline, or Change and Thoroughly Modern Millie, and the lyrics and book by David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Rabbit Hole, are delightful and, at times, moving. Jason, who directed Avenue Q, has given Shrek that show’s same kind of snarky yet kindhearted pizzazz. Shrek seems like an off-Broadway musical that has been slipped some steriods.

The main problem of the movie — and the musical — is that the title character is a bit of a virescent lump. But Brian d’Arcy James brings as much vigor and personality as he can underneath all that costuming and make-up. Daniel Breaker, as the Art Carney character to Shrek’s Jackie Gleason, plays Donkey a bit limp-hooved but he certainly has his hilarious moments. Christopher Sieber, as Lord Farquaad, almost steals the show with his protrayal of the vertically challenged monarch. I’ll let you discover how the show’s creators have met their own challenge in making his lack of stature seem so real. Suffice to say, it’s more than a sight gag. It’s a running sight joke — at times literally so.

But no one can steal a show that Sutton Foster is in. She plays Princess Fiona and she is truly a Broadway musical star — and should be a star of even bigger magnitude. There seems no justice in the show business world when Cameron Diaz, who lent her voice to the cartoon character of Fiona, is foisted upon us as a mega-star with her limited talent and Foster is still only largely known by New York theatergoers. With her singing and comic timing, Foster is able singlehandedly to make these depressing times we’re living in seem less depressing and is worth the steep price of admission all by herself. Her opening “Juliet Prowse number,” in the second act, as I described it to Jason when I first saw the show, is the highlight of Shrek. If it were still possible to second-act shows — as I did so often when I first moved here in the 1970s — I’d suggest those of you out there who’ve already blown your Christmas budgets on presents for your family members to do just that simply to see what a true Broadway star can do when given the material. I adore Foster who is in the same lineage of Broadway stars as, yes, Angela Lansbury. And she’s a better dancer too. See this show for her alone.

T T T (out of 4 possible T's)

Shrek the Musical, Broadway Theatre, 1681 Broadway, New York. Ticket information here.

***13

If tickets for Billy Elliot and Shrek are scarce over the holidays and you have a young niece or nephew in town, then I’d suggest you take them to see Jason Robert Brown’s 13 before it closes in January. I saw it a couple of months ago and found it a delight — if you accept it on its own terms. Again, it is a story of an outsider — a Jewish boy who moves to Indiana and has his bar mitzvah there among the cornfed Protestants of that state. The cast is all amazingly talented and it’s always a treat and pleasure to see young performers full of such joy to be performing.

I took the now 14-year-old I’ve mentored for the last seven years and he had a great time at the show, identifying with several of the characters up on the stage. And so did his old gay mentor, remembering what it was like to want to be accepted by the cool kids in school as I instead trudged home to put on another soundtrack so I could secretly practice my lip-synching.

T T (out of 4 possible T's)

13, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***PRAYER FOR MY ENEMY

An additional heads-up: If you're fans of Victoria Clark (who won a Tony for Light in the Piazza) or Jonathan Groff (who should have won a Tony for Spring Awakening who was so great as Claude this summer in Central Park in The Public's production of Hair) or director Bartlett Sher (a Tony winner for South Pacific) or playwright Craig Lucas (two-time Obie winner for Best Play for Prelude to a Kiss and Small Tragedy and should have won one for The Dying Gaul) then check out the production of Prayer for My Enemy at Playwrights Horizons that is closing this Sunday December 21st. It is a difficult play to like — a drama with Tourette's syndrome-like internal monologues spicing up the usual dialogue. Lucas is always an interesting playwright and the performances are, at times, shattering. But the text becomes a bit too platitudinous for my taste. Again, it is a story of outsiders and how one's very outsiderness can gnaw away at one's sense of self and family and the very notion of a cohesive society.

T T (out of 4 possible T's)

Prayer for My Enemy, Playwrights Horizons Mainstage, 416 West 42nd Street, New York. Ticket information here.

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