After Miss Julie

GRADE: C+

A Version of Stridberg's Miss Julie By Patrick Marber, Directed by Mark Brokaw. At the American Airlines Theater. (CLOSED)

Earning everything from an A from David Cote to a rare F- from Terry Teachout, After Miss Julie is a case in which the critics agree about nothing. Sienna Miller is spellbinding and brilliant and delivers a harrowing performance! Or wait, no, she just walks around looking skinny. Patrick Marber's setting the play during the night that Labor took Parliament in 1945 and ousted Winston Churchill is a stroke of genius! No, wait, it simply mires the play in unnecessary class politics that obscure rather than enlighten. Even the reviews with similar grades disagree, with some praising the adaptation but not the acting, and others believing the acting saves a pointless update of the material. The only points of consensus: Mark Brokaw's staging, Marin Ireland's performance (when mentioned), and Allen Moyer's set design all come out with generally favorable marks.

NYMag A
(Stephanie Zacharek) August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie is lauded as a great work, but I’m not so sure about that. It’s a terse, cold play that examines an archetypal hysterical female, locked into rigid ideas of sex and class, as if she were a bug under a jar. It is scarily persistent, though, and Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie is the rare reimagining of a classic play that may actually improve upon the original. This passionate reworking shifts the setting to a country estate outside London in 1945—when the differences between lower and upper classes were supposedly dissolving—and strives to understand Strindberg’s confused characters instead of just diagnosing them.

Backstage A
(Erik Haagensen) After Roundabout's recent Bye Bye Birdie debacle, it's heartening to be able to report that the company has bounced back with a gripping production of Patrick Marber's After Miss Julie, his reworked version of Strindberg's classic...Film star Sienna Miller essays the title character. Though this is only her second stage appearance, she is clearly to the medium born. She wrings every nuance from her mercurial character and is particularly adept at suggesting the damaged girl within this restless and unhappy young woman. While Miller's beauty lights up the American Airlines Theatre, she doesn't rely upon it and is indeed fearless in abandoning it when necessary. When Miss Julie's fantasies of running off with John to New York to start a new life collapse, Miller turns her character's attempt to reassert her class privileges into a throbbing wound. Even when Miss Julie's actions threaten to destroy everyone around her, Miller makes her selfishness understandable and even sympathetic.

NY1 A
(David Cote) Of New York’s big nonprofit theaters, none has a weakness for star casting like the Roundabout Theatre Company. They seem incapable of mounting a show without a celebrity, however minor or unsuited to the task. But sometimes it actually works, as with "After Miss Julie," starring the lovely and unexpectedly potent Sienna Miller...Matching her for passion and rage is Jonny Lee Miller, athletic and forceful, but capable of shrinking into childlike terror as John. Together, they dance a toxic tango that’s sexy, dangerous and thrilling to watch.

Chicago Tribune A-
(Chris Jones) This is a very clever and consistently arresting script — Marber infuses the original drama with an upstairs-downstairs sense of social tension, but also recognizes that this was always mostly a play about sex. Thus this play...both captures the throbbing sensuality of its source and offers a juicy look at frustrated but ill-equipped Brits desperate to escape the post-war inertia of the grey world outside the manor. The eminently watchable Millers find two aptly contrasting modes of frustration — Sienna Miller's Julie is a spoiled self-hater with violent sexual desires (a danger of celebrity in any era), and a consequent need to switch at whim from aggressor to victim. Meanwhile, Jonny Lee Miller is like a caged animal, pacing the kitchen after being forced to switch from powerful soldier-killer to subservient shoe-shiner. No wonder he wants to sleep with his needy boss.

USAToday B
(Elysa Gardner) Julie's motives and her attraction to John (and his to her) are more complicated, though. As her personal background is revealed, Miller makes her desperation and desire palpable. She's at once willful and confused, sad and irritating. It is, for all its surface bravado — Miller speaks loudly and crisply, almost spitting out her lines at times — a nuanced performance. As John, British actor Jonny Lee Miller (no relation) is a worthy partner — a sparring partner. In character, the Millers can often seem poised to either kiss or punch each other, and it can be difficult to discern which. But if director Mark Brokaw milks the heated chemistry between John and Julie, he also allows them moments of sly wit and affecting tenderness.

AP B
(Michael Kuchwara) The Roundabout Theatre Company production, which opened Thursday at its American Airlines Theatre, demonstrates that Marber's updating and transplanting of the Scandinavian drama to post-World War II England works, for the most part, just fine.

Lighting and Sound America B
(David Barbour) If After Miss Julie must be listed under the season's misfires, it's a classy and fascinating one, put together by people of real talent. The problem is, what do we make of August Strindberg today -- and what of value does he have to say to us?

Hollywood Reporter B
(Frank Scheck) Certainly, Marber's version traffics in an erotic frankness at which Strindberg could only hint. But the updating really does the play no favors, as it only accentuates its less-subtle aspects. Hewing fairly closely to the original, "After Miss Julie" seems more like a footnote than a genuinely thoughtful reinvention. Still, the evening has its fascinations. In a more modern context, the psychological gamesmanship takes on an even deeper resonance. And Mark Brokaw's tense staging, though lacking the intimacy of the original Donmar Warehouse production, is very effective.

Theater News Online B
(Patrick Lee) The other two performances, under Mark Brokaw‘s direction, are consistently successful. Lee Miller brings a palpable, almost animal frustration to his portrayal of John that makes believable the character’s visceral attraction to Miss Julie. You can feel a lifetime of buried, hopeless ambition behind John’s every move. Ireland brings life to what could be a thankless “quiet dignity” role by emphasizing Christine’s intelligence. For the majority of the production, when all three actors are on the same page, After Miss Julie is charged, stimulating theatre.

NY Daily News B-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Miller, making her Broadway debut, is improbably beautiful, every inch the "fine-looking filly" John calls her. She's committed and competent, but her performance is a shade monochromatic, not modulated enough to make Miss Julie's jagged edges sharp. Jonny Lee Miller, whose résumé is studded with London theater roles plus TV's "Eli Stone," also makes his New York debut. He's a dynamic, striking presence as the servant whose post-coital glow turns to ice once reality bites. Marin Ireland completes the cast as John's pragmatic fiancee, Christine, the family cook. A Tony nominee for Reasons to Be Pretty, she adds sizzle with withering stares that could peel paint - or flay flesh.

TheaterMania B-
(David Finkle) Director Mark Brokaw production is initially quite effective, but as it proceeds -- especially after Miss Julie and John have gone to his room to consummate their relationship, and after Christine has discovered them and later confronts him (none of which Strindberg strictly specified) -- the mood switches from genuinely theatrical to histrionic. Among its more problematic moments are the killing of Miss Julie's pet bird and its bloody aftermath (real and symbolic), which require a dramatic delicacy not entirely brought off by its leading lady.

NYPost B-
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Strindberg described his heroine as having a "weak and degenerate brain," a strain of misogyny that made his play devastating. This isn't the Julie of Marber, director Mark Brokaw or Sienna Miller. John doesn't feel brutal enough, either. (Only the brilliant Marin Ireland, in the thankless part of the cook, succeeds in playing varying emotions, which move across her face like shifting clouds.) It's this fear -- or inability -- of making the two leads as unhinged or as odious as they need to be that keeps "After Miss Julie" from taking off.

Entertainment Weekly C
(Jeff Labrecque) When the audience is finally willing to accept that John is merely the instrument for Julie's self-destruction, the play inconveniently asserts the lovers' long-suppressed pining for each other, which only underlines the performers' shortcomings. The two lovers trade verbal blows, while deciding whether to run away to New York City. ''The Americans are charmed by us,'' says poor, bland John. ''They die for the accent.'' I wish it were so.

North Jersey C
(Robert Feldberg) After Miss Julie is never dull, but the characters don't invite much involvement; you regard them as you would curiosities in a sideshow. More than crazy passion is needed for a drama to hit home.

NYTimes C-
(Ben Brantley) While Mr. Miller and Ms. Miller are undeniably attractive people, their Julie and John don’t seem terribly attractive to each other, a serious problem. There is one early moment of real erotic tension, when Julie extends her leg and asks John to kiss her shoe. Ms. Miller looks smug at first, then saucy, then distinctly uncomfortable and finally a bit frightened, as Julie wonders what she has let herself in for. Mr. Miller snatches at that pretty foot like a ravenous fish going after a hooked worm. Unfortunately, he — and we — are destined to stay hungry for the rest of the night.

Bloomberg C-
(John Simon) Logic, a bit stretched even in Strindberg, is out the window in Marber. Nevertheless, something of the original survives, and this, given also the occasional witticism (Julie: Do I shock you? John: Not as much as you’d like to) makes the play watchable. Mark Brokaw, the director, has observed almost too well Strindberg’s request for extensive silences when only one character or none is onstage, or when conversation is supposed to bog down awkwardly. This is unusual and impressive. Moreover, he makes good use of the large, well-appointed set, on which distance between characters and flurries of movement can be effectively exploited. Strindbergian naturalism is well served.

Newsday D+
(Linda Winer) And so it is with After Miss Julie, Patrick Marber's pointless and pretty toothless British update of August Strindberg's 19th century Swedish power-play about class and sexual warfare. To be fair, there is sort of a point to director Mark Brokaw's good-looking production - that is, the fan-mag matchup of young British celebu-stars Sienna Miller and Jonny Lee Miller (no relation) with characters intended to shock audiences since 1888. Both prove to be real actors - but especially he does, as he twitches and flips between being an upward-mobile hustler and a besotted slave to the landowner's overheated daughter, who hunts him down in the huge old kitchen of the estate (meticulously designed by Allen Moyer).

On Off Broadway D+
(Matt Windman) Mark Brokaw's production features so many pauses that it makes the short play feel too long. Still, it benefits from a very realistic set design depicting a large, cluttered kitchen and a generally impressive three-member cast. Tabloid starlet Sienna Miller, who is making her Broadway debut as the title character, enters the stage with aggressive sexual authority, enough to melt down any man who enters her path. But as the play progresses, her attempts to convey Julie's fragile emotions and sudden desperation feel forced and artificial.

Variety D
(David Rooney) That's some handsome country kitchen Allen Moyer has designed for After Miss Julie, with its chunky farm table, its sideboard stacked with Wedgewood and its oven range fringed by hanging copper pots and hissing steam. Pity there's so little cooking in Mark Brokaw's enervated production. Like Strindberg's play, Patrick Marber's blunt postwar-English update of the 1888 drama about class and sex requires an actress capable of negotiating wild swings and reversals. But Sienna Miller is out of her depth in the title role, making her dance of power and death an unaffecting tragedy.

TalkinBroadway D
(Matthew Murray) Can one determined cook save a broth spoiled by too many interlopers? As it turns out in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s underpowered new production of After Miss Julie, the answer is no - but it’s a close call. Were it not for Marin Ireland, who plays the kitchen worker Christine, Patrick Marber’s play at the American Airlines would be far too soupy for even diehard gourmands to digest. But her presence adds a dash of desperately needed seasoning to an almost parodically watery evening.

New Jersey Newsroom D
(Michael Sommers) Unless someone is an unconditional fan of either Miller, there's little reason to see Roundabout Theatre Company's so-what production, which, considering the questionable necessity for reviving the piece at all these days, might better be titled "Why Miss Julie?"

Wall Street Journal F-
(Terry Teachout) Mr. Marber claims that After Miss Julie is "in its way, truer" than the original play on which it's based, but all he's done for Miss Julie is tart it up with politics and vulgarize it beyond recognition. As for Ms. Miller, a model turned second-tier movie star, all she does is stalk around the stage striking vampy poses and looking really, really skinny. I almost felt sorry for her, but the truth is that she has no more business playing a classic stage role than I have posing for the cover of Vogue. The Roundabout Theatre Company should be ashamed of itself for asking her to do so.

NY A 13; BS A 13; NY1 A 13; CT A- 12; USA B 10; AP B 10; THR B 10; LSA B 10; TNO B 10; NYP B- 9; TM B- 9; NYDN B- 9; EW C 7; NJ C 7; NYT C- 6; BB C- 6; ND D+ 5; OOB D+ 5; V D 4; TB D 4; NJNR D 4; WSJ F- 0; TOTAL: 176/23 = 7.66 (C+)

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Bye Bye Birdie

GRADE: D

Book by Michael Stewart, music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams. Directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom. At Henry Miller's Theater. (CLOSED)

Oy. Vey. When F is the most commonly occurring grade in your show's data set, you've got a problem. The newly renovated Henry Miller's Theater gets the most consistently positive reviews in this roundup of critical reaction to the Roundabout's Bye Bye Birdie. Only lavishly praised by John "Contrarian" Simon, the show is, if critics are to be believed, a nearly unmitigated disaster. What's left is an argument over what fares worse: the design, the choreography, or the leads, alternatively described as "tone deaf" and "tin eared." Biggest surprise: The level of affection many critics seem to have for the original source material. Who knew your high school drama teacher's tastes were reflected among New York's reviewerati? UPDATE: Best review prize goes to Michael Feingold.

Bloomberg A-
(John Simon) Still fresh at nearly 50, the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie rebounds on Broadway remarkably well as a takeoff on Elvis, rock and roll, and high-school hijinks, a triumph of lovable silliness. It also spoofs the shenanigans of show-business. This is a show both for the kid with you and the kid within you...Still, the revival has, for Albert, the elastic John Stamos, a worthy successor to Dick Van Dyke; for Rose, a somewhat less terpsichorean but spirited actress and singer, Gina Gershon. Lesser-known Nolan Gerard Funk is a serviceable Conrad, Dee Hoty a genial Doris, and assorted kids and parents a game and well-sung chorus. Jayne Houdyshell steals scenes serendipitously as the son- eating Mae, and Matt Doyle couldn’t be more comically zealous as Kim’s jealous steady Hugo. Allie Tripp is correct as Kim, but sadly lacking in charm; as bedeviled father Harry, Bill Irwin, less actor and singer than mime, hams horrendously, for which director Robert Longbottom must share the blame.

CurtainUp B
(Simon Saltzman) To call the revival of Bye Bye Birdie hopelessly cute and relentlessly wholesome may sound like faint praise, but it is exactly that. Aside for one unfortunate bit of casting, the Roundabout Theater Company revival of the 1960 musical is a modestly diverting family-friendly entertainment. This new incarnation, as breezily directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom, inevitably suffers when seen in the shadow of the original production helmed by director choreographer Gower Champion. Nevertheless, this satiric and decidedly unsophisticated musical will undoubtedly bring smiles to audiences who remember the original and even more to the many who have appeared in the countless high school and amateur productions over the past half-century. Whether there is enough edge to Michael Stewart's aggressively silly book to satisfy demanding audiences looking for more bite for their bucks is questionable.

North Jersey B-
(Robert Feldberg) If the show’s older-generation stars had the same musical-theater chops as its youngsters, it could have been a total treat. As it is, Longbottom makes a mostly fun evening out of the tale of an Elvis-like rock idol about to enter the Army and the teenage girls who won’t let him go without a swoon... Longbottom’s plan for a swift and sparkling evening – the candy-colored outfits designed by Gregg Barnes are eye-catchers – is, unfortunately, sabotaged by his leads: John Stamos, who plays Albert, Birdie’s manager and songwriter; and Gina Gershon, portraying Rosie, Albert’s assistant.

Entertainment Weekly C+
(Tanner Stransky) Birdie is a weak, flawed show blessed with a few catchy, nostalgic tunes. The latest revival — bringing the '60s tuner back to Broadway for the first time in nearly 50 years — doesn't transcend the show's nature. This Birdie is still weak, cheesy, and trite. But even so, it's fun.

The New Yorker C-
(John Lahr) What’s startling about this production of Bye Bye Birdie is not how much the times and the styles have changed since 1960—that’s blood under the bridge—but how much the skill set for musicals has declined as the number of shows staged has decreased. The actors here are bright, but they don’t know how to shine. Something ingenious and luxuriant—a certain sparkle and frivolity—has gone out of the culture and out of them. The actors involved in the on-again, off-again adult romance, for instance—John Stamos as Albert Peterson, Conrad’s manager, and Gina Gershon as his Latina secretary, Rose Alvarez—have no whiff of humor about them and therefore no amperage. (Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera originated the roles.) In the absence of idiosyncrasy or chemistry, Stamos and Gershon have only Charles Strouse’s fetching melodies and Lee Adams’s cute lyrics to lift them up over the footlights. They make it work; they just don’t make it memorable.

Wall St. Journal D+
(Terry Teachout) Vast amounts of money and energy have been poured into this production, for the most part to winning effect. Robert Longbottom's brisk staging and clever choreography flow together seamlessly. The quick-change space-age sets, designed by Andrew Jackness, look as though they'd been swiped from the warehouse of a late-'60s TV variety show. Jonathan Tunick's new orchestrations evoke Nelson Riddle and Count Basie with smoothly swinging exactitude. The costumes are colorful, the chorus fabulous, the pit band hip. So what's the catch? Just this: Only one of the stars can sing...not to put too fine a point on it, the Roundabout's revival of "Bye Bye Birdie" is the worst-sung musical I've ever seen on Broadway. If that prospect doesn't faze you, or if you're tone-deaf, then go with my blessing: Mr. Longbottom is an immensely gifted director-choreographer, and there's plenty to like about this production. I only wish it had been overdubbed.

TheaterMania D+
(Barbara and Scott Siegel) Once you get past the show's two stars, the casting quality picks up a great deal. Longbottom's decision to use genuine teenagers for the show's ensemble is a good one, since they are quite endearing as a group. Trimm, who possesses a lovely singing voice, is perfect for the role of Kim, as she comically teeters on the precipice of womanhood. On the adult side, Jayne Houdyshell gives a strong comic performance as Mae, Albert's smothering mother. Stealing the show, however, is Bill Irwin as Kim's stern but confused father, Harry. Simply put, his work is an inspired clown's creation. That said, any production of Birdie which is mostly memorable for its Harry has plenty of problems -- and this one definitely does.

Variety D
(David Rooney) Robert Longbottom's miscast, over-designed production rarely musters the energy or effervescence its riot of candy color and teenage hormones might suggest. The show retains its corny charms and a bunch of tuneful songs, which might be enough for undiscerning family audiences; others will struggle to identify much authentic flavor in its aggressive blandness.

NYPost D-
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Under director-choreographer Robert Longbottom, this "Birdie" has been completely drained of fun and energy. The Roundabout would have been better off recycling the spirited Encores! production from 2004... Only Jayne Houdyshell, as Albert's overbearing mother, knows how to act cartoonish and stay in character. Everybody else fumbles. As Kim's dad, Bill Irwin looks as if he'd been teleported from another show -- or planet Loony Tunes. Stamos and Gershon sure look great. Then they open their mouths.

AP D-
(Michael Kuchwara) The show's brief moments of exuberance are provided by its young ensemble of dancers, who truly look as if they are teenagers. The show threatens to lift off into genuine musical-comedy entertainment during two of their dance numbers: "The Telephone Hour," in which the local teens discuss by phone - real phones, not cellphones - Kim's love life, and later in the musical when Conrad and the kids defiantly sing they have "A Lot of Livin' to Do." By today's standards, their rebellion isn't much. But a half-century ago, "Birdie" seemed awash in gentle, slightly subversive charm, that both parents and their children could relate to. Plus it exuded a genuine likability, a cheerfulness kept aloft by a buoyant score. That charm - and a sense of fun - are missing in action on the stage of Broadway's newest theatre.

Lighting And Sound America D
(David Barbour) There are a few satisfying things. As Albert's mother, Jayne Houdyshell creates an amusing gorgon right out of a Mad Magazine cartoon; her work is confident, funny, and right on target. Allie Trimm is charming as Kim, the 15-year-old fan selected to give Conrad the big kiss-off, although her number, "How Lovely to Be a Woman," has been stripped of the comic business that makes it so amusing. Nolan Gerard Funk is a fairly ideal Birdie; when he launches into "A Lot of Livin' to Do," you sigh in relief, because at last somebody knows how to sell a number. (The staging suddenly snaps to life -- largely, I think, because Longbottom is more at home in darker, stranger musicals like Side Show and in "Livin'" he has a long, complicated choreographic sequence to work with.) Also, Ken Billington's lighting casts a bright Technicolor palette over everything, and Acme Sound Design has provided one of the most natural-sounding reinforcement jobs I have encountered in many seasons; you can't really see the mics on the actors, either. But there's no question that this is a sad, sad affair, rather like trying to parse a great Russian novel through a middling translation. The saddest thought, to me, came on the way home: Is Encores at City Center the only viable venue for a show like this?

NY Daily News F+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) With the newly restored Henry Miller's Theatre, the Roundabout has another Broadway house under its wing. But with the launch of the venue's inaugural production, a bumbling, badly cast version of Bye Bye Birdie, it also has egg on its face. Director/choreographer Robert Longbottom (Side Show, Flower Drum Song) has staged the sweet, hit-filled 1960 classic like an exaggerated comic book. In the process, many of the charms have been smothered and characters emerge as plastic as the scenery.

Newsday F
(Linda Winer) Given a production with charm, inventiveness, first-rate casting and belief in the material (I'd take any two of the four), it is very possible that this fondly remembered musical fluff-ball would triumph over its dated references and borderline-offensive bigotry...Alas, the Roundabout Theatre Company's production, directed and choreographed like a bus-and-truck tour by Robert Longbottom, manages to be both frantic and stillborn. John Stamos, as Albert, the show-biz manager and mama's boy, is just pleasantly lightweight in a dance-driven role created by Dick Van Dyke onstage and in the 1963 movie. The painfully miscast Gina Gershon croons into approximate notes, posing more than dancing as a crude sexpot of a Rose, his longtime secretary/ girlfriend.

NYTimes F
(Ben Brantley) Flu season has arrived, and an especially mean virus appears to have attacked the cast of the revival of “Bye Bye Birdie,” which opened Thursday night.member, is selected to be kissed by her idol on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I don’t think it’s the swine flu that has flattened Robert Longbottom’s production of this popular 1960 musical about rebel rock ’n’ roll versus small-town America wholesomeness. The symptoms in this case include tin ear, loss of comic timing, uncontrollable jitters and a prickly disorientation that screams, “Where am I?” and “What am I doing?” Theatergoers may feel an empathetic urge to rush home and bury their heads in their pillows. Clearly this is the sort of bug that could jeopardize the health of any red-blooded musical. For the silly, hokey “Bye Bye Birdie,” a show that just wants to have fun and be tuneful, it proves close to fatal.

TalkinBroadway F
(Matthew Murray) The Roundabout Theatre Company’s new revival of Bye Bye Birdie has one, and only one, good reason for seeing it: the place it’s playing. The new Henry Miller’s Theatre on 43rd Street is a smart-looking, highly attractive, subterranean complex that looks like it could elegantly house any musical or large-scale play. It’s even reportedly one of the “greenest” theaters in New York, which points to a rigorous and respectful attention to detail on the part of Roundabout and the people who designed and built it. Would that that same care went into the show that’s christening the new space. Director Robert Longbottom’s production of the classic 1960 musical comedy by Michael Stewart (book), Charles Strouse (music), and Lee Adams (lyrics) is bland where it should be bubbly, trying where it should be tuneful, forced where it should be fun, and bearing a cast led as if to a firing squad by the grossly miscast John Stamos and Gina Gershon. Like Roundabout's deadly 2006 revival of The Pajama Game, which bore most of the same hallmarks, this show has become what it’s never been before: an almost total loss.

Show Business Weekly F
(Frank Scheck) Unfortunately, director-choreographer Robert Longbottom's staging conveys little of the show's charms. The musical numbers are lackluster at best, with even the sure-fire "Telephone Hour," featuring a plethora of plexiglass panels and sliding phone booths, failing to make much of an impact. The performances by nearly all of the principals are a major problem. As Conrad Birdie's harried manager Albert, John Stamos is genial but bland, prosaic at best with his singing and dancing. Gina Gershon, as Albert's romantically frustrated secretary Rose, is similarly uninspired, seeming comfortable only when finally given the opportunity to don a slinky outfit and do some serious vamping. The normally reliable Bill Irwin, in the father role essayed so memorably by Paul Lynde, seems to be in another show, applying broad clowning techniques that are completely out of sync with the performances surrounding him.

Backstage F
(Erik Haagensen) Director-choreographer Robert Longbottom's production seems calculated to decimate the material. Number after number implodes, whether due to clueless direction, fussy and unfocused choreography, or incompetent singing and dancing. Joke after joke dies on the vine. Longbottom appears not to understand that "Birdie" is a satire. It needs to be played within quotation marks. Its roots are in American vaudeville and the sketch comedy that book writer Michael Stewart and songwriters Charles Strouse and Lee Adams perfected creating Catskill revues. The outrageous one-liners and comically quick emotional reversals cannot be played naturalistically. When they are, as happens here (with one glaring exception), they die.

Time Out New York F
(Adam Feldman) Bye Bye Birdie; hello, turkey. The featherbrained revival of this 1960 musical is sure to be roasted in so many critical pans that it seems almost cruel to add to the fire. But we can’t duck our call to grouse about a show that has been cast and staged with such flighty ineptitude. Vultures have circled this production for weeks, for good reason: What should be a lark feels joyless and blah, burdened with the albatross of leaden leading players.

Village Voice F
(Michael Feingold) What Ashley and his cast do to bring the best out of Memphis is exactly what director Robert Longbottom and his cast fail to do, even with the advantage of far superior material, in Bye Bye Birdie, another in the sorry list of the Roundabout's successful attempts to turn formerly delightful old musicals into embarrassing contemporary disasters. The company achieves this distressing goal with such consistency, no matter who is directing the show, that the blame has to be laid on the management's whole system of production planning. This is a matter of public concern, since, with the advent of the ecologically sound but unwelcoming new auditorium behind the restored façade of the old Henry Miller's Theatre, the Roundabout—a nonprofit institution that charges Broadway prices and pays its actors on a regional-theater (LORT) contract—now controls the programming at three Broadway houses...Aside from Jayne Houdyshell, who performs a character not innately suited to her with comic skill and sympathy, everyone and everything else in Bye Bye Birdie is merely bland or insufficient; Irwin, probably the most gifted artist involved, is the production's deathblow. Go figure.

BB A- 12; CU B 10; NJ B- 9; EW C+ 8; TNY C- 6; WSJ D+ 5; TM D+ 5; V D 4; LSA D 4; NYP D- 3; AP D- 3; NYDN F+ 2; NYT F 1; TB F 1; TONY F 1; SBW F 1; BS F 1; VV F 1; TOTAL: 77/18=4.28 (D)

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Distracted

GRADE: B/B-

By Lisa Loomer, Directed by Mark Brokaw. At Roundabout Theatre. (CLOSED)

Who knew that an issue comedy about ADHD, its causes, roots and treatments could prove so divisive? Lisa Loomer's new play at the Roundabout gets three As (From squish-named publications TimeOut, TalkinBroadway and CurtainUp) while also earning a C- from Ben Brantley at the Times and a D from Variety. Boosters praise Mark Brokaw's frenetic direction, Cynthia Nixon's adept performance and Loomer's metatheatrical cleverness. Detractors find the play simultaneously shallow and heavy handed, particularly in its second act.

UPDATE: New York Mag's late-breaking D review brings the grade down from B to B-

TimeOut NY A
(David Cote) A giddily clever comedy about parenting in the age of attention deficit disorder...Distracted is my favorite comedy of the year so far, a spring-jointed issue play hyperactive enough to tickle both your brain and your funny bone... Loomer’s dizzyingly fast-thinking script is a model of economy and wit, and if she doesn’t dwell too long on a particular scene, that’s so much the better.

CurtainUp A
(Elyse Sommer) Lisa Loomer has done it again. She's simultaneously written a riotously funny play and tackled an important social issue. She's applied her gift for blending comedy with problems caused or exacerbated by the world we live in to the extremes women go to... Not the least of this funny yet disturbing play's pleasures can be attributed to its clever structure with its amusing and apt meta-theatrical detours and the way some subsidiary characters are written to be multiple cast. Another major plus is the flair with which Director Mark Brokaw and his designers' have executed Ms. Loomer's vision for the look and feel of the play: a minimally furnished set but one wired to evoke the ADD-prone world so that laptops, iphones and TV screens are always present and ready to shift locales and --well, to distract.

TalkinBroadway A
(Matthew Murray) Some plays ask you to become a part of their world; others demand it. But very few grab your collar and yank you into them, while turning your protestations into laughs and gasps of bedazzlement. Lisa Loomer’s Distracted does exactly this, and Mark Brokaw’s production of it for Roundabout (at the Laura Pels Theatre) only makes it more dizzying and captivatingly indigestible

Lighting And Sound America A
(David Barbour) It's probably not surprising that Loomer, whose wonderful play The Waiting Room offered a devastating critique of the American health care system, might be drawn to this subject matter. I have to imagine that many in the audience -- those, say, with children like Jesse -- may take offense at her bluntly hilarious treatment of modern therapeutic cant. (Indeed, there were a few walkouts at the performance I attended.) That's the more reason to thank Roundabout for challenging its audiences with this provocative satire. In any event, Distracted has more than enough attitude to hold your attention rapt for two hours of thought-provoking comedy.

TheaterMania B+
(Sandy MacDonald) The evening rests squarely on Nixon, who must sustain an aura of frantic desperation from word one without ever wearing on our nerves, and the Tony Award-winning star is uniquely equipped to handle the task. Micro-moods flit across her features, and she is always on the move, whether slumping into a last-ditch lotus position, slapping together PB&Js, or screeching back at that young demon offstage. For her part, Loomer studies the to-medicate-or-not-to-medicate controversy from every angle, like a child intrigued by a shiny object. Yet, in the end, Distracted is not a dull medical treatise but a wake-up call encoded in nonstop laughter.

AP B+
(Michael Kuchwara) Lisa Loomer's theatrical primer on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a smartly comic, sharply observant and surprisingly humane play involving a 9-year-old boy and his bewildered parents, particularly his mother. The production, which the Roundabout Theatre Company opened Wednesday at its off-Broadway Laura Pels Theatre, is also superbly directed by Mark Brokaw. He gives the exhaustingly detailed story a clarity that never falters despite the twists and turns of a rapidly unfolding plot.

Hartford Courant B+
(Malcolm Johnson) Nixon, who won a Theatre World Award at the age of 14 and subsequently appeared simultaneously in David Rabe's Hurlyburly and Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, has grown into an actor with remarkable comic timing, fully exhibited in this production. She carries this production brilliantly and tellingly as Mama explores a place where pills rain down endlessly.

NorthJersey.com B
(Robert Feldberg) Distracted is diverting. It’s also an “illness of the week” kind of play, which puts a cap on its dramatic possibilities

NYPost B
(Elisabeth Venticelli) Loaded with talking points - nature vs. nurture, shrinking attention spans, Ritalin - "Distracted" could easily have turned into the kind of anguished naturalistic melodrama even Lifetime doesn't do anymore. Thankfully, Loomer ("Living Out") is too skilled to fall into that hoary trap, and her metatheatrical tricks inject welcome levity into a fraught topic... frustration seeps in by the second act. Assuming we won't get all of her Big Themes on our own, Loomer spells them out repeatedly, then underlines them with thick Sharpie strokes.

Wall St. Journal B-
(Terry Teachout) Distracted isn't nearly as taut or disciplined a piece of work as Living Out. It's journalistic to a fault -- the characters spend too much time telling us interesting things about ADD instead of interacting with one another -- and it also succumbs at annoyingly frequent intervals to the kind of self-conscious humor that makes you wonder whether Ms. Loomer lacks confidence in her ability to hold an audience's attention by being serious... On the other hand, Distracted is also smart, funny and genuinely felt, and Mark Brokaw, the director, keeps the action flying by so fast that the weaker parts of the script are gone almost before you know it.

Backstage B-
(Andy Propst) Brokaw's staging unfolds with a whiz-bang efficiency... still, despite the emotionally charged subject matter and well-crafted performances, Distracted never fully engages the heart. Laughter abounds, and there is food for thought, but the overall experience is a bit like quickly scrolling through thousands of blog posts, tweets, and Facebook status updates: diverting, entertaining, but insubstantial.

Newsday C
(Linda Winer) Engaging but predictable... this territory hasn't been fresh since phones had cords. Despite Mark Brokaw's amusing sensory-overloaded staging and a big, versatile cast, [Loomer's] answer never gets more provocative than her questions.

NYTimes C-
(Ben Brantley) An attractively acted production starring Cynthia Nixon [that] often feels like little more than a compilation of jokes and observations that have been made, ad nauseam, about this disorder during the last decade. Even if your mind operates like an over-revved automatic channel surfer, it is still bound to have registered — perhaps while hovering hummingbirdlike over a sitcom moment, a comic strip about a multitasking mom or a column in a parents’ magazine — much of what is said here.

New York Magazine D
(Scott Brown) Lisa Loomer’s Distracted is a fast, frazzled, made-for-TV dramedy that’s so strenuously au courant, it may already be obsolete... Watching [Cynthia Nixon[ get emotional over the atypically attentive ministrations of an Indian customer-service representative is a treat. In the end, though, these characters are types, emotional crash-test dummies, and, as such, I kept expecting Loomer to be rougher with them. But ultimately, she’s after consolation, not art.

Variety D
(David Rooney) There's a difference between asking an audience to witness the challenges of understanding and coping with a neurobehavioral disorder and forcing them unrelentingly to experience that state. Most of us are stressed enough already, OK? Director Mark Brokaw has assembled an able cast, empathetically captained by Cynthia Nixon as the frazzled mother teetering on the edge of desperation, whose full-time job has become seeking treatment for her 9-year-old son, Jesse. But the production is so manic and the play's insights telegraphed so insistently that it slides from funny to cutesy to abrasive. That downward trajectory happens way before it's wrapped up with a simplistic conclusion that undermines Mama's ordeal and the experience of folks exposed to similar situations in the real world.

TONY A 13; CU A 13; TB A 13; LASA A 13; AP B+ 11; HC B+ 11; NJ B 10; NYP B 10; BS B- 9; WSJ B- 9; ND C 7; NYT C- 6; NYMag D 4; V D 4; TOTAL = 133 / 14 = 9.b (B/B-)

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Pal Joey

GRADE: B-

Music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, book adapted by Richard Greenberg from John O'Hara. Directed by Joe Mantello. Choreographed by Graciela Daniele. Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54. (CLOSED)

That this famously troubled, much-anticipated revival of Rodgers & Hart's legendary 1940 musical has won as many champions and defenders as it has—with Variety, AP, and Bloomberg leading the charge—might be considered a triumph, given the negative advance buzz and a resounding slam from the NY Times' Ben Brantley. The elevation of understudy Matthew Risch into the lead role after Christian Hoff's injury ramped up speculation of a catastrophe. But while most critics do find Risch a less-than-ideal leading man—saving their praise for female costars Stockard Channing, Jenny Fellner, and above all Martha Plimpton—a fair number are seduced by director Joe Mantello's noir-ish conception and Richard Greenberg's snappy script revision. But what the show's champions see as a deliciously seamy vision, a chorus of detractors finds simply dingy and dull.

Variety A
(David Rooney) The Rodgers and Hart songs in “Pal Joey” are certainly easy on the ear, but what makes the Roundabout revival of their 1940 show so compelling is Richard Greenberg’s trenchant adaptation of the original book by John O’Hara. Erasing the sanitizing stamp of musical-theater coyness, Greenberg brings a fascinating melancholy grubbiness to this cynical story of sordid emotional transactions and opportunistic behavior in late-1930s Chicago. It’s a dark show for desperate times, with enough dramatic meat on its bones to work even as a nonmusical play. And like “Cabaret” a few years back, it seems right at home in the decadent former playpen of Studio 54...The good news is that while Risch is neither a top-drawer singer nor dancer, he’s doing creditable work as louche lounge lizard Joey Evans. ...The smoke-drenched, seamy world of this smart adult musical is intoxicating.

Bloomberg News A
(John Simon) Pumps much-needed fresh blood into a Broadway grown anemic...Richard Greenberg contributes a sleek new book to the top-notch Rodgers and Hart score...Unusual for revised books of classic musicals, the period (1940) and locale (Chicago) have been idiomatically retained and nothing has been mucked up...Risch has the properly improper gigolo looks and persona of Joey, singing, dancing and acting with precarious insouciance spelled by the called-for defensive arrogance...Too bad that Studio 54 couldn’t revert to its initial nightclub format for “Joey,” but let us not ask for egg in our beer. With splendid choreography from Graciela Daniele, combining period with modern; scrupulously detailed staging by Joe Mantello; and Paul Gemignani’s expert conducting of a spirited orchestra, it would take an aged-in-the-wood curmudgeon to ask for anything more.

Associated Press A
(Michael Kuchwara) Greenberg's rewrite is crisp and to the point. There is a hard-boiled briskness to his work, a film-noir sensibility in its punchy dialogue that ricochets lickety-split across the stage. That dialogue, under Joe Mantello's fast-paced direction, is handled with ease, particularly by its three leads, Stockard Channing, Martha Plimpton and, in the title role, Matthew Risch...The understudy acquits himself well, particularly during choreographer Graciela Daniele's club numbers. A fine dancer, Risch...has a boyish energy, a sexy confidence tinged with more than a little naughtiness.

Total Theater A
(Simon Saltzman) There is a lot to praise and be thankful for in this smartly refreshed and snappily staged production under the direction of Joe Mantello...Considering the age of the musical and the tendency in its time for musical numbers to stand noticeably apart from the book portion, Greenberg has done a terrific job in masking and integrating that structure. He has emphasized the most brittle and caustic aspects of the story while grounding the musical’s not-too-likeable characters in their own sociopathic reality...The decision to go with Risch was a wise one. Good-looking and a splendid dancer, he gives every indication that his already convincing performance will continue to grow...Supporting performances are all solid and complete this gritty if not pretty picture of O’Hara’s morally corrupt world.

CurtainUp A-
(Elyse Sommer) The amazing Plimpton sends sparks flying as she bumps, grinds and sings with the other girls of the latest incarnation of Pal Joey...Fortunately, there are plenty of other reasons to see and enjoy this latest musical incarnation of John O'Hara's epistolary stories about an ambitious hustler on the fringes of show business. For starters, Stockard Channing is deliciously bitchy but also "bewitched, bothered and bewildered" ...Without sanitizing Joey as the movie starring Frank Sinatra did, Greenberg has made it easier to see how the crude, cocky heel at the show's center is somehow both attractive and repellent, as innocent as he is exploitative...High on the list of reasons this Pal Joey is worth seeing is that it's a big, handsome musical that benefits from director Joe Mantello's ability to introduce a Sondheim flavor to to a musical from a by-gone era.

Theatermania A-
(David Finkle) If anyone is putting a song across better on Broadway right now than Stockard Channing as she explores the tarnished heart of the great Lorenz Hart-Richard Rodgers number "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," in the Roundabout's Theatre Company's highly entertaining revival of Pal Joey at Studio 54, I don't know about it...This moment...turns out to be only one of the satisfying delights in a production that experienced some mighty touch-and-go moments getting this far...Itemizing the many other Pal Joey pluses makes for a joyful pastime. At the top of the list is the Rodgers and Hart score...Greenberg's other major, if seemingly unnecessary, re-working of the O'Hara script was to add a gay sub-plot regarding nightclub manager Mike (Robert Clohessy), which isn't very O'Hara but is very much Greenberg. Still, there's little harm done to this evergreen musical gem.

Backstage B+
(David A. Rosenberg) This is a revival of Pal Joey in the style of film noir: angry, dark, cynical, acerbic, and paranoid...Furnished with a tough new book by Richard Greenberg, directed by Joe Mantello as if it were Chicago, and tentatively choreographed by Graciela Daniele, Pal Joey is back in a production that, although it can't quite make up its mind what it wants to be and is too remote to be engaging, still manages to find the brash undertones of a fabled, always troubled creation. And, oh, that witty, melodic, still-fresh score!

American Theatre Web B+
(Andy Propst) Matthew Risch, who stepped in at the last moment to play Joey Evans, is certainly well on his way to owning this starring role, but as of press performances, he seems a little unsteady on his feet in this production, which features Richard Greenberg's generally satisfying revision to John O'Hara's original book and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's unbeatable score, and which emphasizes the unsavoriness of the world in which Joey works and lives...While theatergoers most likely would have expected Channing to dazzle as Vera, nothing could have prepared them for the two performances that are revelations in "Joey." Martha Plimpton, a mainstay of the New York stage in dramatic roles, makes her debut in a musical here and is simply captivating...Equally impressive is Jenny Fellner, who's been seen in smaller roles on Broadway, but here plays the sweet ingénue.

Hollywood Reporter B+
(Alexis Greene) Stockard Channing steals the new Broadway revival of "Pal Joey," Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's 1940 musical noir about Chicago nightlife...Channing brings sleekness, wit and sexual suggestiveness...The production itself, imaginatively and forcefully directed by Joe Mantello...will draw both fervid supporters and adamant naysayers. John O'Hara's book (adapted from his own short stories for "The New Yorker") has been rewritten by Richard Greenberg...mostly for the better...To everyone's credit, this is a far sexier and more adult "Pal Joey" than its creators dared present back in 1940 or for the first major revival in 1952...But this is a bleak, harsh world that director Mantello has staged beneath Chicago's looming elevated train. If Risch would just loosen up and roll back the hard sell, this fresh revival of Rodgers and Hart's innovative musical could be a hit.

NY1 B+
(David Cote) The Roundabout Theatre Company gets a lot right with its handsome revival of the jazzy classic - just not the guy on the marquee...If “Pal Joey” has a weak center, the glitter at the fringes is plenty engaging. Richard Greenberg's rewrite of the John O'Hara book flashes with keen wit and shadows of melancholy, raises the emotional stakes for each character and avoids O'Hara's more formulaic plot devices. Choreographer Graciela Daniele keeps the cast bumping and high stepping with jazzy dances. Martha Plimpton makes a sizzling musical theater debut as the jaded singer Gladys Bumps, dryly unzipping Lorenz Hart's perfectly packaged rhymes...Although “Pal Joey” is not a Broadway masterpiece on the level of “West Side Story” or “Guys And Dolls,” but it is a sophisticated showcase of old-fashioned glamor and wit.

Philadelphia Inquirer B+
(Howard Shapiro) Greenberg's new book gives Joey, his society sugar mama (a dead-on Stockard Channing), and even the play's one decent character - the girl who wants to believe in his potential as a long-term catch - glib repartee that's more like a laugh-line thread than comic relief. Joe Mantello's direction...accentuates this characteristic of the revival - nasty talk with a chuckle...[Risch's] Joey displays an arrogance as threatening as it is magnetic, and his lizardlike smile reminds that some things in Pal Joey must never change.


USA Today B+
(Elysa Gardner) Greenberg also gives us fuller portraits of the women in Joey's life...All three are sturdily and sympathetically represented under Joe Mantello's witty direction...The real revelation, though, is Martha Plimpton's Gladys...As for Risch, who replaced original lead Christian Hoff (after Hoff sustained a foot injury in late November), he has no shortage of talent or charisma, but at 27 seems a little green for Joey. Rodgers and Hart's songs, of course, remain as glorious as ever...Gems such as "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" and "I Could Write a Book" still have a cool fire that fits Pal Joey, this incarnation in particular, like a glove.

New Yorker B+
(John Lahr) The scenic and narrative gains of this production bring with them some losses...The dance establishes the internal and external geography of the piece, but does it skew it? This leaching of charm out of the atmosphere, and, subsequently, out of the man, may be up to the minute, but it robs the character of some of his complexity...Greenberg’s new book, it seems to me, superbly sets up the drama of the songs and of Joey’s atrophied soul.

NY Press B+
(Leonard Jacobs) He may dance angelically and sing swell, he may hawk beady eyes and raise smirky smiles, but Risch’s Joey isn’t the snake charmer that Pal Joey demands...How nifty that Pal Joey also manages to be one of the most chic enterprises Roundabout has mounted in a long time. There’s an actual orchestra at Studio 54! And Paul Gemignani’s musical direction of the score, by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, illustrates what an incandescent, melodic knockout it remains. Risch also receives the kind of thespian support that underscores the generosity of the theater.

Back Stage (blog) B+
(David Sheward) I was pleasantly surprised to find Risch was everything Joey must be--a dynamite dancer, a charming romeo, and a first-class heel. The only area where he was lacking was in the vocal department, but Joey is more of a dancing role...Joe Mantello's production is pure film noir with Scott Pask's menacing set dominated by grim elevated train tracks. As Vera Simpson, Joey's alcoholic patroness, Stockard Channing is so cutting and martini-dry, she draws blood from the other characters and tears from the audience...Martha Plimpton is another performer we don't usually see in musicals. Yet she scores a bull's eye with the tough-talking showgirl Gladys.

New York B
(Jesse Oxfield) It's pleasingly consistent with the classic backstage story to report that a major singing-and-dancing talent has arrived—except that it’s not Risch. It's the heretofore serious actress Martha Plimpton...Everything else in this well-conceived, timely revival is dark, dangerous, and dry.

NJ Star-Ledger B
(Eric Grode) Broadway loves an "understudy makes good" story, but for every Shirley MacLaine or Sutton Foster...there are at least a dozen jobbers who hit their marks, take their bow and slide back into obscurity...Such is the case with Risch, a young dancer with a lovely smile, a serviceable voice and none of the nuance needed to make Joey's amorous conquests remotely plausible. Vera's sung summation of Joey as a "half-pint imitation" hits distressingly close to the mark here...The real surprise is Plimpton...who proves to be a sparkling musical theater performer.

New York Post B
(Frank Scheck) I'm pleased to report that a musical-comedy star is born in the newly revived "Pal Joey." Unfortunately for the Roundabout, it's Martha Plimpton and not Matthew Risch, the chorus boy recently bumped up to the title role...Working with a new book by Richard Greenberg (which differs only slightly from John O'Hara's original, while making one of the characters blatantly gay), director Joe Mantello has provided a smooth, reasonably entertaining staging that's enhanced by the slinky, sexy choreography of Graciela Daniele. Stockard Channing, looking impossibly young for her 64 years, is compelling as the sexually rapacious socialite Vera Simpson, even if her renditions of such classic songs as "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" are better acted than sung.

Hartford Courant B
(Malcolm Johnson) The songs are great, the book is much improved and the women deliver, especially the astonishing Martha Plimpton. But there is no Cinderfella story for Matthew Risch, the understudy who took over the title role in "Pal Joey"...The production by Joe Mantello, which the Roundabout Theatre Company opened Thursday at Studio 54, resonantly evokes Chicago in the late '30s when the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart was coming to an end. But this troubled musical, which originally starred Gene Kelly as the nightclub owner/gigolo Joey Evans, has not yet found the production so often dreamed of through the years.

The Record C+
(Robert Feldberg) Hard to warm up to...The production does have some nice things in it, starting with an atmospheric dance sequence performed during the overture. Director Joe Mantello blends one scene into the next, creating an uninterrupted flow of action; Graciela Daniele's choreography has a pleasing period flavor; and the orchestrations evoke the musical sound of the late '30s. The story, though, is a downer....While a capable dancer and singer, [Risch] doesn't make Joey at all appealing...The show's score, overall, is not distinguished.

Newsday C+
(Linda Winer) Despite a smart creative team and game performances from Stockard Channing and the ever-more-surprising Martha Plimpton, the Roundabout Theatre Company production that opened last night at Studio 54 seems more like grown-ups playing dress-up than gritty and cynically delicious pulp fiction. There is no nice way of saying this. Matthew Risch, the understudy who stepped into the starring role when Christian Hoff reportedly was injured, is a slick and stylish hoofer, and a competent singer. But he doesn't have the wattage to make us care about Joey Evans...Without a bad-boy Joey we can't help but adore, the women around him are less than fabulously interesting. Without more spark behind Joe Mantello's handsomely imagined Chicago lowlife of a production, the darkness starts to feel more dull than glittery.

EW C+
(Thom Geier) Though Risch works up an impressive flop sweat—literally mopping up the perspiration from his face with an ill-disguised cloth during one early scene—his efforts still have the whiff of flop about them...Risch is never less than professional, but his costars must struggle to compensate for his shortcomings in this tricky story: Jenny Fellner, as the bumpkin-in-the-big-city ingenue, fails to convince us why she'd hang around for a nogoodnik like Joey; Stockard Channing, as the cougar and sugar mama who falls for Joey and finances his nightclub, is thin of voice but touchingly acts her way through classic songs like "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered;" and Martha Plimpton, as an aging showgirl punished for knowing too much about Joey's shady past, is a surprisingly strong singer who comfortably sells her second-act charmer, "Zip."

The Daily News C
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Casting a boyish near-beginner as a die-hard heel is but one issue in Joe Mantello's low-impact staging, which has a book by Richard Greenberg (seamier than John O'Hara's original) and efficient dances by Graciela Daniele. Under Mantello's inconsistent direction, the acting styles range from realism to broad musical comedy while tuneful Rodgers and Hart songs - from "I Could Write a Book" to "You Mustn't Kick It Around" - land with little impression...The delightful surprise is Martha Plimpton as the street-smart showgirl Gladys. The actress debuts a robust and smoky singing voice and makes the novelty number "Zip" (usually sung by another character) enormously entertaining...Revivals of Rodgers and Hart's dark-toned show don't come around that often. Unfortunately, this "Pal" doesn't inspire a friendlier welcome.

Theatre News Online C
(Roger B. Harris) The fizz is flat...Director Joe Mantello keeps the show moving along at a nice pace while choreographer Graciela Daniele's work is merely adequate. In this instance, jiggling, wriggling chorines, do not a pretty sight make. Richard Greenberg has streamlined and updated the book, which isn't necessarily a good thing. The air is too heavy with innuendo. Scott Pask's set, William Ivey Long's costumes and Paul Gallo's lighting do not get in the way, which I guess is a plus. What is a definite plus is the chance to hear that fabulous score once again on stage.

Talkin' Broadway D+
(Matthew Murray) [Greenberg's libretto] is less a full-blown rewrite than a mild reconsideration, in no way a curb-kicking of the original...The contributions of the rest of the creative team are lethargic at best. Designers Scott Pask (sets), William Ivey Long (costumes), Paul Gallo (lights), choreographer Graciela Daniele, and especially director Joe Mantello have aided neither Greenberg’s script nor Rodgers and Hart’s score in finding their own natural, down-and-dirty rhythm. Rather than exploring the dangers and complexities of Joey and Vera’s pairing against the musty glitter of Chicago nightlife, they’ve tried to change Pal Joey into a makeshift Cabaret by swathing it in darkness, squalor, and self-promoting grit...Daniele’s rancidly greasy choreography is similarly more an approximate afterthought than a necessary element.

The New York Times D+
(Ben Brantley) Featuring the gifted but misused Stockard Channing and a streamlined but innuendo-heavy book by Richard Greenberg (after the original by John O’Hara), this “Pal Joey” has no detectable pulse...Nobody, with the qualified exception of Martha Plimpton as a floozy with a grudge, emerges from this Roundabout Theater Company production covered in stardust. In shining a harsh light on the inner rot of selfish characters who first appeared in short stories by O’Hara for The New Yorker, this revival has succeeded only in turning them into zombies. When Ms. Channing, as the alcoholic society matron Vera Simpson, sings the show’s most famous song, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” it might as well be titled “Benumbed, Bummed Out and Bored Silly”...Watching the cast go through its motions is like watching a “Marat/Sade” in which the asylum inmates have been pumped full of Thorazine.

AM New York D
(Matt Windman) This revival is bewitched, bothered, bewildered and bad!...27-year-old Mr. Risch lacks not only charm, but also credibility. He sweats profusely and looks too hard at work handling all the hoofing to successfully interact with the cast. He also appears too effeminate to play such a manipulative conman. His co-star Stockard Channing has a bigger problem: she has absolutely no vocal chops. She speaks through all of her songs, turning great ballads like “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” into slow, painful marches. If not much else, Channing has the commanding stage presence that Risch desperately lacks. The fabulously talented Martha Plimpton steals the show as chorine Gladys Bumps...The blame for this revisal should lie with playwright Richard Greenberg, whose overhaul of John O’Hara’s original script with new character motives is uninvolving and awkward, and director Joe Mantello for making so many poor artistic choices. Graciela Daniele’s serviceable choreography works best when it parodies bad nightclub staging.

Wall Street Journal D
(Terry Teachout) The Roundabout, as best as I can figure, has decided to sell "Pal Joey" by selling it out. In this production, directed by Joe Mantello and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, the show is retrofitted as a glossy school-of-Fosse extravaganza. The fancy sets and showy steps, while pleasing enough in their own right, have little to do with the seedy, sordid world that O'Hara conjured out of thin air in his very first stage direction...Richard Greenberg, one of my least favorite contemporary playwrights, has rewritten O'Hara's book from curtain to curtain, replacing his sharp-eared dialogue with lame, campy punch lines and smoothing out the rough edges of the plot in a way that is alien to the flint-hearted spirit of the real "Pal Joey."

Village Voice D-
(Michael Feingold) The new book, by Richard Greenberg, does little harm, although nothing was wrong with John O'Hara's original book that a few minor emendations couldn't fix. Almost everything else, however, is just plain awful...Granted, Martha Plimpton's Gladys can put over a song; Stockard Channing's Vera doesn't exactly wreck hers; and Matthew Risch, the understudy who replaced Christian Hoff, dances pretty well and gives the role the understudy's traditional brave try...The evening's marginally more bearable than the Roundabout's scorched-earth rendering of the team's Boys From Syracuse a few years back, but that's the best compliment their holiday gift can extort from me.

Variety A 13; Bloomberg News A 13; Associated Press A 13; Total Theater A 13; CurtainUp A- 12; Theatermania A- 12; Backstage B+ 11; American Theatre Web B+ 11; THR B+ 11; TONY B+ 11; Philly Inquirer B+ 11; USA Today B+ 11; New Yorker B+ 11; NY Press B+ 11; Back Stage blog B+ 11; New York B 10; New York Post B 10; NJ Star-Ledger B 10; Hartford Courant B 10; The Record C+ 8; Newsday C+ 8; EW C+ 8; The Daily News C 7; Theatre News Online C 7; Talkin' Broadway D+ 5; The New York Times D+ 5; AM New York D 4; WSJ D 4; Village Voice D- 3; TOTAL: 274 / 29 = 9.45 (B-)

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