It Shoulda Been You ***

This farcical musical with book and some lyrics by Brian Hargrove and music and concept by Barbara Anselmi has reached Broadway after a successful 2011 run at George St. Playhouse in New Jersey. It raises the question of whether loads of talent and style can overcome a lack of substance and answers it with a definite “maybe.” If for no other reason, we should be grateful that it provides employment for such troupers as Tyne Daly, Harriet Harris, Edward Hibbert and Chip Zien as well as talented younger performers including Lisa Howard, Sierra Boggess and Josh Grisetti. The hoary plot involves the wedding of a Jewish woman and a Catholic man. Both sets of parents are unhappy about the impending marriage and a former boyfriend is determined to stop it. Yes, this field has been plowed many times before, but this time there’s a mildly surprising twist that I won’t reveal here. No cliche escapes. The luxurious hotel set by Anita Louizos is very attractive, as are William Ivey Long’s costumes. David Hyde Pierce shows a real talent for directing. The music, in a variety of styles, is pleasant. The lyrics are wildly uneven. Some are fine, but others are clunkily unmusical. Five people get credits for additional lyrics. In case you are wondering how anything this slight could have reached Broadway, the fact that Hargrove is Pierce's husband certainly didn't hurt. The show could serve as the textbook definition of a guilty pleasure. You might hate yourself for laughing at some of the one-liners, but laugh you will. With its shameless pandering to two pillars of the Broadway audience, Jews and gays, it should have a long run. Running time: one hour 40 minutes, no intermission.

The Big Knife **

After the success of the recent revivals of "Awake and Sing!" and "Golden Boy," it must have seemed like a good idea for Roundabout Theatre to revive another Clifford Odets play. Unfortunately, it wasn't -- at least not this minor work set in Hollywood in 1948. Charlie Castle (Bobby Cannavale) is a disillusioned leading man whom  studio head Marcus Hoff (Richard Kind) is determined to get to sign a 12-year contract by whatever means necessary. Charlie's idealistic wife Marion (Marin Ireland) threatens to divorce him if he signs. Their screenwriter friend Hank Teagle (C.J. Wilson), who is going back to New York to write a novel about Tinseltown, hopes Marion will leave Charlie and come with him. We also meet Buddy Bliss (Joey Slotnick), the PR man who took the rap and served time for an auto accident that Charlie was responsible for, his unsatisfied wife Connie (Ana Reeder) who has slept with Charlie occasionally, Dixie Evans (Rachel Brosnahan), the ingenue who was in the car with Charlie when the accident occurred and whose silence the studio has bought, the aptly named Smiley Coy (Reg Rogers), Hoff's right-hand man, Charlie's agent Nat Danziger (Chip Zien), gossip columnist Patty Benedict (Brenda Wehle) and the butler Russell (Billy Eugene Jones). While I have much admired Cannavale and Ireland on other occasions, I found them inadequate here. In their defense, their roles are less interesting than the supporting characters, up to and including the butler. The play springs briefly to life in the final scene, but by then it is far too late to care. The dialog is overwrought, the characters are underwritten and the production is undercooked, all adding up to a long tedious evening. Doug Hughes' direction shows no improvement over the mess he made out of "Enemy of the People" last year. On the plus side, John Lee Beatty's set design is superb and Catherine Zuber's costumes are wonderful. If the trite plot really interests you, you can save a lot of money by renting the film version with such Hollywood luminaries as Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Wendell Corey, Jean Hagen, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ilka Chase and Everett Sloane. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes, including intermission.

The Twenty-Seventh Man **

(Please click on the title to see the complete review.)
I might have liked Nathan Englander's adaptation of his own short story, now in previews at the Public Theater, better if I had not read the story when it first appeared.  In it, we meet four Jewish writers in a Russian jail. As part of Stalin's purge of Jewish intellectuals, 27 Yiddish writers have been rounded up and imprisoned. All are established authors except for one innocent young man who writes but has never been published. His inclusion, the apparent result of a bureaucratic error, must somehow be justified by the prison head. Yevgeny Zunser (Ron Rifkin) is a very old writer, once revered, now neglected. Moishe Bretzky (Daniel Oreskes) is an alcoholic sensualist who voluntarily gave up the chance to live abroad. Vasily Korinsky (Chip Zien) has been Stalin's loyal toady and thinks that will protect him. Pinchas Pelovits (Noah Robbins) is the young innocent whose greatest joy is to write something every day. Byron Jennings plays the "agent in charge" and Happy Anderson is a guard. The older writers bicker about their literary reputations while Pinchas, lacking pen and paper, commits to memory his final story and recites it for his cellmates. For me, the tale was far more powerful on the page than on the stage. Somehow the characters seemed less vivid in the flesh than they were in my imagination. The unevenness of the acting is a problem. Rifkin and Zien are very good, Oreskes and Jennings are alright, but Robbins is woefully inadequate in the difficult role of Pinchas. The simple sets by Michael McCarty are effective. With one exception, Katherine Roth's costumes are fine: Bretzky does not look nearly unkempt enough. Barry Edelstein's direction is unobtrusive. I suspect that the play will work better for those unfamiliar with the story. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes without intermission.