The titular family faces a major change: her irascible husband Ben is dying, forcing people that have largely chosen to avoid each other to confront some hard issues. Silver deals with the well worn dramatic terrain of familial dysfunction, but rings some interesting changes on it.

For one thing, Rita may have been a terrible mother, but Silver successfully leads the audience to see the family through her eyes. Sure, she and Ben may have mangled her children’s psyches in the past, but does that make it in any way her responsibility to fix them now? An intriguing perspective, and one that Silver pursues intelligently and humorously.

Dick Latessa is hilarious as the even nastier Ben, spewing venomous barbs at everyone from his hospital bed. Michael Esper has the most scenes in the play as their socially inept gay son Curtis, and he navigates the twisted, darkly comic turns of his erratic behavior with great skill. Director Mark Brokaw shines a bright light on their work, keeping the pace brisk and the tone tart.

In a season bursting at the seams with slapstick, sex farce, and social satire, Silver and company have taken a different, more neurotic road. It may not be the show to make you roll in the aisles with laughter, but it may be the best mix of wit and psychological insight this Broadway season.

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The multiracial casting of this revival is handled so deftly that it’s almost a non-issue. Underwood is simply as sexy and scary – and sometimes deceptively rational – as Stanley should be. Parker underplays Blanche, letting her neuroses and hidden strengths speak for themselves. Parker’s approach is a bit too low key for my taste, but I still respect it as an intriguing, intelligent way to approach the role. And Wood Harris brings an interesting bravado to the role of Stanley’s friend Mitch, giving the role colors I’ve never seen before.

As for the New Orleans side of the issue, designer Eugene Lee’s set is the first one for a production of Streetcar that I have seen get it so painstakingly right. The part of the Marigny neighborhood that Stanley and Stella live in was run-down and unglamorous in the 1950s, there were no elegant wrought iron balconies or galleries – this isn’t the French Quarter. Everything was made of wood, and wood not in the best of condition – and that’s exactly what Lee shows us.

Jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s moody score does a good job of evoking a sweaty New Orleans summer. That said, his compositions have a post-bop sound that is seriously anachronistic in a production that is otherwise so scrupulous about getting time and place right.

This may not be a definitive Streetcar, but it is an intelligently directed, designed and acted one. I sincerely think Tennessee would have approved – I certainly do, and recommend it highly.

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Playwright Marc Camoletti’s Don’t Dress for Dinner doesn’t quite have the insane edge of his Boeing-Boeing, but it’s still very entertaining in that same sex farce vein. Farce is, for whatever reason, suddenly hot again (to my delight), so there’s some competition in town – Don’t Dress for Dinner isn’t a world-beater in this arena, but it can certainly hold it’s silly head up high.

In Don’t Dress for Dinner, Bernard plans for a romantic rendezvous with his mistress, complete with gourmet caterer and an alibi courtesy of his friend Robert. But when Jacqueline, Bernard’s wife, learns that Robert will be visiting for the weekend, she decides to stay, setting the stage for lots of the subterfuge and mistaken identities that are farce’s stock in trade.

The star name here is Jennifer Tilly as the mistress Suzanne, and she is tailor-made for the role, all boobs and throaty sex-kitten voice. But the real scene-stealer is Spencer Kayden as chef Suzette (and yes, much is made of the confusion of “Suzys” on the scene), who reveals her physical comedy gifts slowly, layer by layer, like a parfait. Her performance truly blossoms when Bernard and Robert encourage Suzette to emulate the Parisian snobs she so often serves – Kayden really starts rolling here, and doesn’t stop until the end.

Director John Tillinger gets the tempo and precision of farce right, though there are some puzzling production choices. What’s with John Lee Beatty’s oh-so-weighty set, which doesn’t do the light comic tone of the play any favors? William Ivey Long’s costumes are much wittier, no surprise there – but I still kept asking, why are these design elements fighting each other like this?

Still, this production manages to elict belly laughs in the echoey American Airlines Theatre, which is itself no friend to comedy (The 39 Steps, for example, was much more fun at the Helen Hayes Theatre). The show is, at least, that thing all of its characters are seeking – a really good time!

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Act Two is set in the same house in 2009, as the house, in the now predominantly African-American neighborhood, is being sold to a white couple. Playwright Bruce Norris spends the first 20 minutes or so of the show milking the naïveté of late 1950s mid-America for all the comedy he can get out of it. Just as this threatens to get grating, though, the conversations Russ and Bev have with each other – as well as with their minister Jim (cute ginger Brendan Griffin) – begin to touch on more serious matters, both personal and political.

Norris writes in a very pungent, aggressive way; in some of his previous plays this has made it difficult to connect with his characters. Here, though, it serves his subject matter so well that it invigorates rather than annoys. Director Pam KacKinnon applies a light touch that aids in bridging that gap. The cast is uniformly fine, with Wood’s stoic portrayal of Russ standing out – rarely has a stage actor communicated so much with such minimal means.

Norris has accomplished that balance between entertainment and insight, which to my taste is so essential to really good theatre-making. Clybourne Park is quite good, and I’m really curious to see where Norris goes next.

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Her new show at Feinstein’s, “The Happiest Sound in Town”, features many of her her signature songs, including “Golden Rainbow” and “You’re Gonna Hear From Me”, a personal favorite of mine. This is a classic act in every sense of the phrase. Maye is a jazz-pop singer worthy of being included in the company of Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn or Blossom Dearie, and her phrasing is the finest I’ve heard in that style from a living singer.

Her repertoire for the evening ranges from Shaiman & Wittman’s “Butter Outta Cream” from Catch Me if You Can and a dazzling New York medley to “When I’m In Love” by her mentor Steve Allen, and even Mama Cass’s big hit “Make Your Own Kind of Music”. Maye exquisitely tailors her style of singing to the individual song, smooth for the ballads, swinging for the standards, and truly gritty for the bluesier numbers.

Maye appeared on Johnny Carson’s edition of “The Tonight Show” a total of 76 times, a record not likely ever to be beaten by any other singer with any other host. She’s been enjoying a New York renaissance recently, making critically acclaimed appearances all over town. If you love classic songs sung like they’re meant to be sung, it doesn’t get any better than this.

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I’ve often said that writing a rave review is much harder than writing a pan – the language of insult is so much more plentiful and colorful than the language of praise. And that’s true here: what else can I say but that it’s freaking hilarious, so funny it made my ribcage hurt from laughing? Cordon is an immensely talented stage comedian, with every bit of the abandon and shamelessness of, say, a Nathan Lane. He’s nearly beat in the physical comedy department by Tom Edden, as the elderly, shaky-handed waiter Alfie – I’ve seen very few performers who committed as totally to slapstick as Edden, and he’s a real joy to watch.

Playwright Richard Bean adapted the play from Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, an 18th Century farce, which Goldoni himself adapted from the stock characters of the unscripted commedia dell’arte. Setting the action in Brighton in the relatively innocent time of the early 1960s was a terrific choice on Bean’s part and it definitely gives the comedy some extra fun and zing.

To underline the period setting, director Nicholas Hynter has added a band in natty matching sharkskin suits who play skiffle in the first act, and Merseybeat rock in the second. This is the only thing in the show that doesn’t quite work – those peculiarly English forms of music, while appropriately energetic, don’t have quite the same nostalgic pull in New York that they must have had in London, and I found myself wanting to the band to finish long before they actually did. Hynter has smartly made the musical interludes in the show much shorter at the end than at the beginning, but they could be trimmed even more.

That’s a small complaint, though, for a show that is this much joyful fun. One Man, Two Guvnors is not to be missed!

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In Masks Outrageous and Austere was Williams’s last full-length play, unfinished at the time of his death in 1983. In it, an incredibly rich woman, her hustler of a husband and his young male lover are brought to a beautiful seaside where they are kept captive by the sinister Kudzu Chem Corporation. There have been various attempts over the years to reconcile different manuscripts, shepherded most recently by Joe E. Jeffreys, who is listed as dramaturg on this production, the play’s long anticipated world premiere.

I have become very familiar with Williams’s later work in preparation for directing the abovementioned productions, and have to say that while it is quite compelling, Masks still definitely feels unfinished. Now the Cats is as wild and wooly a play, but to me has a stronger and clearer sense of what Williams was attempting to convey. Williams wrote his first drafts in a very raw and instinctual way, and then would work assiduously to rewrite them to better reflect what he wanted to express. Masks is still very raw, not to mention long and somewhat meandering.

Director David Schweitzer is smart enough to exploit this very rawness, pushing the performances to frenzied intensity. There is nothing raw, however, about the design elements in this production. I felt intense “production budget envy” as I entered set designer James Noone’s dazzling LED-dominated environmental set, which reinforces the overall feeling of retro-80s futurism.

The cast give uniformly strong performances, conveying a great many shades of hope and dread, along with the occasional hint of homo-eroticism. As is always the case with Williams, this raw unfinished overlong mess is better than many a well-made play – it just isn’t as polished a jewel as other late Williams.

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Both novel and play mine the idea of telling Peter Pan’s backstory, full of British Empire intrigue, orphans, magic and, yes, pirates. Playwright Rick Elice’s jokey adaptation slims the novel’s epic quality down to a manageable length, yes, but there still remain many moments where the audience is well ahead of the script. There’s also several moments that are muddied by different production elements fighting each other for attention. The production was co-directed by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, and indeed this is one of the more over-directed shows I’ve seen in a while.

This is quibbling, however, since Peter and the Starcatcher is generally very engaging and entertaining. As often as they muddy the waters, Rees and Timbers even more often successfully find ways to assist Elice’s storytelling with simple yet appropriately magical theatrical means.

Plus, the cast is clearly having the time of their lives, especially Smash‘s Christian Borle as the way-fey pirate captain Black Stache – he once tells a monster to stop eating his scenery, which actually seems like an understatement. Adam Chanler-Berat is rapidly becoming the city’s go-to actor for evoking the joys and challenges of heroic adolescence. His portrayal of the proto-Pan “Boy” looks at this from directly the opposite angle of his take on Rent‘s “please-let-me-grow-up-right-now” Mark, and is every bit as effective.

I had a good time and more than a few laughs at Peter and the Starcatcher, and have no hesitation in recommending it as mildly thought-provoking – but mostly just really charming – entertainment.

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Director Michael Grandage is a British master of realism – his productions of Red and Frost/Nixon were powerful for that very reason. His style also works very well for classical theatre, which has meant wonderful, realism-inflected versions of Hamlet and Mary Stuart. But Evita isn’t realism, and it isn’t classical. So what we have here is great talent largely misapplied.

I’m not saying that Grandage’s approach bears no fruit here: he brings out Eva’s humanity and vulnerability in new ways and, together with set designer Christopher Oram, makes dramatic use of Argentina’s beautiful architecture. It’s successful in its way, but nonetheless seems to somewhat miss the point.

Evita has a definite attitude about Eva, expressed not only through acerbic commentary Time Rice wrote for Che, but also through Webber’s Wagnerian use of musical themes to symbolize assorted ideas and parts of society. Grandage largely ignores these cues, giving us big production numbers (choreographed by a tango-happy Rob Ashford) that lack the necessary tension, danger and excitement.

One number in the second act “And the Money Kept Rolling In” really explodes, but does that in part because Grandage and Ashford have been inexplicably holding back until that point. Evita has multiple climaxes (ahem) and building to just one in the second act makes zero sense to me.

All that said, the leads are working hard in their assignments. Ricky Martin makes a very ingratiating Che, which does help tell the story with a certain clarity. The diminutive Elena Rogers is physically similar to historical Eva (more striking and glamorous than truly gorgeous), and puts her whole heart into acting the role, even if vocally she doesn’t quite have the belting power the part so desperately needs. Michael Cerveris successfully captures both Perón’s macho authority and his genuine tenderness toward Eva.

This is a good, but not great Evita. I liked it, but I really wish I had loved it.

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Playwright Eric Simonson has a real gift for bringing out the human side of sports stories. His 2010 play Lombardi let us in on legendary Green Bay Packers football coach Vince Lombardi’s deep, sincere affection for both the game and his players. Now, his Magic/Bird follows one of the fiercest rivalries in sports history, sprawling over decades as Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird, two of the all-time great basketball players, battle for championships, MVP awards, and dominance of their sport.

This was less of a surprise to me than Lombardi. Having seen that other play, I knew that I wasn’t in for an evening of stats and machismo. Stats are referred to but never laid out, and macho shit talk is played almost entirely for laughs.

Magic/Bird is both more epic and human-scale than Lombardi. Where the earlier play asked interesting questions about all kinds of ethical issues, this one straightforwardly tells the engaging story of an intense rivalry developing into an equally intense friendship. On the other hand, Lombardi focused on a single incident, whereas Magic/Bird follows our heroes through the golden days of their careers, from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Johnson was also one of the first prominent American heterosexuals to admit to contracting HIV, and that is dealt with quite sensitively.

Kevin Daniels is Magic and Tug Coker is Bird, and both are rock-solid. The real acting treat of the show, though, are stage veterans Deirdre O’Connell and Peter Scolari tearing up the stage in series of mostly comic smaller roles. Director Thomas Kail is once again Simonson’s creative partner, and his inventive staging makes creative, restrained use of projections and turntables – all purposeful, never just spectacle for spectacle’s sake. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy Magic/Bird, just a fan of good storytelling and solid entertainment.

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