One might be concerned that a play about a woman dealing with ovarian cancer would be at best dull, at worst depressing. How welcome it is, then, that for most of its hour and a half length, playwright Margaret Edson’s Wit fulfills the promise of its title.

Vivian Bearing (Cynthia Nixon), a scholar who devoted her life to the exacting study of the work of 17th Century metaphysical poet John Donne, confronts cruel paradoxes – and great physical pain – as she becomes the subject of research after she agrees to be part of an experimental treatment for her cancer.

Fun stuff, right? Actually, surprisingly, for the most part Wit is fun. Dr. Bearing is not the sentimental type and her toughness, and, yes, wit, keep the story from being more maudlin or depressing than it has to be. Edson’s writing exquisitely walks the line between erudition and accessibility, neither insulting the audience’s intelligence nor talking down to it. As Bearing’s condition worsens, her welling emotions come across in a way that is truly affecting, rather than maudlin. The play lingers for a little too long after it has completed its story and made its points, but this is a quibble with a mostly tight, lean piece of writing.

Nixon does a terrific job of communicating the intellectual rigor of which Vivian is rightly proud. I found myself wishing that she would put across more of the passion and joy of scholarship, but that could just be my own sentimentality as the son of two college professors coming to the surface. Director Lynne Meadow smartly lets Edson’s sophisticated words do the heavy lifting, setting them in a production that finds its power in its simplicity. Wit certainly isn’t a laugh riot, but it is a smart, ruefully funny show that offers many rewards.

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I have a very special relationship to the 1965 Andy Warhol film Kitchen. In the years following Kitchen‘s very limited art house cinema release, Ron Tavel, Warhol’s scenario writer, adapted Kitchen into a stage play called Kitchenette, which in various incarnations was a favorite of off-off-Broadway well into the 1970s, featuring legendary performances by the likes of Harvey Fierstein, Mary Woronov and Taylor Mead.

Decades later, I acted in a public workshop of the play at the Omaha Magic Theatre. My mentor, playwright Megan Terry, had seen Kitchenette in the 60s, and thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. Reading Tavel’s wild and wooly script, I had to agree with her. After that workshop, whenever a directing class called for an exciting springboard, I would choose Kitchenette as the script I would work on. I developed a warm long-distance friendship with Tavel, and directed a reading of Kitchenette with NYC gay troupe TOSOS only a handful of years ago, shortly before Tavel passed away.

So I come to avant garde Brit theatre company Gob Squad’s Kitchen with a very unusual set of baggage. Gob Squad re-enacts the Warhol film (not as funny as the play, since Warhol’s cast couldn’t remember their lines…for various reasons…), laying emphasis on what was about to happen in the years after the film came out, and Warhol’s fascination with the telling details of the banal and the everyday. To better approximate the raw, almost amateurish edge of Warhol’s film, the Gob Squaders gradually replace themselves with people from the audience, to whom they feed lines through headsets.

I should not have been surprised, perhaps, that I was the first person selected to go on-stage the night I attended…

I can attest that Gob Squad’s version of Kitchen is a truly entertaining hoot-and-a-half, both as an audience member and as a participant. Happily, you can continue to enjoy the show as a spectator once you go onstage, since video monitors are liberally peppered throughout the set.

This is as much fun as avant-garde theatre gets, with plenty of food for thought and briskly optimistic theatricality.

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I’m not the biggest fan of South African playwright Athol Fugard, but this revival of his The Road to Mecca has raised my opinion of what he has to offer as a writer and a thinker. The things I don’t like about his other plays are still in evidence – it takes over a half hour for almost anything at all to happen, and once the play has reached its moving climax, we still have a half hour to go, much of it repetitive or unnecessary. That said, though, the second half of the first act and the first two-thirds of the second are indeed gripping, thoughtful drama.

Set in 1974 in the semi-desert region of South Africa known as the Karoo, The Road to Mecca follows elderly recluse Helen (Rosemary Harris), based on real-life “outsider” artist Helen Martin. Helen’s friend Elsa (Carla Gugino), a young teacher from Cape Town, visits her, concerned by a despondent letter Helen has sent. We discover (after that interminable half-hour) that Pastor Marius Byleveld (Jim Dale), who embodies the village’s conservative values, is determined to get Miss Helen into an old-age home.

Harris succeeds beautifully at conveying both Helen’s strong spirit and her ironically weak will. Gugino makes the best of the show’s least well-delineated character, laying the emphasis firmly on her compassion for Helen. And since we are inclined to hate the small-minded Marius before he even appears, its a testament to Dale’s phenomenal acting gifts that he actually seems to be a full, even somewhat warm human being.

Director Gordon Edelstein has a real gift for casting, and also keeps Fugard’s long exposition moving as briskly as possible, taking full advantage of those moments where we actually see the character’s personalities rather than hearing about them. Be patient with this show, and there are definitely rewards to be had.

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Back in the late 1970s Ashford & Simpson wrote a classic, elegant instrumental disco song “Bourgie Bourgie”, to which they later added lyrics for Gladys Knight. The vocal version of the song is an anthem of African-American upper mobility, celebrating aspirations to leave “the street” to join the bourgeoisie or even higher echelons of society.

Playwright Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly immediately brought “Bourgie Bourgie” to mind for me; Diamond has a lot of intelligent points to make about the very complicated relationship between race and class in America. She has to stretch her plot to make these points – the points remain true and insightful, but the plot has a hard time recovering from the stretching. Set at the elegant Martha’s Vineyard summer home of the well-to-do LeVay family, Stick Fly begins when two adult sons independently choose to introduce their girlfriends to the parents on the same weekend (do you feel the stretch yet?).

Stick Fly‘s production team includes a talented successor to Ashford and Simpson in Alicia Keys, who both partially funded the play’s move to Broadway and wrote new incidental music for the Broadway production. Her music, which recalls Phillip Glass just as often as it recalls Valerie Simpson, is indeed quite lovely, but director Kenny Leon gives it a little too much weight, often stopping the action dead in its tracks.

The cast gives uniformly solid performances under Leon’s steady hand, with two major stand outs: Condola Rashad as the young domestic Cheryl and Tracie Thoms as Taylor, an intellectual oddball from a working class background. Stick Fly is at its best when these smart African-American people debate what it means for Cheryl to work for the LeVays and Taylor to “marry up” to them.

It’s at its worst when it threatens to become a sexual soap opera. Sure, this does allow Diamond to make equally sharp observations about how gender and sex intersect with race and class, but once again with costs to the coherence of the plot. Overall Stick Fly is an intelligent and mostly engaging comedy of manners, but as entertainment, I’m not sure that it’s worth those bourgie Broadway prices.

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As other people have observed, this isn’t a show that anyone else could do. The medleys that dominate the show are so individually tailored to Jackman, they would seem hackneyed in the hands of a lesser talent – in his hands they positively soar. Accompanied by an 18-piece orchestra, Hugh Jackman sings the songs he wants to sings, dances the steps Warren Carlyle has crafted for him, and tells the stories he wants to tell, whether they’re about Australia, Hollywood or New York.

And there’s obviously a lot for gay men here. First of all there’s the simple fact of seeing this unreal hunk live and in the flesh. Also, Jackman doesn’t shy away from camp; in fact he has immense fun camping it up whenever he can. His biggest opportunity for that comes at the top of the second act, where he channels gay showman/songwriter Peter Allen, like he did in The Boy From Oz. His Allen act is even gayer here than it was in Boy, if that’s possible.

There’s a reason this concert is one of the hottest tickets of the Broadway season. You’ll be doubly lucky if you can get a ticket: lucky to get that precious commodity in the first place, and lucky to see one of the theatre’s greatest entertainers at the peak of his form. This. Is. Legendary. 10s across the board.

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Four aspiring young writers are accepted for a private seminar with Leonard (Alan Rickman), a respected novelist. He teaches them with ruthless, often unkind honesty, which also includes, under pressure, honesty about his own unethical behavior. Sex comes into play, but isn’t the thematic center of the play (at one point Leonard pushes the subject aside with something along the lines of “enough of the soap opera”). Gradually Martin (Hamish Linklater) emerges as the central character and his professional love/hate relationship with Leonard the spine of the play.

Rebeck is remarkable for the way she combines a realistic style with sharp-eyed satire (all her plays are satirical on some level). This is her most engaging comedy in quite some time; she is not immune to the occasional plot hole, but it’s all in the service of telling the often funny truth about the difficult, bruising life of a writer.

Rickman delivers his usual excellence as Leonard, portraying a man whose charisma and love for his craft more often than not overcome his genuinely heinous character flaws. Linklater is at the zenith of his geeky hotness here (particularly in one all-to-brief shirtless moment) and gives a detailed, appropriately twitchy performance that more than stands up to Rickman’s. Director Sam Gold, making his Broadway debut, connects with Rebeck’s hard edges and gives the play’s zing full reign.

If writers are important to you like they are to me – I’ve been working with them since I was 18 – then Seminar might be just the cup of sweet-tart poison for you.

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While the show has a vague underlying theme – something to do with singers and songwriters that have inspired the two – mostly this show simply testifies to their ability, separately and together, to dig into a song and tell its story with detail and feeling. Cook finds some rich shadings in Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in His Arms” that most other singers miss. She also fully plays both the ruefulness and the celebration in “Here’s to Life”, where most singers would pick only one angle and stick with it.

Feinstein’s been truly blossoming as a singer in recent years. In the evening’s most moving moment, he delivers a passionate rendition of “Fifty Percent” that the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman have altered slightly to change the character in the song from a newly widowed woman to a gay man. His heartfelt, textured reading of this clear-eyed yet ardent song goes from a gorgeously restrained, romantic beginning to rattling the rafters with an open-throated declaration of love at all costs. What can I say, it made me kvell. Go, Michael go!

This may not be particularly holiday themed, as Feinstein’s shows around this time of year have sometimes been. But this is, nonetheless, about as luscious as cabaret gets. Highly recommended.

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Stephen Sondheim’s Follies is revered in the theater community, and I think rightly so. It contains some of the best musical comedy songs ever written – funny and poignant, often at the same time. Thank goodness, then, that the new Broadway cast recording is beautifully recorded. It’s also the fullest recording of the complete Follies score to date, including pieces of cross-over and incidental music, played by a 28-piece orchestra. Jayne Houdyshell is extraordinary singing “Broadway Baby”, giving that song a roaring, teary-eyed joy I don’t think I’ve ever heard in it before. And Elaine Paige tears “I’m Still Here” a new one, mining a profound rage that underlies that famous song’s bravado. A Follies recording that gets this much right is musical comedy heaven.

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I’m a big fan of Noël Coward – here’s a gay playwright who married queer wit to a penetrating understanding of human emotions. Director Richard Eyre’s breezy new production of his Private Lives largely does right by my boy Noël, although his cast sometimes plays the darker side a touch too heavily, which throws Coward’s glittering balance off a bit.

Glamorous Brits Amanda (Kim Cattrall) and Elyot (Paul Gross) have been divorced from each other for five years. Now, on honeymoons with new spouses in the South of France, they meet again on neighboring hotel balconies, rekindling their powerful love and lust for each other…and then, slowly, the things that drove them apart originally begin to creep back in.

For the most part, Catrall and Gross do a solid job of keeping the pace quick, the quips delivered with sharp timing. One trick to playing Coward, though, is not letting his incisive insight into human psychology shade too dark. He is making gimlet-eyed fun of human folly, and much of its charge comes from the tension between glittering surfaces and murky depths. Put those depths too much on display, and the energy goes slack. That happens particularly in Act III of this production. By the very end though, Catrall and Gross are back on track, and finish off the evening on an appropriately light-hearted note.

Rob Howell’s set is the production’s biggest misstep – I get the idea behind the art deco apartment in the second half, but it is so poorly executed that it undercuts the elegance that is such a crucial part of Coward’s world. This is a minor hindrance, however, and most of the time this featherweight production glides by swiftly and effervescently, just like it should.

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I’m so thrilled that 2011 can be marked as the year that two very promising American playwrights crossed over into visibly being really great writers. David Lindsay-Abaire did it on Broadway in the spring with Good People, and Jon Robin Baitz did it Off-Broadway with Other Desert Cities. I rarely miss anything on Broadway, so I knew about Lindsay-Abaire’s triumph first-hand. I heard Baitz’s triumph trumpeted frequently by people whose taste I trusted, so I was very much looking forward to the inevitable Broadway transfer of Other Desert Cities. I was not disappointed.

In Other Desert Cities, writer Brooke Wyeth (Rachel Griffiths) reunites with her parents (Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach), former members of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan’s inner circle, her brother (Thomas Sadoski) and her aunt (Judith Light), in Palm Springs, to celebrate Christmas 2004. Six years after writing a hit novel, Brooke announces that she is about to publish a memoir focusing on an explosive chapter in the family’s history, throwing the holiday reunion into turmoil, as the Wyeth family struggles to come to terms with their past.

This is first-rate, intelligent family drama, as powerful in its own way as Tracy Letts’s breakthrough August: Osage County – and more tightly written. Political hot-button issues of all sorts are raised, their personal dimensions smartly explored – the comparisons and contrasts between the personal and the political are thoroughly worked over – and no easy answers are offered (though Baitz resolves the family stories in ways that feel earned, honest, and satisfying).

Rachel Griffiths is terrific as Brooke, and Stockard Channing is frighteningly accurate as she charts the shifting perspectives of Brooke’s mother Polly, a Texas Republican who also happens to be a Jewish ex-screenwriter, full of all kinds of surprises. The most compellingly writen character of all, though, is Polly’s fuck-up liberal sister Silda, which Judith Light plays to perfection. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first serious contender for 2012′s Best Play Tony.

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