ScheckOnTheater

There’s a mass seduction going on nightly at the Broadhurst Theatre. In his one-man show Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway, the Aussie performer has the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. It’s a charm explosion, the sort of dazzling exhibition that would make Al Jolson green with envy and be declared illegal in certain countries. Shamelessly flirting with male and female audience members alike, Jackman offers himself up for our delectation and--judging by the rapturous response--everyone is prepared to take him up on it.

Jackman is not a brilliant actor, singer or dancer. And yet he combines all three elements to fabulous effect in this song-and-dance show that is the sort of old-fashioned star entertainment that has all but become extinct.

From the very first moments, when he sings the opening notes of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from offstage, he has the audience in his pocket. Casually strolling onstage while still singing, he cuts such a figure of masculine perfection that he almost seems a parody of himself.

But he effectively plays off his ridiculous good looks with ample doses of good-natured humor. He bumps, he grinds, he does pelvic thrusts and, if you’re sitting in one of the box seats, he might even sit in your lap.

The show, previously presented in San Francisco and Toronto, is essentially an autobiographical nightclub act, combining highlights from Jackman’s career with pop standards and songs from movies and Broadway musicals. The performer is certainly not shy about relating his long list of credits, and even accompanies his rendition of “L.O.V.E.” with a clip reel showcasing his film and television appearances.

Accompanied by an 18-piece orchestra and six back-up female singer/dancers, he rockets through a two-hour program that includes medleys devoted to movie music, dance-themed numbers and the songs of Peter Allen, who he portrayed so memorably in The Boy From Oz. Highlights include a gorgeous version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in which he’s movingly accompanied by aboriginal singers and musicians, and the first act finale, a magnificent rendition of “Soliloquy” from Carousel.

But it’s his uncanny rapport with the crowd that really forms the heart of the show. For the sultry number “Fever,” he selects an audience member for some hilarious up-close and personal interaction. And whether he’s cracking silly jokes about the short-lived Kardashian marriage and the NBA lockout, showing embarrassing childhood photos of himself or describing his training regiment to play Wolverine, he steals hearts with seeming effortlessness.  

He’s only scheduled for a limited run through the end of the year, and tickets will no doubt soon become difficult, if not impossible, to procure. Don’t hesitate—who knows when this sort of show business magic will come our way again?

Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com.

Just in case you didn’t you didn’t get your hippy-dippy fix with the recent revival of Hair, there’s now the 40th anniversary production of Godspell to help you get your groove on. Stephen Schwartz’s 1971 musical, conceived and originally directed by John-Michael Tebelak, retells the story of Jesus through a series of musical numbers adapted from the Gospel of St. Matthew. In this new version conveniently playing next door to the same composer’s Wicked, you’ll hear references to, among other things, Steve Jobs, Facebook, the birther controversy, Donald Trump, Occupy Wall Street and Lindsay Lohan.

Don’t remember such things from your Bible studies class? Not to worry. This version is designed to be strictly of the moment, as contemporary as a special episode of Glee, which is it most closely resembles.

Your tolerance for this sort of thing will depend on whether you find the idea of the above gags amusing and the prospect of being invited onstage at intermission to mingle with the cast and partake of some “wine” appealing.

To be fair, the mostly young audience ate it up. But to also be fair to those of us of a certain age, they probably haven’t sat through innumerable previous productions of the show, or seen the lamentable film version.

The relentless jokiness of the proceedings, which is thankfully alleviated in the second act—presumably that’s because it’s hard to have quite as much fun with such matters as Judas’ betrayal and the Crucifixion—becomes tiresome.

Not that the evening is without its pleasures. They are chiefly derived from Schwartz’s tuneful pop/rock score, which contains such memorable numbers as “Day by Day” and “Turn Back, O Man,” and the amazingly high energy of the youthful ensemble, who perform as if their life depends on it. The sole weak link was Hunter Parrish (Weeds) as Jesus, who lacks the voice to put over the ballads or the charisma to be convincing as the leader of a new religion. Of course, his hunky good looks went a long way towards overcoming these deficiencies for the young women in attendance, who seemed to melt every time he flashed his toothy grin. Which was a lot.

Director Daniel Goldstein certainly makes excellent use of the intimate Circle in the Square space, having the actors running up and down the aisles while making every effort to directly engage with audience members. The staging even has the band members situated throughout the auditorium, wailing away on their electric guitars. Like everything else about the show, such the overly aggressive musical arrangements, they seemed to be trying too hard.

Circle in the Square, 1633 Broadway. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com.

Miscommunication—of the linguistic, cultural and relationship kind—is the subject of David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish. Receiving its Broadway premiere after an acclaimed run earlier this year at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, this witty new comedy by the author of M. Butterfly concerns the travails of an American businessman trying to negotiate the labyrinth of Chinese commerce. But with its repetitive gags involving mistranslations, it frequently feels more like an overextended sketch and ultimately lacks the depth to make it more than a slight if entertaining diversion.

Daniel (Gary Wilmes) is a Cleveland entrepreneur who has traveled to the mid-sized city of Guiyang to secure a contract to provide the signage for their new cultural center. Not knowing a word of Chinese, he enlists the service of an Australian émigré interpreter (Stephen Pucci) to help him in his dealings.

At first, his meeting with the minister (Larry Lei Zhang) and his stern female vice-minister, Xi Yan (Jennifer Lim), seems to go well, despite the comic mistranslations of a young translator whose mistakes become evident to the audience via projected supertitles of the actual words being spoken. (Indeed, lengthy portions of the play’s dialogue are in Mandarin, which is surely a first for a Broadway play.)

But complications soon abound, as the English speaking Xi Yan insists on a private meeting with Daniel in which she professes to want to secretly help him for reasons of her own. Daniel quickly falls in love with his unofficial partner, even while their different agendas and inability to fully communicate with each other cause an endless series of problems.

The playwright has a great deal of fun not only with the language barriers separating the various parties, but also their cultural differences. One of the wittier extended gags involves the Chinese bureaucrats’ unexpected reaction to the revelation that Daniel once worked as a salesman for the disgraced company Enron.

But the comic conceits ultimately wear thin, and the ostensible love story between the two principals, culminating in a surprise plot twist, doesn’t have the desired emotional resonance. Not helping matters is the play’s tired structure, with the action consisting of a flashback framed by Daniel’s Powerpoint presentation about conducting business in China.

Although Wilmes is rather bland as the hapless American, he’s certainly convincing enough. The real acting honors go to Lim, superb as the double-dealing Xi Yan, and the supporting players, who fully mine the laughs in the complex dialogue in both English and Chinese. Director Leigh Silverman has provided a fast and breezy production, aided mightily by David Korins’ wonderfully versatile sets and those terrific projections.

Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200. www.ChinglishBroadway.com 

Relatively Speaking, the new evening of comic one-acts by Woody Allen, Elaine May and Ethan Coen, has just opened on Broadway, and all I can say is…oy! That this level of writing talent--not to mention an estimable cast of many comedic pros--could produce such a lethargic, laugh-free evening is a mystery and a tremendous disappointment.

Truth be told, none of the authors’ playwriting efforts, at least in recent years, has been particularly good—there’s a good reason that May doesn’t include the Broadway flop Taller Than a Dwarf in her credits. But there were high hopes for this production directed by actor John Turturro.

Coen’s relatively brief curtain-raiser, Talking Cure, is as baffling as it is unfunny. The first scene depicts the charged interaction between a surly mental hospital patient (Danny Hoch)--a postal office worker who went postal on a customer--and a psychiatrist (Jason Kravits). The action then segues to a suburban home in the 1950s, where a long-married couple (Allen Lewis Rickman, Katherine Borowitz), presumably the patient’s parents, is squabbling. None of it makes much of an impression.

May’s seemingly interminable (actually, a little more than 50 minutes) George is Dead marks the welcome return of Marlo Thomas to the Broadway stage. Unfortunately, the actress, who looks stunning at age 73, is trapped in the one-note role of Doreen, a wealthy socialite who has just lost her husband in a skiing accident. Infantile and helpless, she shows up at the apartment of Carla (Lisa Emery), the daughter of the nanny she had as a child. There she makes endless selfish demands on her host, who is in the middle of a vicious argument with her husband (Grant Shaud). It’s a one-joke premise, and the joke isn’t funny at that.

Allen’s contribution demonstrates that the veteran funnyman hasn’t lost his ability to craft amusing one-liners. They flow fast and furiously in Honeymoon Hotel, but the thin sketch feels like a relic, something that definitely wouldn’t have passed muster at Your Show of Shows, where the young Allen worked as a writer. It concerns a middle-aged novelist, Jerry (Steve Guttenberg), who runs off with his son’s nubile bride-to-be (Ari Graynor) on their wedding day, only to be pursued to the tacky titular setting by numerous interested parties. They include Jerry’s furious wife (Caroline Aaron); his best friend (Shaud); the jilted bridegroom (Bill Army); the bride’s parents (Julie Kavner, Mark-Linn Baker); the clueless rabbi (Richard Libertini) and Jerry’s hapless shrink (Kravits). Eventually, a Brooklynese-talking pizza delivery man (Hoch) shows up to impart some working-class wisdom to the self-absorbed group.

Even with some admittedly funny jokes and a dream cast of supporting comic players (where has the great Libertini been all these years?), the piece feels strained and vacuous. And considering Allen’s own controversial romantic issues, it also comes across as more than a little bit tacky.

Not helping matters is the leaden direction by Turturro, who based on this evidence doesn’t seem to have a comic bone in his body. Although to be fair, not even a Mike Nichols or Gene Saks would have been able to bring anything to these futile exercises.

Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929. www.ticketmaster.com.   

One of history’s greatest ironies is that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his soaring “I’ve have been to the mountaintop” speech on the very night before his death. Now, emerging playwright Katori Hall has imagined the events of that final evening at the Lorraine Motel in her work The Mountaintop.  This Olivier-Award winning play, being presented on Broadway in a production starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, is a theatrical tour de force.

As magnetically played by Jackson, King is here presented as a compellingly human figure: exhausted, battling a cold; deeply upset about the Vietnam War and concerned about his safety. He also apparently has “stinky feet,” and desperately needs cigarettes and coffee.

Supplying the latter items is Camae (Bassett), the attractive chambermaid who delivers them to his room during a torrential rainstorm. Sassy, provocative and a bit flirtatious, she stirs more than just friendly interest from King.

At first the two playfully banter over such lighthearted matters as whether King should keep his moustache and the proper poses to strike while smoking—meanwhile, the periodic bursts of thunder have him flinching as if they were gunshots. But the encounter soon takes a more surreal tone, as Camae, who describes God as a black woman, turns out to have a very particular agenda.

While the playwright is not fully successful in elevating her work into a deeper commentary on the progress of racial relations in America, The Mountaintop is so entertaining and insightful along the way that it hardly matters. And whatever deficiencies there are in the writing are compensated for by the masterful staging of Kenny Leon, who--aided by David Gallo’s amazing set and projections-- delivers a stunningly climactic coup de theatre.

Although he bears little physical resemblance to King and doesn’t truly alter his distinctive vocal mannerisms, Jackson, with the aid of subtle make-up and hair styling, is a reasonable facsimile. More to the point, he’s hilariously funny—never more so than during an aggrieved phone conversation with God—as well as deeply moving when conveying the civil rights leader’s fears and vulnerabilities. 

Bassett is even better, stealing the show with her wildly raucous and earthy portrayal that fully mines her character’s humorous and otherworldly qualities. And her delivery of Hall’s superbly written poetic monologue encapsulating modern black history is blisteringly visceral. It’s very early in the season, but it’s hard to imagine a performance that could beat this one come awards time.

Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com.