C+

Critics mostly agree that playwright Delaney Britt Brewer has a way with dialogue, but the three parts of her play are too loosely connected and hard to follow. Even though critics see the wolf imagery as little more than a gimmick and are mixed on the performances, they are generally charmed by enough of the play to keep the grade just on the positive side.

A-

Critics say Richard Taylor's script owes something to Sam Shepard and Martin McDonagh--and then pays that debt of precedent with interest. In near-unanimity, they praise Taylor's blend of genuine terror and sharp comedy and the two leads at the center of this brotherly ex-con confrontation (Rhett Rossi and Tom Pelphrey) get high praise, too. But the production is not without its detractors, who essentially contradict the praise of their colleagues. What one critic finds gripping another finds annoying. Kevin Kittle's direction either winds the tension marvelously or subverts itself with poor staging. There does not appear to be an axis of interpretive dispute among the critics, only a matter of raw taste.

B

Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, so even gentlemanly critics like David Gordon of Nytheatre.com, who acknowledge narrative flaws in the late Frank McCourt's 1997 musical ode to the Irish, inevitably give it up: "McCourt deserves all the applause he gets, even if he's written better pieces than this." Critics agree that the catchy music helps the history lesson go down; as the Post's Elisabeth Vincentelli confesses, "Throughout the show, the music expresses a sentimental nostalgia through catch-in-your-throat numbers that make you reflexively tear up." Credit's also due to the actors, especially Kerry Conte and Gary Troy; just as the hard work of Irish laborers on the railroad began to shift America's perception of these hard-luck immigrants, so too does the hard work of this cast.

B+

This doesn't happen everyday: Replacement leads in an award-winning commercial hit that may be even better than the original stars. Even critics who found Trevor Nunn's revival overly slim and dim when it opened last December, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury making it more or less worth a visit, mostly acknowledge at least that Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch bring fascinating new shadings to their roles, and at best that their presence--not to mention several months of good houses and a couple of Tonys--have transformed the show. Many of the repeat critics have improved their overall grade (with the exception of Talkin' Broadway's Matthew Murray, who calls the new-cast production a "train wreck"). Michael Sommers of New Jersey Newsroom, a fan of both casts, offers an intriguing theory: that Stritch may by intentionally forgetting the lines to "Liaisons" for effect. NOTE: Reviews of the new cast are indicated by an asterisk.

A-

Here's a first: The biggest complaint levied against Headland's gluttonously dark yet comic look at what critic Michael Sommers calls "mean-girls-gone-wild" is that the show is too mean. The excesses, including a show-stopping treatise on oral sex, are roundly applauded, especially the aesthetics of Andromache Chalfant's Fifth Avenue suite design and Emily Rebholz's lush costumes. The actors and their spot-on director are also uniformly praised, which leaves the few party poopers like Backstage's Erik Haagensen to gripe that "the laughter felt more contemptuous than empathetic, smugly asserting superiority to what was unfolding on stage." But for the guilt-free party animals, like The New York Post's Frank Scheck: "If the rest [of Headland's plays about sins] are this good, I can't wait for the ones about lust and greed."

B+

Mark St. Germain's play, which imagines a meeting between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis on the eve of WWII, gets mostly high marks for lively intellectual discussion and fine performances in the two lead roles. Though even some admirers admit that the concept is a bit prefab and that the playwright hasn't deeply humanized these icons as much as he could, most critics find the talk rich enough to overcome these flaws. A few dissenters--most strongly, Lighting & Sound America's David Barbour--see it as a kind of sock-puppet Great Ideas Debate.

B-

Jack Cummings III, who recently staged The Boys in the Band in a Chelsea loft, again takes an immersive seating approach as audience members sit in beach chairs as the musical takes place in the empty space around them. Some critics find this effective, while others find it uncomfortable. Critics find the show enjoyable, but to varying degrees. Some find that too many of the vignettes are cliché, but there are high marks for Brad Alexander's score and the cast, especially Donna Lynne Champlin in her multiple roles.

B

PTP/Potomac Theatre Project continues its string of productions of the works of Howard Barker-- a mainstay of British post-Brechtian theatre who remains largely unknown outside of a constituency of academics and critics here in the US-- with this presentation of two of his poems. While everyone admires the craft and talent on display in this evening, a majority of critics feel that the billing is both too short to be fully satisfying and that the language is more poetic than dramatic and thus, no matter how well done, is poorly suited to the one-shot experience of hearing something on the stage. (If you would like to learn more about Howard Barker, blogger George Hunka writes a continuing in depth series on his work here).

F-

This universally scorned septuagenarian sex farce might make even Hef wince, but as critic Matthew Murray points out, at least it has medicinal value: It's "at least as effective as prescription sleeping pills, if perhaps slightly harder to swallow." Variety's right there with him, agreeing that "99% of the gags make you gag," which makes sense since, according to Backstage, "The gags feel older than the combined ages of the three cast members." At best, The New York Post gives credit to the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold's "ample physical charms," but that's it. At least there's one good side-effect for this stinker: It's really stimulated the critics, even if, as Murray puts it, they're "stiff for all the wrong reasons."