Cool, Cool Men

American Psycho at the Schoenfeld Theatre

A scene from American Psycho.

         Remember when serial killing used to be fun?  I’m talking about the good old days, when Hannibal Lecter, in Silence of the Lambs, tearing off the face of a duped security guard, betrayed the slightest hint of a grin at the corner of his lips; or when Anton Chigurh, in No Country for Old Men, still managed to take a grim satisfaction in his increasingly creative butchery.  For sure, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, that deliciously soulless Wall Street banker with a heart of the finest mahogany, used to remember those days.  In fact, one could argue that with his fascination with the greats of his time – the Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, Leatherface, and, on an unrelated note, Donald Trump – he was even our foremost elegist of levity in assassination.  

You wouldn’t know it to look at him now, as played by Benjamin Walker in the musical version of that disturbingly relevant novel and film, at the Schoenfeld.  In a later scene, when one of his killing sprees is staged, by the unstoppably innovative director Rupert Goold (King Charles III) and genius choreographer Lynne Page, as a synchronized ‘80s club dance, Bateman is relentlessly grim, his jaw set firmly as he literally stabs friends and call girls in the back with serrated knives.  He doesn’t even crack a semblance of a smile until he starts shooting bystanders between his legs with a pump-action shotgun.  Go figure.

Christian Bale, in the 2000 film, made Bateman one of the more fascinating characters of turn-of-the-century cinema by shading the possible murderer, definite sociopath with the dead-eyed remove he later put to use, to brilliant effect, as Bruce Wayne.  But the most well-known image from that film is Bale’s face, splattered with blood, staring down the camera with an open-mouthed, wild smile – he saw the humor in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, meant to be a satire of yuppie consumerism and doomed to be eternally misinterpreted. 

This musical, by contrast, is written by Duncan Sheik, which means it can’t be interpreted at all – like most of his work, it’s performance art with the volume turned up, always interesting but never masterful.  (It doesn’t help that Mr. Sheik, writing some of his first theater lyrics here, is a borderline terrible lyricist, if admittedly a pitch-perfect writer of ‘80s genre parody.)  His score, which is at best fine, at worst affirmatively dull, and the book, by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, alternately hew to the satire Mr. Ellis intended and fall into the easy trap of turning Bateman into a tortured philosopher instead of what he is, which is a fun monster.  Several bizarre scenes, seemingly visiting from other musicals, ensue – among them an “A Chorus Line”-style power anthem version of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and, genuinely confusingly, what amounts to a one-scene cameo for Tony Award-winner Alice Ripley as Bateman’s mother, a part invented for the show, who sings (with Jennifer Damiano’s mousy assistant) a wistful ballad about the genuine goodness inside her son, called “Nice Thought.”  Nice thought indeed.

There’s only so much vapidity a narrative can stand before it becomes all about surfaces, but, luckily, the surfaces here may be unlike anything seen on a Broadway stage before.  Es Devlin, concert scenic designer for superstars ranging from Jay-Z to U2, creates a seemingly infinite hall of mirrors and pristine white walls for Bateman to get lost in, Justin Townsend’s lighting and projections conjure, alternately, the avarice of the decade and Bateman’s rending psyche, and Ms. Page’s choreography (a break-dancing ATM is a highlight) reminds us that those rigid, unchanging club dances of the 1980s were, at their core, a frightening paean to conformity.  Think about that next time you’re doing “Thriller.”

And Mr. Goold pulls it all together, making for a visual experience that rivals the film itself.  It’s fitting, actually, that the best scene in the show, the last of act one, is also the best scene in the movie (to which it’s not disloyal so much as laterally disjointed).  It won’t be a spoiler to anyone remotely familiar with the material to say that it involves an axe murder set to Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square.”  The scene is absolutely flawlessly staged, but what I noticed, more than the artful jets of blood, was that Mr. Walker, as Bateman, dances, at least in this scene, and smiles, at least in this scene, and commits murder, at least in this scene, like someone would if he were having a hell of a time.  I don’t know, maybe it was the Adult Contemporary pop rock at work, but it was the only time during the show when I didn’t have the ironic urge to whisper to one of the most renowned hedonists in pop culture: Jesus, Pat!  Cut loose!  Live a little!

Hometown Boy

Hold On to Me Darling at the Atlantic Theater Company

(L-R: Timothy Olyphant and C.J. Wilson in Hold On To Me Darling.)

As if we needed further reminder, there is ample evidence at the Atlantic Theater Company through April 3rd that the theater community ought to be eternally grateful -- indeed, ought to be nearly continuously genuflecting -- for the continued presence of Kenneth Lonergan, the greatest American playwright to emerge onto the scene in the last 25 years, in its midst.  Hold On To Me Darling, part treatise on celebrity and part paean to humanity, is slow to start but engrossing and entertaining for nearly all of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, a feat unmatched by many a Broadway production of late.  Mr. Lonergan, who wrote This is Our Youth and co-wrote the screenplay to Gangs of New York, is one of the last dramatic writers working who is a true master structuralist (Nora Ephron was one, Billy Wilder another -- where have they all gone?).  The twists and turns of his narrative are deployed with such a dexterous hand that they’re nearly as fascinating as the narrative itself.  Hold On To Me Darling bears the marks of a play that, like Youth (revived in 2014), will live on beyond any initial run.

Not that this one, directed by Atlantic artistic director Neil Pepe, is anything to sneeze at.  Timothy Olyphant more than bears the weight of a deeply difficult main character, Strings McCrane, a world-famous country singer and movie star -- his brother, Duke (C.J. Wilson, gruff and excellent) calls him “the third-biggest crossover artist of all time,” not without resentment.  The sudden death of Strings’ mother, at sixty-seven, just as he is about to begin shooting a big-budget epic and launching a worldwide tour, shatters and transforms him.  Suddenly he is desperate to escape the burdens of a star’s life, and in a flash he’s proposing to a married massage therapist, Nancy (Jenn Lyon, mastering and shading an ambitious gold digger), planning to move back home to Tennessee, and buying and managing a feed store in his hometown -- where his young, recently widowed second cousin (Adelaide Clemens, phenomenal) causes problems in his young relationship.  When confronted with his own obliviousness and self-contradiction, Strings maintains that his crusade is a holy one -- to live a simple life, leaving the paparazzi, the crowds, and his $200 million definitively behind.  

If it sounds simplistic, a southern-fried rom-com slightly northward of Sweet Home Alabama, it never is.  Admittedly, its particular charm takes a few scenes to fully rub you the right way, but once it does, it quickly coalesces into a fully memorable if slightly cliched piece of modern American drama.  Mr. Lonergan has always been at home with stories of young, wealthy, confusingly likeable jerks returning home after a tragedy, and this go-around is no exception.  Every scene, every line, every word is shaded with meaning (not to mention the jokes that land hard), with the added benefit of a collection of pitch-perfect southern accents that add legitimacy to a deeply authentic Tennesseean story written by a Bronx native.  (Props to Stephen Gabis, the dialect director.)  Walt Spangler’s rotating scenic design contains more hallways and rooms than seem possible for a structure so small.  Similarly, this play initially plays into expectations only in order to subvert and deepen them.  And if the hard-edged celebrity satire softens into reflective familial schmaltz at the end, you can't really begrudge Mr. Lonergan his indulgence, since, like the country singers Strings emulates, he's just too damn good at it.

Masters of the Universe

Dry Powder at the Public Theater

(L-R): Claire Danes, John Krasinski, and Hank Azaria in Dry Powder.

    Not since Glengarry Glen Ross has such as collection of eloquent slime been assembled upon a stage as in Dry Powder, the new play by Sarah Burgess and directed by Tommy Kail at the Public through May 1st.  Like that play, it’s appealing not for its sporadic cruel humor or for its pathos as much as its effortless fluency in the language of the profession it variously celebrates and views through a skeptical eye.  In the case of David Mamet’s 1984 play, it was real estate sales; for Ms. Burgess, it’s private equity.
    The latter playwright achieves a similar feat to the former in making the obscure language of a demonized line of work seem poetic and clear without ever oversimplifying it.  Ms. Burgess, like Mr. Mamet, also raises the stakes beyond the everyday, making immediate the struggles of a class of people with whom the theatergoing public might struggle to identify.  Rick, an impatient collection of tics and bellows played excellently by the wonderful character actor Hank Azaria, is the founder and president of a beleaguered private equity firm called KMM, which has run into trouble as of late after Rick threw himself an elaborate birthday party (which he insists included no more than one elephant) on the same day as KMM laid off thousands of workers at a national supermarket chain they own.  The resulting PR nightmare -- which seems to be brewing financial trouble for Rick as well -- can only be abated by a huge deal.  Luckily, Seth (John Krasinski), a co-founder of the firm and one of Rick’s right-hand men, has one: the acquisition of an American-made luggage company run by a seemingly gullible CEO, Jeff (Sanjit de Silva).  Jeff is willing to sell for a song, but the third co-founder, Jenny (Claire Danes), refuses to consider any deal, however good it’d look, that doesn't maximize potential profit.  Betrayal and backroom deals ensue.
    The cast is excellent and thrillingly naturalistic, but, appropriately for a play about high finance, the day is stolen by an unexpected participant.  Claire Danes’ character is a cartoon -- she refers to Yale as a “second-tier Ivy” and appears genuinely dumbstruck when Jeff tells her about his company-wide volunteering initiative -- and she’s not the right actress, overrated as she is, to elevate her to anything more than a generally funny foil.  It’s John Krasinski, unsurprisingly for me but perhaps surprisingly to the general public, who walks away with the production.  He has a towering dignity as an actor that he could never quite hide under his mean-spirited prankster on “The Office,” and he handles Seth’s transformation from smarmy sleaze to the moral center of the play, one of the most satisfying arcs in recent drama, with the same reserved, relaxed aplomb with which he fires off insults at his rival, Jenny.  It’s his first Off-Broadway performance, but almost certainly not his last.
    The play itself -- staged in the round by Mr. Kail, director of Hamilton, in a sea of nonspecific blue plastic fitting for a play about removed industrialism -- is not so much ripped from the headlines as much as it makes the audience vaguely uncomfortable when referencing subjects that are becoming more and more relevant (carried interest comes to mind).  The bespoke suits and unfortunate pantsuits (designed by Clint Ramos) and pulsing electronic music (by Lindsay Jones) seem to suggest that not all that much has changed in this world since the days of the yuppie, amoral businessmen who inspired American Psycho.  And much as those amoral businessmen would, it actually succeeds in raising the suspicion that doing what’s “right” may not always be the best choice, not only financially but also morally.  This means Ms. Burgess, in her third play, has created something ethically ambiguous, laugh-out-loud funny, and disturbingly relevant -- words one could easily use to describe the looming presence of the very system it depicts.

Secret Identities

The Crucible at the Walter Kerr and She Loves Me at Studio 54.

(L-R): Zachary Levi, Byron Jennings and Jane Krakowski in She Loves Me.

    I don’t entirely know how to describe the experience of a production directed by Ivo van Hove except to say that I seem to have been living in one since December, when I saw his acclaimed reinterpretation of A View From the Bridge.  I have just come from The Crucible (at the Kerr through July 17th), the other of Arthur Miller’s two most visceral plays, also directed by Mr. van Hove and designed by his partner Jan Versweyveld, and the four-month gap between has folded to something thinner than a memory, until the two spread together across theatrical time and space to form one blood-drenched morality play of the human condition.  I don’t know if this is enough to call Mr. van Hove the best director of straight plays active in the American theater, but I will say that if he should decide to conclude this American trilogy with a revival of Abie’s Irish Rose I should probably have to hold my nose and buy a ticket.
    To begin with, it is astonishingly well-acted by an extraordinary cast.  Saorise Ronan, late of Brooklyn, in her stage debut, acquits herself well as the dead-eyed girl who accuses her former lover’s wife of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts, as does Tavi Gevinson as the accuser’s friend who grows disillusioned with pointing fingers.  (I’m thrilled that a participant in the hugely underrated 2014 revival of This is Our Youth has been thus recognized.)  But Ben Whishaw and Sophia Okonedo, as the Proctors, the skeptical couple who find themselves at the mercy of mob hysteria, steal the production, turning in sensitive, understated performances full of love, tenderness, and authenticity.  Where Mark Strong, in A View From the Bridge, bellowed and growled in fear of loss of his world, Okonedo and Whishaw stand proudly and finally bow humbly.  Tonally, this poses no threat of whiplash to Mr. van Hove, further proof of his maneuverability in the American canon.
    Part of the production’s success -- equal to, but not quite exceeding, that of A View from the Bridge -- is that The Crucible remains such a gripping and a relevant play.  Wisely, Mr. Versweyveld and Wojciech Dziedzic, the costume designer, have kept the visual details of the play out of the realm of temporal definition, so as to leave the events of the Salem witch-hunt it describes unmoored to any age -- a detail of which Mr. Miller would undoubtedly approve, given that his play, written in 1953, was meant to mirror the Communist witch-hunt of the McCarthy hearings.  At first Mr. van Hove’s staging seems too small for the vast proscenium of the Walter Kerr, but as the show goes on we begin to see that he is treating figures like a slowly growing whirlwind, scattered and slow-moving at first, then faster and faster, whirling until the audience is forcibly drawn forward as a participant -- and a witness.

    It’s become just as easy to recognize a Scott Ellis production as it is to recognize a van Hove one.  Like Mr. van Hove, Mr. Ellis is a master of a his craft as a director, has a magnificent touch with actors, works exclusively with one scenic designer (David Rockwell, one of the best in the business), and harbors a deep love for the American stage canon.  Unlike Mr. van Hove, Mr. Ellis has a facility, one of the most dependable on Broadway, for leaving the audience with an ear-to-ear smile that lasts for days and days afterward.  After back-to-back knockouts with On the Twentieth Century and You Can't Take It With You and a relationship with Broadway hits going back to the eighties, it’s become his trademark.
    So, for the 50th anniversary season of the Roundabout Theater Company (with whom Mr. Ellis has a long history -- he directed both of their first two Broadway musical revivals), it’s back to She Loves Me, Mr. Ellis’ first-ever production with the Roundabout back in 1993.  Once again he directs and Mr. Rockwell designs, and Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi star as the dueling lovers in an adaptation of the same play that served as the inspiration for The Shop Around the Corner and You’ve Got Mail.  Joe Masteroff, of Cabaret, wrote the deeply excellent book, borrowing just enough both from that play, Parfumerie, and from Samson Raphaelson’s script for Shop whole still having fun with it in a fashion uniquely his.  It’s objectively a better book than Cabaret’s, and certainly a wittier one.
    Meanwhile, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, who went on to write music and lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof a year after this musical, in 1963, used this little jewel-box certainty of an adaptation to do some of their most playfully experimental work.  Bock’s music is just as sweet as it is fleet, and Harnick’s lyrics are so darting, quick, and satisfying they recall a puzzle of which you can't stop following the contours.  (“Sounds While Selling” makes “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” look like “I’m a Little Teapot.”)  There are twenty-two numbers in the show, and one can’t repress the feeling that Bock and Harnick just had a hell of a lot of fun writing this show and got carried away.  Who wouldn’t?
    Because this is an absolutely delightful musical revived in an absolutely delightful production with a radiant ensemble (Michael McGrath, Nicholas Barasch, Jane Krakowski, and Gavin Creel are standouts), an irresistible sense of fun, and two perfect leads.  Ms. Benanti, whose voice alone should be billed above the rest of the cast, had a cold on the performance I saw her, not that you would know it for the bravura performance she turned in.  The only thing that could match her singing voice is her funny, sympathetic, flawless stage presence.  A lesser actor would've quailed in her presence.  Instead, shockingly, the normally unremarkable Zachary Levi (late of NBC’s “Chuck”) more than matches her with the felicity of any rom-com leading man and energy that puts those leading men to shame.  (When Mr. Levi, six-three, pulled off a perfect cartwheel during the title number, I was barely surprised.)  I kept thinking he was doing an impression of some old matinee idol from the forties before I realized it was only that he was turning in a performance that would not seem out of place there -- the first I've seen in a while.  If I loved this trademark Ellis production absolutely to death, if I would readily see it again several hundred more times, it’s for the same reason anyone still watches old romantic comedies -- the boy and the girl helped me fall in love with an old, dear friend all over again.

Remembrance of Things Past

Blackbird, at the Belasco Theatre

Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in a promotional still from Blackbird.

Blackbird, by David Harrower, opens at the Belasco, in its Broadway premiere, on March 10^th, and true to the playwright’s name, it manages to be harrowing without entirely achieving the similarly difficult feat of being meaningful.  It originated at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, then transferred to the West End, where it won the 2007 Olivier Award for Best Play.  That same year it came to the Manhattan Theatre Club, with Jeff Daniels and Allison Pill in its two primary roles and directed by Joe Mantello.  In the eight years since it’s had over forty productions around the world, and a film version, starring Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, is due later this year.  So most of the team from that MTC production (minus Ms. Pill, who’s gotten an ABC drama since) has been reassembled for this production.

Mr. Mantello, who’s also responsible for this season’s The Humans, a painful play about a reunion between once-close compatriots who hurt and keep things from one another, is dealt a similar hand here.  Ray (Mr. Daniels), a possibly reformed pedophile who has started a new life under the name Peter, is visited at his workplace by Una (Michelle Williams, replacing Ms. Pill), his victim (although it becomes a matter of perspective whether this is the right word).  It’s been fifteen years since they’ve seen each other; their relationship occurred when she was twelve and he was forty.  Una never left her hometown and has suffered disgrace and humiliation, whereas Ray, after serving less than three years in prison, has, as Una sees it, gotten off scot-free.  She wants resolution, and confronts her abuser in his office’s garbage-scattered breakroom, as “Peter’s” coworkers slide by behind fogged windows like sharks circling for the attack.

Blackbird has power, undoubtedly, but it’s largely due to its performances, and those are interesting more in terms of actorly vivacity than dramatic talent.  Mr. Daniels makes Ray altogether too sympathetic, which may seem an unfair criticism given that the challenge with a character like Ray is to make him sympathetic in the first place, but it must be said that Mr. Harrower’s writing and Mr. Daniels’ performance never altogether plumb the depths of this man’s psyche.  He seems more neurotic than ashamed, but too uncomfortable with the situation to truly be unaffected by Una’s presence. 

Ms. Williams, meanwhile, in her second Broadway appearance, does nearly the same thing with Una as she did with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two years ago.  She delivers a twitchy, spasmodic performance ripe with tics that would commonly be described as overacting, but so unique in their enactment it’s almost impossible to come down on one side or the other as to whether it’s any good.  Her Bowles was nearly un-criticize-able because no one was really sure what she was doing; I felt much the same way about her Una.  When she’s not girded by superior material, however, it’s more difficult to give her the benefit of the doubt; when I recall Carey Mulligan’s performance in Skylight last year, as another spurned woman confronted with her much older and crueler former lover, I think of stillness and strength despite an unraveling personal life.  Onstage, Ms. Mulligan was a beacon, while Ms. Williams is a flickering, uncontrolled bug zapper.

Eventually, the play’s tenuous grasp on morality and motivation comes to seem confusing rather than fascinatingly disconcerting; Una’s transition from fury to a kind of an Oedipal desire is too abrupt to be convincing, and subtext alone makes not a dramatic tour-de-force.  All in all, the show rather parallels Scott Pask’s interesting set, which begins as a dreary, fluorescent-lit office hallway and literally unfolds into the conference room like a pop-up book.  The process of initiation draws you in, but gradually you’re left with something you’ve seen before.  To harrow is not to entertain.

Putting on a Show

Two Roundabout Theater Company productions, The Humans at the Helen Hayes Theatre and Noises Off at the American Airlines Theatre.

(L-R: Daniel Davis, Kate Jennings Grant, Jeremy Shamos, David Furr, and Andrea Martin in The Humans.)

    There’s deep authenticity and an almost tactile sadness in Stephen Karam’s play, The Humans, which has transferred to a Broadway production at the Helen Hayes after a hugely successful Off-Broadway run.  If it doesn’t add up to much, in the end, or if the larger point in lost somewhere in the unfolding of the various calamities that befall the pious Blake family, of Scranton extraction, it doesn’t take away from the fact that rarely has a family dynamic been portrayed so accurately, or so wrenchingly, on the stage.
    Brigid Blake (Sarah Steele) and her boyfriend, Richard (Arian Moayed) have invited the whole Blake clan to their cavernous, ground-floor Chinatown duplex, distressingly empty of furniture or decoration, for Thanksgiving.  (The set design is by David Zinn, who did Fun Home, another disturbing reminder of how little we know about our own families.) Naturally, personal demons haunt the proceedings.  Brigid’s career is floundering, her sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck) is ill and alone, her grandmother, Momo (Lauren Klein) is in the grips of dementia, and her parents, Erik (Reed Birney, great) and Deirdre (Jane Houdyshell, fantastic) are hiding something big.  Or at least it seems that way, given Birney and Houdyshell’s performances, which elevate Karam's excellent, funny, spilling-over dialogue to such heights that the issues of their squabbling brood seem like minor complaints by comparison.
    The play is excellently directed, by Joe Mantello (Wicked), who reminds us here of his marvelous facility for managing an ensemble.  A late scene, in which the stage lights go completely dark, leaving Erik groping in the gloom, is brave if only for its unusualness.  (Kudos to designer Justin Townsend for his punishing, incandescent apartment lighting.) Beyond its authenticity, however, the production doesn't stay with you long, much as a contentious Thanksgiving, so earth-shaking in November, has gone tepid in the memory by February.

    Take out the authenticity and crank up the memorableness and you have Noises Off, at the American Airlines, another ensemble piece that’s effortlessly funny and marvelously acted and directed (by Jeremy Herrin of last season’s Wolf Hall, Parts One and Two, weirdly).  Todd Haimes, the Roundabout Theater Company's artistic director, has referred to Michael Frayn’s 1983 comedy as “the funniest play ever written.”  On the page, I’m not sure if that’s true.  What I can say, and say wholeheartedly, is that central to and pervading this flawlessly cast production is without exception the best physical comedy I have ever seen on a stage.
    The structure of the play is what gives it its spark.  Effectively, Noises Off is a backstage farce bent into the shape of a Möbius strip and forcibly injected with crack cocaine.  In the first act, the troupe of players about to launch a tour of a bedroom farce go through a disastrous late night rehearsal. In the second, the set of that farce is turned around to reveal the backstage exploits of a calamitous performance of the play, several weeks later.  (The extraordinary set is designed by Derek McLane.) In the third, it’s flipped again to show us a later, even worse performance, in which the set is slowly destroyed as the evening goes completely off the rails.
            Listing the accomplishments of the actors who pull all of this off would fill innumerable columns.  Suffice it to say that the second act, by far the best, is performed almost entirely in silence, as those cast members who remain backstage go berserk trying to help those floundering out under the lights.  Just as futile would be to name favorites in the cast, as their collective performance achieves that rare compliment for a farce of moving like a well-oiled machine, but I'll give it a go.  Andrea Martin, as the lead of the show and the show within the show, proves a game captain.  Jeremy Shamos and David Furr, as befuddled actors, and Rob McClure, as an eternally harried stagehand, achieve things with their bodies I had not previously thought possible for those not composed of rubber.  Megan Hilty plays a terrible actor so well that I can only confirm that she is a wonderful one.  (To approximate fear, her bimbo actress clomps across the stage waving her arms above her head like a deranged Muppet, counting her steps as she goes.) And Tracee Chimo cements her place as Broadway's most valuable character actress, disappearing, chameleon-like, into her demure, nervous stage manager.  She is not even a little disguised, but the star of Bad Jews and The Heidi Chronicles is unrecognizable.  Anyone who can camouflage like that and still be funny deserves top billing sometime soon.
  Noises Off doesn't add up to much, either, dramatically.  Seemingly vital plot lines are introduced, then dropped, with abandon.  But the play proves that when you lean into structure, as it does and The Humans fails to do, that doesn't really matter.  The Humans was exciting to watch, but painful, too, which is maybe why I've already begun to forget it.  If I had the second act of Noises Off on tape, even now, days later, I'd still be rewinding it to try to understand how this cast could possibly have achieved such heights.  All humans need a laugh once in a while.

School's In

School of Rock at the Winter Garden Theatre

 

Alex Brightman (far left) and the ensemble of School of Rock: The Musical.

            There’s a little miracle going on at the Winter Garden Theatre right now, which is strange, because that esteemed stage is better known for gaudy, misbegotten, mind-bogglingly long-running pieces; three of its last tenants are Mamma Mia!, Rocky, and Cats.  That the man responsible for this show, School of Rock, is the same man who wrote Cats, more than thirty years ago, cannot be said to be especially surprising.  It’s impossible to classify Andrew Lloyd Webber or squeeze his shows into any category; they vary wildly in quality and scope, often in the same score.  Mr. Webber hasn’t had a musical on Broadway in ten years, and he hasn’t written a successful Broadway musical since Sunset Boulevard, in 1993.  What a way to break a streak this is.

            School of Rock is, of course, based on the iconic Richard Linklater film, now (yikes) more than twelve years old, that made a star of a young Jack Black.  In retrospect, it begs to be musicalized; it includes a few original songs (by Black and Mike White) and an infectious spirit of rebellion and abandon, but it’s Jack Black’s movie.  Even Joan Cusack, in an underrated turn as an overworked principal, can’t interrupt his runaway train to stardom as the wannabe rock god Dewey Finn.  (Sierra Boggess plays her role in the show, and though she has unmistakably the best Broadway voice in the cast, whenever she’s on stage you almost want her to get out of the way and let Dewey do his thing.)  As a comic role, Dewey, who’s forced to impersonate his substitute-teacher roommate to raise money for rent, is an actor’s dream, and Alex Brightman, who plays Black’s role here, grabs hold of it with both hands.  The first intimation that this show isn’t going to run on nostalgia is the immediately apparent fact that Mr. Brightman is not a Jack Black impersonator.  With insane energy and dedication, he throws himself into this hard-rocking, joyous musical as no one but himself, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.  He is the unmatchable emcee of a big ball of fun.  Tony’s calling.

            If Mr. Brightman’s the anchor of this far-out cruise ship, then the phalanx of children in his class, whom he wrangles into a pea-sized but unstoppable rock band, are the crew.  The pre-teens who make up the show’s ensemble (and play all the instruments live, themselves, every night, as Mr. Weber reminds us in a prerecorded announcement) are blessed with a level of talent that completely defies the usual critic’s reluctance to embrace child actors.  When Dewey tells his lead guitarist, Zack (Brandon Niederauer), “You’re only ten and you’re already better than me,” and calls him “the next Hendrix,” you believe him.  Those who don’t play instruments are just as talented — deserving of special mention is Isabella Russo as Summer, the band’s overachieving manager, who brings an earnestness to the part that Miranda Cosgrove, who played Summer in the film, could never manage — not to mention a singing voice Cosgrove, supposedly a musician, would envy.  But it seems useless to describe these kids with words — much like this shockingly entertaining production, they kind of have to be seen to be believed.

            Expanding if not improving on the comfortable, lived-in universe of the film are Glenn Slater (of the Disney film “Tangled”), a consistently capable, workmanlike lyricist whose flashes of brilliance line up almost exactly with Mr. Webber’s, and, oddly, Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, who wrote the book.  It’s not so surprising that Mr. Fellowes would be attracted to this project — thanks to Mr. Weber, it’s got British street cred, and Mr. Fellowes was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his book for 2006’s Mary Poppins.  What is surprising is that he’d do it so well.  Without losing any of the best parts of Mike White’s original film script (“I have been touched by your kids… and I’m pretty sure I’ve touched them” still gets laughs), he has rounded out characters, elucidated motivation, and adapted the hazy world of Richard Linklater to the more brightly lit one of Broadway, all without missing a beat.  His contribution refuses to be overlooked.

            What this all amounts to is a show that never fails to be exciting and new, but recalls and replicates the comforting, sympathetic, artistic, explosive spirit of the original film.  It strikes a perfect balance between cutesy escapades and its true, rebellious heart (a balance its forerunner, Matilda, didn’t manage quite so effectively), and it leaves you grinning from ear to ear days after seeing it.  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s projects are, as a rule, hit or miss.  This is a hit.  Let there be dancing in the aisles.