Don't miss these Broadway shows

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 9, 2009 at 3 p.m.

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Broadway shows may be closing in droves - and new ones canceled before they start rehearsals - but there are still shows to be seen. Rocky theater critic Lisa Bornstein says some of them create as much drama offstage as on.

Billy Elliot

* Star power: Music by Elton John, who appeared at curtain call on opening night in a white tutu, as worn by the show's ballet class girls.

* What's great: A piece of theater in which dance expresses the most complex emotions. Extraordinary performances.

* What's not: An occasionally melodramatic script that brought giggles to me at the line "It's not about a bairn who wants to dance!" Music that echoes the gritty sound of union protests, never the most melodic of traditions.

* Down and dirty: Three boys share the role of Billy Elliot, the son of an English miner in the midst of the 1980s strike. Stephen Daldry, who directed the 2000 movie, blurs the line between gritty reality and ethereal dance.

Trent Kowalik's Billy combines a wiry innocence with the foul mouth of an unsheltered boy, most remarkable in his quiet sentiments and the furious combination of tap and modern dance that marks his imagined meeting with his adult self. His best friend, Michael, played by two boys (on a recent night, the remarkable David Bologna), doesn't understand the appeal of dance but does get the love of a good tutu. In his comical song Expressing Yourself, he and Billy try on his mother's clothes without making it drag or girly.

Saturn Returns

* Star power: John McMartin and James Rebhorn, stage actors who have made so many films and TV shows that they're the faces you know and the names you may not.

* What's good: Rebhorn as a grieving widower holding too tightly to his daughter and playwright Noah Haidle's quiet, thoughtful concept on the heels of the maniacally funny Mr. Marmalade.

* What's not: The three phases of man don't add up to much in the way of revelation or innovation, and a play just over an hour feels both slow and short on information.

* Down and dirty: In a short run at Lincoln Center, Haidle told the story of a doctor, Gustin, through three actors playing him at points in his life 30 years apart. The play opens on the elderly Gustin (McMartin), at age 88 in need of home health care more for the company than for the assistance. He's still sharp and a little playful, but his life is emptiness, a chasm of grief over the long-ago death of his wife and more recent death of his daughter.

As McMartin walks offstage, he's replaced by Rebhorn, the character at 58, mourning his wife's death and treating his 30-year-old daughter as a companion. She, meanwhile, is itching to break out into her own life, and to that end desperately tries to set him up on blind dates.

Finally, we meet Gustin at 28 (Robert Eli), newly married, dancing to swing music with his wife and working long hours as a radiology resident. All three women are played by Rosie Benton, perhaps as some sort of thematic tie but, in effect, reducing all the women in this man's life to a single character.

The theater surely needs thoughtful, carefully paced plays, but they need more momentum and meaning than Saturn Returns provides.

Speed-the-Plow

* Star power: David Mamet's three-actor satire of Hollywood originally starred Entourage Emmy hog Jeremy Piven, Broadway star Raul Esparza and Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss. Then Piven left the show in mid-December, saying he had mercury poisoning (at which point Mamet wished him luck on his future career "as a thermometer"). Broadway star Norbert Leo Butz plays the role through Sunday, with Mamet cohort William H. Macy taking over Tuesday. The show is scheduled to close Feb. 22.

* What's great: Esparza. The actor best- known for Broadway musicals brings a musical ear to Mamet's rhythmic language while serving up new manic flavors and a perfect amount of underplaying to one of Mamet's funniest scripts.

* What's not: Other than all that offstage drama? Well, in a career marked by plays in which women are absent or underplayed, the role of Karen doesn't give an actress much to work with, and Moss, like many before her, can't quite nail down the part.

* Down and dirty: From the first words, the play has the precise pace of a ticking clock. It scoots by in 90 minutes of scheming, reveling and dirty tricks. This is the Hollywood of transplanted New Yorkers, making money and scrounging for power, thrown into upheaval when an office temp (Moss) suggests they make a movie for art's sake. A movie so pretentious it sounds like a combination of Waterworld and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Bobby Gould (Piven-Butz-Macy) has just been promoted to studio head, and his long-suffering partner in crime, Charlie Fox, has plans to go along for the ride, lofty secretary dreams be damned. The play clicks best when the two men share the stage, bathing in their visions of masculine rule.

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