Posted on Sun, Jun. 08, 2008

Good plays found a home on Broadway this season, though on this Sunday before the 62nd annual Tony Awards, not so many of them are still open for business.

Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, the revivals of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming and William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba and Cyrano de Bergerac -- all yielded Tony nominations, and all are gone.

But the best play of all? It's still around. Though it has nominal competition from Patrick Barlow's The 39 Steps, The Seafarer and Rock 'n' Roll, Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County is the play to beat this year.

Though not drawing huge audiences -- on Broadway, only musicals do -- Letts' riveting play is a testament to two things: the virtues of the ambitious, well-constructed, old-fashioned family drama, and the rich acting to be mined from performers who have worked together for many years, as is the case with this cast full of actors from Chicago's famous Steppenwolf Theatre.

On the new musical side, the two top Tony contenders are anything but traditional or formulaic: In the Heights, an ebullient show with a score full of Latino and hip-hop sounds; and Passing Strange, a rock-driven piece about a young black man's journey through life and love. Each of the season's two best musical revivals, a standard-setting Gypsy and an exquisite South Pacific, would be a clear-cut Tony winner in a season when they weren't competing with each other.

Here's a look at nine Broadway shows you'll see represented when the Tonys are handed out at Radio City Music Hall next Sunday. Buy tickets via Telecharge at 1-800-432-7250 or www.telecharge.com, Ticketmaster at 1-800-755-4000 or www.ticketmaster.com, or contact the Roundabout Theatre Company as indicated.

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th St.; $76.50-$102.50; Telecharge: Letts, a member of Chicago's groundbreaking Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is an incendiary actor-playwright whose darkly comic successes include Killer Joe and Bug. August: Osage County, an engrossing drama about a dysfunctional Oklahoma family, is marbled with that same dark humor. But its craft, scope and obvious progenitors -- watching it you cannot help thinking about Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night -- helped elevate the play to this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Staggering toward death, Violet Weston (Deanna Dunagan) -- cancer-stricken, pill-popping and vituperative to the bone -- seems determined to inflict soul-deep wounds on as many members of her family as possible. Her spirit-crushing sister, Mattie Fae (Rondi Reed); her daughters Barbara (Amy Morton), Ivy (Sally Murphy) and Karen (Mariann Mayberry); her pot-smoking sexpot of a young granddaughter Jean (Molly Ranson) all fall victim to her dagger of a tongue. During this family's own long journey into night, people laugh, rant, weep, display crushing cruelty and pitiable vulnerability. August: Osage County is a gripping, grand exploration of the ties that bind -- and sometimes strangle.

CRY-BABY, Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway; $35-$120; Ticketmaster:Hairspray it isn't. The second Broadway musical based on a John Waters movie, Cry-Baby isn't nearly as entertaining as either its 1990 source material or the rollicking stage hit that Hairspray became. With a script by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan (who won a Tony for their Hairspray book) and a score by Daily Show writer David Javerbaum and Fountains of Wayne rocker Adam Schlesinger, Cry-Baby confirms that turning movies into musicals is far from a sure thing (see Young Frankenstein below).

The well-worn romantic tale of a '50s bad boy (James Snyder) who romances a perky good girl (Elizabeth Stanley) is intact, and the wondrous Harriet Harris as the girl's propriety-conscious grandmother achieves a more authentic sense of Waters' quirkiness than anyone in Hairspray did. One number, Girl, Can I Kiss You . . .? (featuring an array of couples with frisky tongues French kissing), and the dance-driven jail-yard antics of Cry-Baby Walker and assorted juvenile delinquents have the sort of musical comedy sizzle missing from too much of the rest of the show.

GYPSY, St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St.; $32-$117; Telecharge: Critics have pronounced as definitive the fourth Broadway revival of this 1959 musical classic by Jule Styne, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim. And they're right. Directed by the 89-year-old Laurents, the show about the ultimate stage mother features a superb cast, including Tony-nominated Boyd Gaines as Mama Rose's long-suffering suitor Herbie and Laura Benanti (also a Tony nominee) as the gawky-turned-gorgeous Gypsy Rose Lee.

That said, the reason to catch this Gypsy is the woman playing Mama Rose: Patti LuPone. Living her dreams through her daughters, Rose can be relentless, charming, shameless, oblivious, monstrous -- or a mixture of all those qualities. LuPone conveys a single-minded drive, a real bond with Gaines' Herbie and, fleetingly, Rose's own vulnerability. And she makes Rose's Turn, which has been compared to a nervous breakdown in song, a thrilling, old-fashioned showstopper.

IN THE HEIGHTS, Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 W. 46th St.; $30-$110; Ticketmaster: From the moment that 28-year-old theatrical wunkerkind Lin-Manuel Miranda begins his hip-hop introduction of a neighborhood and its residents, In the Heights reveals its warm heart and musical richness. Salsa, hip-hop, merengue, Reggaeton, traditional Broadway and more blend in Miranda's eclectic score. The script by Quiara Alegría Hudes, though neither particularly deep nor always successful in avoiding clichés, conveys a powerful sense of Manhattan's Latino/multicultural Washington Heights neighborhood, and it neatly follows multiple story lines.

Also helping propel In the Heights to its competition-leading 13 Tony Award nominations are the vibrant performances of its talented cast (including Miranda's as the show's narrator, a bodega owner named Usnavi), the universality and specific cultural touchstones of its story and its genuine -- and contagious -- sense of joy.

PASSING STRANGE, Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St.; $26.50-$66.50; Telecharge: A young black man grows up, middle class and questioning, in Los Angeles. A smart, aspiring artist with a wry sense of humor, he first must answer the age-old question: Who am I? In search of answers, he travels to Amsterdam and Berlin and into the terrain of sex-drugs-rock 'n' roll, reinventing himself as he goes.

Passing Strange, the creation of a rock musician named Stew (just Stew, nothing else), fellow musician Heidi Rodewald and director Annie Dorsen, isn't like any other rock-propelled Broadway musical. It is affectionately satirical, experimental in form, exquisitely acted by a cast that includes Tony nominees Daniel Breaker and de'Andre Aziza, Rodewald, Eisa Davis (niece of activist Angela Davis) and Stew himself. It's a trip, musically, intellectually and theatrically.

SOUTH PACIFIC, Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 W. 65th St.; $75-$120; Telecharge: Since its Broadway premiere in 1949, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's South Pacific has had just one 15-performance ''revival'' -- until now. Sitting in Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, listening to 30 musicians play that lush original score, one simply feels gratitude: to Bartlett Sher for his brilliant direction; to Ted Sperling for his exquisite musical direction; to the design team; and to Lincoln Center for saying ''yes'' to a huge, costly, well-made classic.

Kelli O'Hara, who played opposite this production's Lt. Cable (Matthew Morrison) in The Light in the Piazza at the Vivian Beaumont, is a slender and beautiful Nellie Forbush, more down to earth than big-voiced Mary Martin but nonetheless moving as she makes the journey from prejudice to a truer love. Making his theatrical debut as the mysterious French planter Emile de Becque, opera star Paulo Szot is a riveting leading man -- and as hot, hot, hot as the South Pacific itself.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St.; $36.25-$121.25; 212-719-1300 or www.roundabouttheatre.org: In another season -- one without Gypsy and South Pacific -- the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Sunday in the Park With George might have won the best revival Tony. Intimate in scale, cutting-edge in design, the new production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1983 exploration of Georges Seurat's life and artistic process is beautiful and daring.

To replicate Seurat's creation of his pointillist masterpiece Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, projection designers Timothy Bird and the Knifedge Creative Network ''paint'' figures, background and eventually the entire painting on the white walls of the artist's studio; in the second act, set a century after the first, the same technique shows the development and transformation of Seurat's once-idyllic haven. British actors Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, who won 2007 Olivier Awards for their performances in the leading roles, don't top the work of Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters in the original, but their performances are richly detailed portraits of an artist and the woman who loses out to his work.

XANADU, Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W. 44th St.; $41.50-$111.50; Telecharge: How do you turn an absolute stinker of a 1980 Olivia Newton-John movie into a tongue-in-cheek hit Broadway musical? You hire Douglas Carter Beane (As Bees in Honey Drown and The Little Dog Laughed) to write the smart, snarky book about an artist, his muse and a roller disco.

It doesn't hurt that some of today's best musical comedy actors -- Kerry Butler (who pushes Newton-John's Aussie accent to just shy of unintelligible), Cheyenne Jackson (who plays a dumb hunk frighteningly well), Jackie Hoffman and Mary Testa (who play dueling muses), and Woody Allen movie vet Tony Roberts (who looks fairly hilarious in a toga) -- bring to life Beane's book and the Jeff Lynne-John Farrar songs (including I'm Alive, Evil Woman, Suddenly, Strange Magic and that timeless classic Have You Never Been Mellow?). On roller skates!

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, Hilton Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St.; $60-$120; Ticketmaster: Before it opened last November, Mel Brooks' follow-up to his triumphant musical version of The Producers looked to be the show to beat at this year's Tonys, with premium seats priced at a staggering $450 each. Then it opened.

Though Brooks, fellow book writer Thomas Meehan, director-choreographer Susan Stroman and star Roger Bart were all involved in The Producers, Young Frankenstein -- based on the hilarious 1974 movie written by Brooks and star Gene Wilder -- is generally as lead-footed as the monster with the defective brain in his noggin. The best song in the score? Puttin' on the Ritz, not by Brooks but by Irving Berlin. Most of the show's collection of gifted comic actors -- Bart as Frederick Frankenstein, Megan Mullally as his touch-phobic fiancee Elizabeth, Sutton Foster as Inga, Andrea Martin as Frau Blucher, Christopher Fitzgerald as Igor and Shuler Hensley as the monster -- evoke without equaling the movie's cast. Though millions have been spent in the effort, Young Frankenstein, groaning under the weight of stale Borscht Belt humor, never gets jolted to the brilliant comic life that The Producers displayed from overture to curtain call.