The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (Richard Rodgers Theatre)

By Harry Forbes

First things first. This production, which hailed from the American Repertory Theater, is no desecration of DuBose Dorothy Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin’s masterpiece. Despite some patronizing comments from director Diane Paulus and adapters Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray prior to Broadway that indicated the work needed fixing – comments that drew ire from Stephen Sondheim and others – this is very much the “Porgy and Bess” we all know and love.

And despite streamlining, at two and a half hours, it is a satisfyingly full evening and hardly feels like a Reader’s Digest version by any means.

Paulus has, in fact, done a superb job of giving the drama sharp focus, and she’s been aided by a uniformly excellent cast.

Audra McDonald’s Bess – finely characterized and sung as it is – does not blow away Norm Lewis’ grey-bearded Porgy, nor anyone else on stage for that matter.

David Alan Grier reveals a strong voice, and registers as one of the best Sporting Life’s within memory. Natasha Yvette Williams’ amusingly gruff Mariah is a constant delight, and her “I Hates Your Strutting Style” putdown of the drug-pushing Sporting Life is a little show-stopper in itself. Nikki Renée Daniels’ Clara offers as sweet a “Summertime” as I’ve ever heard in the show’s opening moments. And Bryonia Marie Parham’s Serena gives full measure to “My Man’s Gone Now.”

The supporting men hold up their end, too, with powerful work from Joshua Henry’s Jake, Nathaniel Stampley’s Robbins, and Phillip Boykin’s scary Crown.

McDonald acts up a storm as Bess, playing her as a damaged (literally as per the scar on her cheek) as well as emotionally. Though not as innately sexy as some past interpreters, she certainly plays up the sexuality in her first scenes, and then transforms most affectingly once she moves in with the crippled Porgy after her lover Crown commits murder and must go undercover.

When Crown surprises her at the picnic and virtually rapes her, she succumbs with graphic abandon. And, near the end, when she falls under Sporting Life’s sway, she becomes a pathetic creature again, hungrily sniffing the cocaine on the ground.

Lewis is a pillar of strength, and though Porgy’s lost his cart in this production, Lewis’s twisted legs make him as “crippled” as the character needs to be. He and McDonald make beautiful music together, slipping into the numbers, like the rest of the cast, as naturalistically as possible.

This is probably the dancingist “Porgy and Bess”you’ve ever seen, and Ronald K. Brown’s choreography is tasteful and satisfying throughout.

Purists may rankle at re-orchestrating Gershwin, but William David Brohn and Christopher Jahnke’s adaptation sounds just fine to me. There’s a new Broadway-style overture, and a couple of numbers such as “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” have a slightly more pop inflection, but not egregiously so.

This Broadway-style adaptation is miles better than Trevor Nunn’s West End version a few years ago, which played well dramatically, but was musically undernourished.

(Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 West 46th Street, 800-745-3000 or ticketmaster.com)

Close Up Space (Manhattan Theatre Club)

By Harry Forbes

David Hyde Pierce is a highly adept stage actor and it’s a pleasure to watch him at full throttle in the opening moments of Molly Smith Metzler’s, alas, ultimately not very compelling play. He’s Paul, a widowed publisher whose 18-year-old daughter Harper (Colby Minifie) has been thrown out yet another school, this time for some naked rooftop shenanigans on campus.

The school has just written him about her expulsion, and Paul, red pen in hand, bitingly dissects all the errors of redundancy, syntax, and grammar in the series of letters, blithely oblivious to the disturbing content therein.

Soon after, he similarly decimates the application letter of would-be intern Bailey (Jessica DiGiovanni) whose initial assurance soon gives way to humiliation and tears. Despite all, he hires her.

These are the play’s most entertaining moments, but in short order, we’re introduced to his eccentric office manager Steve (Michael Chernus) who, unbeknownst to Paul, has been camping out in the office reception area at night in a big yellow tent. Why? Because he’s disconsolate about his beloved dog shifting affections to Steve’s roommate, and can’t bring himself to return home.

Suddenly, we’re in annoyingly absurdist territory that only escalates with the cyclonic arrival of the delinquent Harper, now defiantly spouting Russian – unintelligible to Paul -- and behaving in an alarmingly threatening manner.

There’s also Vanessa Finn Adams (Rosie Perez providing some chuckles), the firm’s best-selling author. Against all odds, both she and Steve end up bonding with Harper who, as the play’s (thankfully short) 85 minutes progress, reveals her genuine hurt at her father’s lack of empathy.

As our sympathies are so much with Paul, however, it’s difficult to feel much pity for the eccentric Harper, though the script would seem to have us do so.

The play is ultimately about communication, or lack thereof. Thus, the title refers not to “Close Up” in the cinematic sense, but the editing term that mirrors (and might conceivably fix) the metaphorical ellipsis between Paul and Harper.

All the performers are decent, and to varying degrees, appealing, including, little by little, Chernus’ initially annoying Steve.

Leigh Silverman directs a well-paced production. Todd Rosenthal’s detailed office set provides visual interest. Emily Rebholz ‘s costumes, Matt Frey’s lighting, and Jill BC Du Boff’s sound design are fine.

(Manhattan Theatre Club, New York City Center – Stage I, 131 W. 55th St., 212-581-1212 or nycitycenter.org; through January 29)

Neighborhood Watch (Brits Off Broadway)

By Harry Forbes

In his 75th play, Alan Ayckbourn shows that he is still very much at the top of his game (though when has that not been the case?), and “Neighborhood Watch,” direct from Ayckbourn’s home base, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, England, features his usual exemplary ensemble of actors that have you marveling at the absolute perfection of each characterization.

A large part of the pleasure derived from Ayckbourn’s plays is the skill with which he orchestrates each new development, but on this occasion, the play does open with a long speech in which the the middle-aged Hilda (Alexandra Mathie) eulogizes her beloved brother Martin who, we gather, has been killed “tragically and prematurely.” That much we know. The rest of the play a flashback.

We see how said Martin (Matthew Cottle) and Hilda have taken up residence at the Bluebell Hill Development and are relishing their anticipated carefree suburban existence. But a young trespasser climbs over their fence just as they are preparing for a housewarming party. Their first guests – the ex-security guard and sometime vigilante Rod (Terence Booth) and the gossipy Dorothy (Eileen Battye) – convince them there’s danger everywhere.

Rod, in particular, warns that the lower class folk in the estate houses at the bottom of the hill are a bad lot, and Martin and Hilda had better put a strong fence, topped with barbed wire, around their house if they know what’s good for them.

In short order, we meet their other neighbors: sad sack Gareth (Richard Derrington), a retired engineer, obsessed with ancient torture devices, whose sexy young wife Amy (Frances Grey) is having her latest extramarital affair with none other than Martin and Hilda's next-door neighbor, powder-keg Luther (Paul Cheadle), abusive husband of meek music teacher Magda (Amy Loughton).

Martin is sufficiently galvanized by Rod’s alarmist talk to form the titular neighborhood watch, one which carries increasingly fascistic overtones. If the police won’t adequately protect them, as Rod has demonstrated in his cautionary tale about how his hedge trimmer once went missing, they'll do it themselves. Before long, we see that there can be just as much danger within their gated community as outside.

A dark undercurrent imbues the play, with Ayckbourn taking every opportunity to satirize right-wing, sanctimonious folks whose fear and paranoia are far more destructive than whatever they perceive as the enemy. Hilda and Martin are devout Christians, but Ayckbourn takes sharp aim at the hypocrisy beneath the good intentions. The character with the least hang-ups – the amoral Amy – is the one who most earns our sympathy.

The cast, as noted, is truly brilliant. Each brings one of Ayckbourn’s masterful character studies to vivid life. They exemplify the best of the British school of acting, with Mathie especially impressive as the sweet but, as we gradually come to see, scarily controlling sister.

Set designer Pip Leckenby’s cannily placed pair of crescent-shaped sofas, with three perfectly positioned throw pillows, makes the apt living room centerpiece, even without having to show us the dreadfully green wallpaper which Hilda has proudly covered the walls.

Under Ayckbourn’s own direction, every funny barb, delicious nuance and ominous utterance lands just as it should.

(59E59 Theaters, 212-279-4200 or www.59e59.org; through January 1)

Seminar (Golden Theatre)

By Harry Forbes

If “Seminar” offered nothing more than a chance to see Alan Rickman at his most sneeringly, witheringly sarcastic, that would probably be enough for the audience that cheers his entrance, and laps up every subsequent scene. He’s Leonard, a famous fiction writer, hired for a cool $5,000 each by four aspiring young novelists, to coach them over a period of 10 weeks.

His feedback as they tremblingly offer him a few pages of what they’ve written is anything for paternal, and he – like everyone else in this play – seems to be able to assess the quality of prose by the merest glance. But we’ll forgive playwright Theresa Rebeck this bit of dramatic license.

The well-heeled Kate – whose spacious 10-room rent controlled apartment is setting – gets the worst of Leonard, as he harshly laces into the story it’s taken her six years to write. She’s played by Lily Rabe in a sardonic, New York style eons removed from her much-praised Portia in the Al Pacino “Merchant of Venice.”

Jerry O’Connell (in his Broadway debut) is Douglas, the cockiest member of the group about to be published (though Leonard decrees his writing is perfect “in a whorish way”); Hettienne Parr is the sexy Izzy (she uninhibitedly bares her breasts early on) with a tougher skin than Kate, but with the more pragmatic outlook; and Hamish Linklater is Martin, the most insecure, and the one most reluctant to hand over any of his precious prose for Leonard’s exacting, no-holds-barred inspection. Literary matters aside, love and sex enter the picture, but I shan’t spoil what the pairings.

Rebeck has written five juicy parts, and they all rise to the occasion, under Sam Gold’s smart direction.

The play is far from profound, and more than a little implausible, though there are some astute observations on the writing process and the realities of the publishing world, and certainly, the Rebeck's setup holds your attention, with a good number of laughs. When matters take a more serious turn, we go along with the mood shift

Rickman has a long revelatory speech that he delivers with understated power. I found his projection a little understated, too, for much of the evening (perhaps the result of an acute respiratory infection that felled him earlier in the week), but in every other respect, he was at the top his game here.

David Zinn’s striking set design for Kate’s apartment defines Kate to a tee, and gives way to a striking scene change when you least expect it, lighting designer Ben Stanton’s bright illumination morphing to something more atmospheric in kind.

(The Golden Theatre, 252 West 45th Street, 212-239-6200 or www.telecharge.com or 212-239-6200.)

Private Lives (The Music Box)

By Harry Forbes

Kim Cattrall proves the real deal in Noel Coward’s classic “Private Lives.” As the mercurial, witty Amanda, there’s nary a trace of the “Sex and the City” Samantha on display. Her assumption of the role is, in fact, the latest in a string of latter-day performances that have seen the actress stretching with a number of versatile roles, from Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer” to “My Boy Jack” on PBS’s “Masterpiece Classic” to her recent stint as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in the U.K.

Cattrall received praise for Richard Eyre’s production of Coward's play in London last year, opposite Matthew MacFadyen as Elyot. Here, she’s joined by the wonderful Paul Gross, star of “Slings and Arrows,” that superb mini-series about a Canadian Shakespeare festival, not unlike Stratford, which you can still catch on the Sundance Channel.

As the formerly married couple who meet in Deauville on their respective honeymoons to other people – the stuffy Victor (Simon Paisley Day) and the simpering Sybil (Anna Madeley) -- they play with great style, tossing off their barbed lines with crisp British aplomb in a way that honors the roles’ originators, Coward himself and Gertrude Lawrence, with the overlay of their own considerable personalities.

The first act is set on the traditional double balcony – though those early scenes are marred by “off-stage” music far too intrusive and not appropriately directional. The actors shouldn’t have to compete with what should only be distant ambient scene-setting. The music, of course, eventually leads into Amanda and Elyot’s sentimental favorite, “Someday I’ll Find You,” vocalized most charmingly by Cattrall and Gross.

They are far from the whole show, however, as Day and Madeley are quite wonderful in their supporting roles, both showing their mettle in the third act, after Victor and Sybil come in upon their squabbling mates who have fled to Amanda’s Paris apartment, designed – like the period-perfect costumes -- by Rob Howell in witty Art Deco fashion. But though highly fanciful, the spacious layout gives the stars ample room for the considerable slapstick of the second act, which Cattrall and Gross enact adroitly.

What makes Eyre’s production so special is the sensitivity to the serious subtext beneath the witty banter: those significant pauses and silences, the casual references to death, belief, afterlife, love, attraction, and fidelity. The seemingly idle banter of much of Coward’s dialogue belies the comedy’s true substance. One is reminded anew how human and natural is the dialogue with its quicksilver shifts from light to shade.

This is, if anyone need be reminded, a great play, and it’s happily been accorded an ace production.

(Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street, 212-239-6200 or www.telecharge.com; through February 5, 2012.)

The Grand Duke (New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players)

By Harry Forbes

For its annual one-night-only event – often a G&S or Sullivan-only rarity – NYGASP, under the direction of Albert Bergeret – resurrected G&S’s final operetta, a critical and popular flop in 1896, and not performed again by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company till 1975.

Under the circumstances, NYGASP’s staging was remarkably polished and full, including some delightful choreography by David Auxier (who also co-directed with Bergeret, and took the small but significant part of the Herald who brings on the Prince of Monte Carlo near the end).

Bergeret’s conducting – brisk, buoyant and graceful throughout – ensured a high musical tone, one matched by a uniformly superb cast. The concerted numbers – “Strange the Views Some People Hold” and “Now Take a Card,” to name two – were gorgeously vocalized.

All in all, Sullivan was, in fact, more faithfully served than librettist Gilbert some of whose lyrics were rewritten, albeit not egregiously. The music proved a constant delight to the ear, because even though near the end of his life and in poor health, Sullivan came up with one beguiling tune after another.

Gilbert’s libretto – an unfocused story about a theatrical troupe in a German Duchy who plot to overthrow a penny-pinching Grand Duke (the redoubtable Stephen O’Brien) and govern along theatrical lines, actually achieving that end through a game of cards (don’t ask) – lacks the sharp focus of Gilbert’s earlier work, but even so, the situation is never less than amusing.

Richard Holmes essayed the role of company comedian Ludwig who takes the Duke’s place, and learns that duty dictates his abandoning his sweetheart Lisa (Melissa Attebury) for a succession of ladies with claims to the status of Grand Duchess, including the troupe’s leading lady Julia (Charlotte Detrick), the battleaxe Bareness von Krakenfeldt (Angela Christine Smith), and finally the Princess of Monte Carlo (Sarah Caldwell Smith).

As usual, Holmes’ mellifluous tone, incisive diction, and assured stage presence made for a cherishable performance.

Daniel Greenwood as theatrical manager Ernest and Detrick brought just the right comic flair to their roles, the latter having a ball with her incongruous (for an “English” actress) German accent, and were vocally strong.

Attebury’s Lisa was exquisitely sung, and her second act lament, “Take Care of Him,” was especially lovely, garnering one of the biggest hands of the evening. As, later, did Quinto Ott as The Prince of Monte Carlo whose dazzling Roulette number, sung with firm tone and appropriate panache, brought down the house.

The purist in me didn’t care for Julia’s showpiece aria “So Ends My Dream” turned into a duet for her and Lisa, but – as both were abandoned by Ludwig at this point – it made some dramatic sense, and gave us another opportunity to hear Attebury. Also right on target was James Mills as the Notary who sang with style and fine musicianship throughout.

The performance was unobtrusively miked, the sound emanating from the stage cleanly and naturally.

The edits and revisions notwithstanding, the performance was faithful in most particulars and made a good case for the piece’s reclamation. Of all the “Grand Duke” revivals I’ve seen in town over the years by our enterprising operetta companies – including NYGASP themselves – Sunday’s performance was among the most persuasive.

(Peter Norton Symphony Space, 2535 Broadway at 95th Street, (212) 864-5400 or www.nygasp.org)

Venus in Fur (Manhattan Theatre Club)

By Harry Forbes

I missed Nina Arianda in her much praised performance in this play last year Off-Broadway at the Classic Stage Company. But now, after making an auspicious Broadway debut in “Born Yesterday,” she has returned to the role that first brought her attention, one that allows her to demonstrate even far greater range.

She’s a loopy, classless actress trying out for a part in a play based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel “Venus in Fur,” about a nobleman who allows a lady named Vanda (significantly, Arianda’s character has the same name) to dominate him for sexual pleasure. (The word masochism derives from the author’s name.)

Hugh Dancy plays David, the harried playwright/director who’s adapted the novel. She arrives in a rainstorm for the audition late and frazzled, but before long, she’s persuaded him – by a combination of her forceful personality and manipulative cajoling – to read the nobleman’s part in the script (which, by the way, allows Dancy to revert to his natural English accent).

And, for the duration of the intermissionless play, they go through a series of kinky role-playing as they act out Sacher-Masoch’s story, every so often departing from the play and speaking of their actual situation which, of course, mirrors the the situation in the 19th century narrative.

Arianda is so mercurial and dazzling to watch that it almost doesn’t matter that David Ives’ play, though cleverly conceived, becomes awfully talky as it morphs from comic romp to something considerably darker, though director Walter Bobbie masterfully orchestrates the transitions.

This is not a one-woman show, however, as Dancy expertly matches Vanda’s quicksilver mood and character shifting with a most accomplished performance.

(MTC's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, 212-239-6200 or www.Telecharge.com)