Press

Nobody could accuse Robert Falls of taking the safe route with "Desire Under the Elms." As in Simon McBurney's "All My Sons" revival earlier this season, the director layers on bold auteurial flourishes in a stylized bid to fire up the molten Greek tragedy in a naturalistic American drama.

As he did with his groundbreaking 1999 revival of Death of a Salesman, Robert Falls shatters expectations and forces us to rethink an American classic. His new production of Eugene O'Neill's 1924 Desire Under the Elms, now on Broadway after a run at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, defies popular conceptions of the play and O'Neill's work in general.

I have zero nostalgia for the 1960s, but I love this "Hair." Everything aligned perfectly when Diane Paulus resurrected the 1967 epoch-making show in Central Park last summer. Not only did the production throb with life, but having it play under the stars, for free, elevated it to a near-mythical level. Even the audience participation came across like an expression of community rather than cheeseball pandering.

"You'll be happy to hear that the kids are all right. Quite a bit more than all right. Having moved indoors to Broadway from the Delacorte Theater in Central Park — where last summer they lighted up the night skies, howled at the moon and had ticket seekers lining up at dawn — the young cast members of Diane Paulus's thrilling revival of "Hair" show no signs of becoming domesticated."

There are many reasons why you should see Exit the King, but foremost among them is the opportunity to see a brilliant physical comic performance by Geoffrey Rush. My companion at the show is an alumnus of L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, and he told me that the reason he was particularly excited to see this show is that Rush is an alumnus as well.

There was nothing like "Hair" when it opened on Broadway in April 1968, and there's nothing like the revival that opened last night at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. "Hair" was then and is now the most exciting new show in town, not so much a breath of spring air as a jolt of adrenaline.

With its alfresco setting and the penetrating echoes of its countercultural themes during an election year in which political disenchantment became endemic, the Public Theater's revival of "Hair" last summer in Central Park was a unique experience. So shifting it indoors could only dim the thrill, right? Wrong.

"Hair," the legendary 1960s American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, has made the jump from a summer Central Park engagement to Broadway with all its exuberance intact — and more. If you want to know why this joyous revival, which opened Tuesday at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, is so successful, you need not look any farther than the show's first-act finale.

"On Broadway, the spring season has brought imperfect productions of two transcendent musicals, West Side Story and Guys and Dolls. Now, to redress the balance, there's a transcendent production of an imperfect musical."