6. Golden Boy

Bartlett Sher’s impassioned revival proved Clifford Odets morality play to be completely accessible. In a sterling ensemble, Seth Numrich stood out with a breakout performance as the boxer caught between two professions and two worlds, and Tony Shalhoub is an early Tony favorite for his performance as a heartbroken father.

5. Carolee Carmello, Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson

Scandalous, now closed, was a passion project for Kathie Lee Gifford, who honed the book and music for the better part of the last decade. Despite the show’s flaws, star Carmello proved indomitable as the early evangelist, aging several decades and rarely leaving the stage. She sure made a believer out of me.

4. Douglas Hodge, Cyrano de Bergerac

Hodge is one of Broadway’s great transformers – first as a Albin/Zaza in La Cage Aux Folles, and now as the romantic with the pronounced proboscis in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of the Rostand classic. Tough but tender, humorous but heartbroken, Hodge’s performance proved the actor hasn’t lost any of his panache.

3. The Piano Lesson

The still-newborn Signature Theater has mounted its first, well, signature work in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s revival of this August Wilson classic, arguably the most dramatically sound entry in the late playwright’s cycle. Chuck Cooper, Brandon J. Dirden, Jason Dirden, Roslyn Ruff and James A. Williams were all astonishing in this examination of the complexity in learning both how to look back without anger and move forward with great pride.

2. Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Just when you thought we didn’t need another rendering of the Edward Albee milestone, this Steppenwolf import reminded us all what a potent powder-keg Woolf can be, thanks to a push-pull relationship between Letts’ stronger-than-usual George and Morton’s newly vulnerable Morton. Thanks to an underlying subtext of very apparent carnality, these two showed in ways never before seen, just why their relationship is worth saving. I left this performance not with a sense of doom for the couple, but rebirth.

1. Shuler Hensley, The Whale

Hensley might have ended up on this list just for the way he made Jessica Pabst’s 600-pound “fat suit” a second skin, but it’s the way he embodies Charlie’s emotional baggage in Samuel D. Hunter’s sharply observed play that sends him to the top of this list. In Charlie, a hermited gay online tutor literally eating himself to death in his Idaho apartment, Hensley skirts hyperbole to find the truth about suffering and what happens to those who try and reclaim the love they have once forsaken. It’s a performance that never courts false sympathy, and yet remains a wholly empathic one.

12. Rob McClure, Chaplin

As a show, Chaplin left many wanting more – including me. But McClure’s breakout performance as the famous, and famously problem-plagued, performer had it all, going far beyond mere imitation to suggest the emotional genesis for the images made immortal by the man. “Where Did All the People Go?” Chaplin sings in the show’s eleventh-hour number. Back home to tell their friends about McClure, one would think.

11. Slowgirl

Playwright Greg Pierce’s last name is appropriate, since his sharp play – marking the opening of new Lincoln Center space the Claire Tow Theater — looked beneath the facades put on by an estranged uncle (Zeljko Ivanek) and niece (Sarah Steele) to show the lengths to which people will go to retreat from their own personal truths.

10. Lindsay Mendez, Dogfight

Mendez is Rose, the “ugly” girl asked to a cruel party by a would-be marine in this adaptation of the 1991 film. The joke ends up being on the men, though, as Rose proves to be strong, talented, full of self-worth and open to an increasingly changing world. And damn if Mendez, in excellent voice, didn’t capture every color of this character’s rainbow.

9.  Anthony Warlow, Annie

Warlow makes for a winning Daddy Warbucks in this production, enjoying a healthy revival. With an honest emotionalism that never veered into creepy territory, Warlow makes it clear just what’s been missing from his life until he meets the pert red-headed orphan.

8.  Detroit

Lisa D’Amour’s topical thriller offered pointed commentary about what happens in a society when adults don’t have the opportunities to act like the grownups they always thought they would become. Anne Kauffman’s production starred a scarily good Darren Pettie and Sara Sokolovic as a couple who aren’t what they seem and Amy Ryan and David Schwimmer as a couple who aren’t where they want to be. Detroit doesn’t actually take place in Michigan, but one gets the sense that hese characters’ feeling of dislocation could – and do – occur anywhere.

7. Annie Funke, If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet

Part of a hopeful pattern of complicated portrayals of teenage women (see also: Lindsay Mendez, Sarah Steele), Funke was the center of Nick Payne’s family drama about, among other things, an overweight daughter who gets seen for all the wrong reasons and overlooked in all the important moments. Remember this actress.

Check out the rest of my picks here!

Photo by Chris Bennion.

Life stories are a tricky business. Every individual weathers enough ups and downs to have their own experience merit the telling – but that doesn’t mean that all lives translate to cogent dramatic arcs. Aimee Semple McPherson, however, one of the more colorful and dynamic personalities to emerge from the early twentieth century, should evade that pitfall. And yet the new musical, Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson, can’t seem to do its subject justice.

Linear but unfocused, Scandalous is the pet project of talk show personality Kathie Lee Gifford, who purportedly spent nearly a decade getting this show to the Great White Way,  and wrote the show’s book and lyrics in addition to contributing music to David Pomeranz’s and David Friedman’s serviceable score. Perhaps Gifford’s adoration of McPherson, an evangelist who founded California’s Foursquare Church and became an early media impresario, blinded her to her heroine’s weak spots. Or Foursquare’s involvement as producer ridded the show of any objectivity. Either way, what should be a warts-and-all bio-musical ultimately airbrushes away any blemishes on its titular subject.

Carolee Carmello, the gutsy and glamorous Broadway belter, takes on McPherson, narrating her life story from its early beginnings as a Canadian teenager all the way through her polarizing stature as a pill-popping diva. But Gifford, making good on the adage that “the devil is in the details,” leaves too many crucial details out to keep McPherson looking like an angel. Her husbands disappear in brackets: She falls in love with Robert Semple (Edward Watts) after catching his Pentecostal “holy rollers” tour, but after a trip to China, Robert dies of malaria. A second marriage to accountant Harold McPherson (Andrew Samonsky) ends in divorce; though the two were married for nearly a decade, the man merits not one scene or line of dialogue.

Watts and Samonsky return for the show’s second act, in which McPherson’s traveling ministry has transported her to the belly of the beast. A natural for Hollywood, she ended up in Echo Park, where she launched her Angelus Temple and wed one of her choir-men, David Hutton (Watts again, making Hutton out to be far more of a model than the real version ever was). It’s also where she ran off with radio technician Kenneth Ormiston (also Samonsky). This is a cloudy period in history, as McPherson claimed to have been abducted in a story riddled with holes. Ultimately, she and her mother, Minnie (an imperious Candy Buckley) were charged with obstruction of justice in 1926 for her odd disappearance. It’s this trial that lends itself the show’s title and Gifford’s framing device, but Scandalous offers no enlightenment on what really happened.

Carmello does everything right – she ages believably from teenage to middle age, she belts McPherson’s bombastic but generic-sounding numbers to the high heavens, she even manages to sell her character’s “hey where did that come from?” addiction to barbiturates. But this superb, commanding talent can only ace what she has to work with, and the one thing Gifford hasn’t provided for Scandalous is a soul. We rarely feel that religion ever matters to her, and her demons are merely name-checked, not explored. And we never see how she became the titanic presence she did. Why was she able to hold sway over such a congregation? (One thing they do give her? A fun ally in Roz Ryan’s delicious turn as madam Emma Jo Schaeffer.) Armstrong doesn’t do much to shape the proceedings either; the show hurtles through McPherson’s life, Wikipedia-style, though it shoves all the juicy stuff under the rug – and offstage. Scandalous gives and takes in all the wrong places.

Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson

Neil Simon Theater, 250 West 52nd Street, www.scandalousonbroadway.com

Ostensibly a sequel, Spirit of Vengeance turns Marvel’s death-and-action Ghost Rider comic book franchise into more than just an entertainment: It’s a spot-on cultural assessment. Neveldine-Taylor use the story of badass biker John Blaze (Nicholas Cage) saving a child from the devil for a modern Redemption allegory.

Neveldine-Taylor redeem cinema unexpectedly by pushing its commercial extremes: outré violence and sarcasm (coin of the Tarantino/video game realm) where horror and comedy mix, as in their two terrific Crank movies. Spirit of Vengeance isn’t the perfect introduction to Neveldine-Taylor’s cynical brilliance but it claries their method: They are the only filmmakers interested in simultaneously mastering genre technique, pursuing an on-going cultural critique and laughing.

After the troubled Jonah Hex project (which Neveldine-Taylor wrote without directing), their gallows humor finds the basic Faust element in Ghost Rider. When John Blaze reneges on his deal with the devil, Neveldine-Taylor trace his madness to our sped-up, digital-age culture. Tarantino exploits vengeance but Neveldine-Taylor explore the ramifications of the “Lust to punish” in today’s berserk world—a criminals-and-monks allegory for how media mavens and private citizens act vengefully without humility or compassion.

Neveldine-Taylor’s moral clarity seems paradoxical given their hyperbolic, deliberately trashy-looking style, but there’s old-fashioned satisfaction to the way they connect modern nihilism to a classic theme. Concerned with the preservation of human values, they express them when angel Moreau (Idris Elba) enlists Blaze to protect Danny (Fergus Riordan) from the satanic clutches of Roarke (Ciaran Hinds). They work through contemporary decadence the same way medieval artists did. Like the Crank movies, Gamer and Jonah Hex, Spirit of Vengeance satirizes purgatory.

To read the full review from City Arts editor Armond White, click here.

For different reasons, Hardy’s youthful blush is also wasted in the new knockabout spy comedy This Means War, where Hardy plays the loser in the film’s ménage a trois with Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon.

CIA agents Tuck (Hardy) and FDR (Pine) vie for products executive Lauren (Witherspoon)—they dodge bullets, make passes at the woman and threat/passes at each other in a pointless, meant-to-be-funny sexual competition. This latent homoeroticism is livelier than in Tinker Tailor, yet is so persistently unfulfilled that it feels both mistaken and misdirected.

The film’s uncommitted approach to the battle of the sexes and gender confusion has as little to do with current sexual habits as Tinker Tailor does with contemporary politics; it’s a lowbrow version of Tinker Tailor’s skepticism about government pushed toward cynical manipulation of today’s baffling romantic impulses.

Here’s Hardy, a genuinely charismatic movie actor in a period where the incumbent George Clooney runs on an outmoded, blatantly insincere platform of smarminess, stuck in the teasing outsider position of a love triangle. That Tuck loses Lauren to Pine’s FDR (FDR?!) settles for a blandness that goes against movie-watching instinct.

The film doesn’t have the subtlety or finesse to successfully maneuver action comedy, screwball romance or bisexuality. Just when you expect the threat of danger to edge the film toward the risqué, it stays banally far outside it. Director McG takes none of it seriously, which is a disappointment, given that his two previous films, Terminator Salvation and We Are Marshall, indicated McG was outgrowing the adolescent puppyishness of his two Charlie’s Angels retreads.

It must be commercial desperation that makes McG hit every note here so tunelessly hard; he can’t even juggle the physical humor of shootouts, skydiving and mano-a-mano one-upmanship. If McG could have aced the assignment and found a method of slapstick eroticism, This Means War might have made sense of its raunchy and reckless view that combines global political problems (post-9/11 romantic disillusionment) with the anxiety of personal commitment. Instead, it’s as bonkers as Brangelina’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

If Tinker Tailor suggested a Bourne movie directed by Béla Tarr, This Means War suggests one of the stars of Jackass directing a Valentine’s Day chick flick while lying in traction. I would have expected McG, of all directors, to come up with a romantic comedy version of the Jackass movies; Hardy and Pine supply enough comic virility (Witherspoon, alas, is superfluous and performs anxiously).

The entire overbright, overbearing production is already outdone by a viral promotional clip of McG and Hardy dropping their pants to become paintball targets. That clip is funnier and more authentically boyish than anything in the film’s arrested adolescent assumption that anyone wants to see two guys persistently go after the same woman while fighting Eurotrash terrorists and dodging the ire of their angry boss (Angela Bassett).

This Means War runs along three separate tracks that never successfully converge; it’s just off the rails. Hardy’s waiting-in-the-wings movie-star charisma seems not only underutilized but misunderstood.

Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.

When the CIA waterboards Frost and its Safe House is breached, rookie agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) takes custody and attempts to bring him in chased by lethally powered anonymous assassins. Their cat-and-mouse game through the obstacle course of Jo-burg shantytowns, beaches and a soccer stadium rouses both men’s skepticism about government security (and panders to our own). Yet, Safe House gives as little serious thought to actual politics or race relations as the ludicrous District 9.

Co-producer Washington merely exploits the political potential of both his own stardom and the audience’s depraved taste for violence. Safe House employs relentless gunplay and killing while smugly decrying torture tactics; it also takes a high body count of black African citizens (and whites, too) while playing out an Obama-era version of The Defiant Ones, Stanley Kramer’s landmark 1958 film in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis played black and white escaped convicts handcuffed together and running toward freedom in the racist American South.

When Frost tells Weston, “We take advantage of people’s desire to believe, to trust,” that could be Washington explaining his career path as a craven “post-racial” Hollywood icon. Forget brotherhood—the only frisson in the men’s relationship is ass kicking; no ideological discussion, simply the black/white spectacle for the cheap illusion of substance.

District 9’s allegory depended on naïveté, but Safe House depends on cynicism. It’s really a loathsome distortion of genre expectations, mixing poorly edited chases with fake politics. At times Weston plays Super Honky Patriot to Frost, to whom Washington gives the full, appalling panoply of arrogant black stereotypes: Frost is slyly calculating, knowingly cynical, ruthlessly violent.

This is the first time Washington has worked in South Africa since the 1987 Cry Freedom, when his career took off playing the martyred activist Steve Biko. This is his anti-Biko, playing against his goody two-shoes biopic roles.

Having grown up during the Blaxploitation era and seen the stud heroics of Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Bernie Casey and Ron O’Neal, Washington’s film career peaked when hip-hop did, and he took hip-hop’s Reagan-era hustling to heart. Not just striving for success, Washington, like Frost, has gone rogue seeking a thug niche. But his insistence on proud, contemptuous characters is as much a trap as being limited to butlers and buffoons. It’s just hustling, not artistry.

Director Daniel Espinosa gives Safe House the same jagged, shallow intensity as the house style Washington has developed with Tony Scott, but he never achieves expressive action tropes like in the marvelous Colombiana or thrilling Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Instead, Safe House chases after fake significance, turning Weston’s denouement into the same liberal media exposé of the U.S. government. Safe House might have been clever fun—not just cynical—had Denzel traded that Malcolm X getup for a Matt Damon mask.

Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.

In Chronicle, debut director Josh Trank uses all of the high school adolescent clichés polished into queer angst, Obama stargazing and hunk sensitivity.

It’s commercial formula with a brash spin; Andrew’s (Dane DeHaan) snooping camera represents a poor kid’s attempt at both the self-consciousness of the social media age and Hollywood’s latest cheap trend: using subjective realism as a premise for the horror and supernatural genres. This goes back to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, trite exploitations of the hand-held, real-time camera gimmick, but Trank distances himself from both with state-of-the-art panache.

Videography by Matthew Jensen makes spectacle the movie’s real subject. Chronicle’s sharp, ultra-clear, subtle imagery is more compelling than what happens to Andrew, Steve (Michael B. Jordan) and cousin Matt’s (Alex Russell) friendship after they develop telekinetic superpowers upon encountering a meteorite.

Chronicle alludes to the metaphoric hormonal urges of DePalma’s classics Carrie and The Fury—in fact, it’s loaded with pop references. Screenwriter Max Landis throws in plot concepts and gimmicks without ever achieving the concentration on moral quandary and mythology that distinguished last year’s TrollHunter, the Scandinavian upgrade of the witness-to-horror stunt premise.

Landis and Trank only play around with that potential. But when the three friends discover an ability to fly and play football in the sky, the metaphor for prowess and transcendence blends digital video effects and genuine cinematic spectacle into the damnedest thing since the skydiving scenes in Point Break.

Beyond its gimmicky premise, Chronicle’s visual excitement raises the important issue of how we use and respond to media. When the camera appears to follow Andrew’s P.O.V. or capture his different adventures and humiliations—from spelunking to flying to sex—Trank seems to be exercising cinematic form.

The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity movies have degraded cinematic form, but when the hand-held, real-time stunt isn’t trite, the matter of aesthetic purpose and artistic responsibility must be pondered, as here.

Masterpieces like Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Bertolucci’s The Conformist, DePalma’s The Fury and Spielberg’s War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin make aesthetic issues part of their stories—the Blair Witch hoaxes don’t. Trank’s fumbling allegory questions responsibility: The boys realize that their ability to move things and do damage carries an onus (their noses bleed) and cousin Matt comes up with rules that Andrew defies when enraged. Lacking consistent follow-through, Chronicle deteriorates into a destruction-of-Seattle finale, eventually trashing Trank’s subtle references to Nirvana’s cheerleaders-in-hell music video “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

That Plato question is smart-assed. Chronicle superficially touches on philosophy as it superficially questions violence while exploiting Hollywood’s violent trends. Chronicle’s frustrating misuse of dazzling cinematic technique raises the question of the era: Do youth audiences know what cinematic form is for?

Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.

Bill Condon, who made a mess of Dreamgirls and Kinsey, takes out the dreaminess and neuters the sex. Condon’s non-direction shows no attempt at style or visualized emotion (each bland sequence is staged to ineffectual music). Even Bella’s hideous pregnancy (she wastes to corpse-like pallor and CGI thinness) is just part of the narrative slog. Author Stephenie Meyer’s ludicrous plot is stripped of the pubescent tumescence that was Hardwicke’s specialty and gave the first film its Brontesque compulsion.

To read the full review by Armond White, head to City Arts.

“Such an “embargo” only works if journalists comply. Only weak, subservient journalists would do it,” White says. Critic independence is at stake,so is our culture’s independence.

Read this important cultural assessment only at CityArts.