Exotic Foods

“The Lifeboat” by Charlotte Rogan (Reagan Arthur Books, April 3). A young woman, Grace Winter, sailing from England to New York in 1914 with her new husband, is cast adrift in a lifeboat with 38 other survivors of an on-board explosion. Life on an overcrowded, undersupplied boat quickly deteriorates into power struggles and ethical dilemmas that test the limits of the people’s humanity. When Grace is finally rescued and reaches New York, she is put on trial for some of her actions on the boat. “We could not save everybody and save ourselves,” says Grace, a gratifyingly complex character who narrates this dazzling psychological drama.

Harper

Mr. Boyd is a born story teller whose clear, taut prose never gets in the way of his characters and their unpredictable fates.

“Waiting for Sunrise” by William Boyd (Harper, April 17). Mr. Boyd’s new novel begins in Vienna just before World War I, where a young English actor seeks psychotherapy and falls in love with a fellow patient. An accusation of rape forces him to flee to London, where he tries to unravel the convoluted chain of events that have led him to begin working undercover for the British government. Mr. Boyd is a born story teller whose clear, taut prose never gets in the way of his characters and their unpredictable fates.

W.W. Norton & Co.

A clear-eyed and exquisitely written look at the decisions and compromises people make for a little more time on earth.

“Memoir of a Debulked Woman” by Susan Gubar (W.W. Norton & Co., April 30). In 2008, Ms. Gubar, who co-wrote the trailblazing study of 19th-century women in fiction, “The Mad Woman in the Attic,” was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Since then, she has undergone radical debulking surgery, removing as much of her abdominal organs as possible to extend her life. But this is in no way a “misery memoir.” It is a clear-eyed and exquisitely written look at the decisions and compromises people make for a little more time on earth. How does a mature, intelligent, happy woman weigh life-extending treatments against the treatments’ “capacity to destroy the pleasures of existence”?

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

‘The Baroque Genius of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’

National Gallery of Art

Through July 8

Washington

The most daring bit of showmanship in the delicious exhibition “The Baroque Genius of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione,” currently on view at the National Gallery of Art, is placing his work in the context of better-known artists. That Castiglione (1609-64) more than survives the comparison is a tribute to his innovative influence; it also reminds us that we would do well to pay greater attention to artists who may not be household names.

Genoa-born and trained, Castiglione was a characteristically baroque artist, whose work reflected most of the various stylistic interests of his age. So we glimpse suggestions of more familiar artists (Rembrandt and Rubens, Bernini and Poussin) throughout his work, which consisted primarily of masterly prints and drawings. Of the 80 works in this exhibition—most of them works on paper—34 are by Castiglione, and the interplay among the works on view demonstrates his active visual connection with many other artists.

By arranging the exhibition thematically, rather than chronologically, curator Jonathan Bober encourages exploration of the various ways in which Castiglione left his mark on such artists as Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. There’s a wonderful inventiveness at work here, beautifully exemplified in an etching such as “The Flight into Egypt” (1647/49). In that work, Castiglione radically modifies the traditional lateral procession by presenting the Holy Family moving forward, with the customary donkey coming right at us; a grand palm tree almost overwhelms the scene—ordinarily represented as an idyllic landscape. The nearby Tiepolo etching of the same subject (1753), with the Holy Family conventionally centered in the space, serves to demonstrate Castiglione’s resourcefulness and panache. It’s not as if this exhibition makes claims for the artist as one of the seminal figures of his era; but there’s a persuasive case that Castiglione did create compositions that had an impact on other artists.

No less seductive, however, is the suggestion of stylistic and thematic interplay that often occurs among artists working during the same period. Rembrandt’s dramatic 1634 etching “The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds” introduces an insistent central dark diagonal to highlight the glowing upper-left corner. Castiglione’s “God the Father and Angels Adoring the Christ Child” (c. 1650/55) apparently wants to do precisely the opposite with its oblique swath of light as the central focus of the composition.

To the eyes of a nonspecialist, so many of Castiglione’s etchings seem informed by Rembrandt. That’s especially true of the several wonderful and imaginative portrait etchings on display here—often employing the same dress-up approach we associate with Rembrandt. Indeed, we might mistake “Man with a Moustache Wearing a Fur Headdress, Facing Left” (1647/49) as a work by the more famous master, whose “The Second Oriental Head” (c. 1635) is also here. Close examination of the two reveals the difference between Rembrandt’s characteristic short, even nervous, marks on the etching plate and Castiglione’s longer, somewhat more relaxed strokes. Tiepolo’s similar “Profile of an Old Man with a Beard” (1762) has more stippled markings than we see in Castiglione’s etchings, while in the four wonderful portrait etchings here by the Austrian Paul Haubenstricker we can clearly note Castiglione’s graphic influence.

One of the joys of this exhibition is in its presentation of works by artists who may be totally unfamiliar, but whose work coaches our eyes toward enhanced acuity in examining small works that are too easily overlooked. Among those special delights is the gorgeous and very moving chalk-and-pastel drawing by Lorenzo Baldissera Tiepolo (Giovanni Domenico’s brother), “A Bearded Old Man Leaning His Head on His Hand” (c. 1760). No less significant is the exhibition’s nod to the National Gallery of Art’s amazing resources in works on paper, since the majority of works here are from the museum’s collections.

The exhibition attempts to connect Castiglione’s Genoese artistic heritage to the ways in which we understand his work. It’s more difficult to understand that kind of aesthetic source than it is to enjoy the constant stylistic interplay of the artist, his contemporaries and his followers. Sometimes this happens via inventive compositions. The small painting “Tobit Burying the Dead” (c. 1640) relates to Watteau’s much later (c. 1710) drawing of the same subject, but is also an example of Castiglione investing his work with a stronger emotional quality than we generally see in his often intellectually stern approach to a subject.

While Castiglione is an artist best known for his graphic work, the exhibition also reveals a painter of enormous talent. It makes us wish for more of the small oils that may superficially remind us of Peter Paul Rubens’s oil sketches. A spectacular painting, “Alexander at the Tomb of Cyrus” (1645-50), is endowed with both compositional and narrative power far beyond its relatively small size (approximately 22 inches by 16 inches).

Perhaps the show’s most exciting, if frustrating, aspect is the display of only one oil-pigment monotype, “David with the Head of Goliath” (c. 1655). Castiglione’s monotypes are extremely rare (alas, the National Gallery of Art owns only one)—and are the first ever to have been done in this medium, which involves inking a printing plate in a manner that results in a single print, rather than the more conventional serial versions. Whether it’s the result of intentionally uneven application of pigment or simply accidental pressing, there’s a seductive dramatic quality to this print that seems to have David thrusting Goliath’s head forward at us, along with a kind of palimpsest head in the upper right-hand corner. This masterly image is yet another reason to be grateful that we no longer need think of Castiglione as forever under our artistic radar screen.

Mr. Freudenheim, a former art-museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian.

A version of this article appeared April 24, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Minor Name, Major Impact.

By BARRY MAZOR

‘Leaving Eden” (Nonesuch) features winning, rhythmically decisive renditions of both “West End Blues,” best known from the 1928 version by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five (and sung early on by Ethel Waters), and “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” introduced on Kentucky radio by hillbilly vaudevillian Cousin Emmy with her band the Kinfolk in 1940, then made a bluegrass standard by the Osborne Brothers in the mid-1950s. Such an unusual musical combination is well within the inclusive, always-evolving musical range of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who since 2005 have emerged as an American roots-music phenomenon.

“It’s been interesting working both of those sides,” says group co-leader and co-founder Dom Flemons in a recent phone interview. “We’ve always tried to do more expansive material, to keep on delving and pulling out different pieces that grab our attention. Now that the group has achieved another level of popularity, we have to figure out how to handle that, too—how to keep bringing more people in, while getting regular comments like ‘Are you guys doing straight renditions, or being a “fusion band”?’ We get a lot of that. Whatever anybody thinks to label or categorize the music, I’m all about it, as long as it keeps the folks interested and coming out to see us.”

Exciting audiences as instrumentalists, singers, even as dancers, while digging further into the broad legacy of Southern music, particularly African-American Southern music, the group—a core trio of Mr. Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins (who recently replaced the departing third founder, Justin Robinson) and an array of additional contributors—have defied genre classification by charging, fully prepared, into many fields. The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ last release, 2010′s “Genuine Negro Jig,” won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album, but they have also been featured at the Newport Jazz Festival, on the Grand Ole Opry and in rock clubs; they have topped the bluegrass charts, and have been referred to as an Americana jug band, an old-timey African-American string band and even as an R&B group.

Mr. Flemons, a showman who handles guitar, jug, harmonica and bones for the band, started out as a more conventional roots-rock and pop musician. Ms. Giddens, the group’s stunning, soulful vocalist and banjo and fiddle player, was classically trained. They, along with Mr. Robinson, the former Chocolate Drop multi-instrumentalist, were in their 20s when they met at the Black Banjo Gathering, an annual get-together in Boone, N.C., for those interested in reviving the African-American stringband tradition.

They went on to study under and perform with Joe Thompson, who was considered—before his death last month at age 93—the last of the great fiddlers left playing that generations-old music. (One of Thompson’s instrumentals, “Riro’s House,” leads the new CD.) While rural stringband music was a large part of the Chocolate Drops’ initial focus—and its newcomer, Mr. Jenkins, is also a banjoist—the band’s interest in reviving older music and performance styles for contemporary audiences was never limited to solemn turns on traditionalist folk styles. The more exuberant parts of the musical spectrum—hokum blues, jazz, vaudeville—were always included in the music they chose to bring forward, which has ranged from a turn on 1920s banjoist Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Your Baby Ain’t Sweet Like Mine” to Ms. Giddens’s soulful, always show-stopping version of 1990s R&B singer Blu Cantrell’s “Hit’em Up Style.”

“Rhiannon’s a very versatile performer; when she gets the notion, she can pretty much attack anything,” Mr. Flemons notes. “And one thing that’s unique for our group: When we do old material, I try to get at stuff that wasn’t particularly on the beaten path. You’re probably not going to get a Robert Johnson song in there.”

Looking for a distinctive stamp for “Leaving Eden,” the band and its label turned to Buddy Miller, the Nashville Americana musician and producer. He’s brought sounds, and very often old songs to consider, to everyone from Emmylou Harris to Solomon Burke and Robert Plant. But suggestions for old songs were not the prime need here.

“They have an energy when they play live that I really wanted to try to capture,” Mr. Miller noted in a separate interview, “putting them on a soundstage where they could just play in a circle or next to each other, instead of being separated into vocal booths. There were such different songs that every song had a different set-up, including who was singing. So it was one of the more difficult records, just in that respect, to make. We cut some things in the back room of the studio, some stuff on the front porch—while cicadas were in full bloom here in Nashville.”

There may be documentarylike authenticity in the fact that those interloping cicadas can be heard chirping on the recording at one point, but the Carolina Chocolate Drops remain as interested in finding exciting ways to present the music they love to today’s audiences as in documenting older styles.

“You do justice to a worthy original,” Mr. Flemons says, “not by doing it exactly like it was done, but by making sure what you do is interesting in relation to it—no matter how far out you may go with it. I’ll get the heritage behind a song and sometimes I’ll have a connection in a literal sort of way; other times it’s more abstract—how would I want the tone to sound on that, or what singing style would fit with this particular style, and what instruments? Should it have a slightly Latin touch, the ‘Spanish tinge’? And it’s a string-band song, so then let’s put in horns. It’s alchemy.”

Alchemy, of course, involves finding underappreciated materials and transforming them into new gold. Not a bad job description.

Mr. Mazor, author of “Meeting Jimmie Rodgers” (now in paperback from Oxford University Press), writes about country, roots and pop music for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 13, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: ‘Leaving Eden’ And the Legacy Of Americana.

Follow 5 kids and families over the course of a school year into the often cruel world of the lives of bullied children. Video courtesy of the Weinstein Company. (A previous version of the description erroneously described this movie).

“Bully” doesn’t dwell on the bullies themselves. That’s fair enough; we know what they do and, at least in a general sense, why they do it. The subjects of this valuable documentary are the bullied, those who suffer cruel and all-too-usual punishment in our middle schools and high schools for being different and defenseless. One of them, a 16-year-old girl named Kelby, offers a different way of looking at rain. “The world,” she says, “has taken in so much sadness that it can’t hold it anymore.” Watching the film may cause scattered showers in the region of the eyes, but it should also provoke dismay with a succession of school administrators who respond to the problem of bullying by denying it, sidestepping it or shrugging it off with an attitude that a grief-stricken father in rural Georgia characterizes as “kids will be kids, boys will be boys, they’re just cruel at this age.”

Yes, they are cruel, as the father, David Long, knows all too well. In 2009 his 17-year-old son, Tyler, committed suicide after years of abuse by his classmates and, according to Mr. Long and his wife, Tina, indifference by school officials. Another expert in such cruelty is the film’s central character, 12-year-old Alex, a gentle middle-school student in Sioux City, Iowa. In a culture that celebrates standardized good looks, he has prominent lips that prompt his classmates to call him “fish face.” In an era of rampant friending, he is friendless. Alex tells heartbreaking stories of severe and systematic bullying. “I feel like I belong somewhere else,” he says wistfully. And we get to see what he’s talking about when, during school-bus rides, his schoolmates punch him and insult him with chilling flippancy, even though they know they’re being photographed. (The film was directed by Lee Hirsch, and written by Mr. Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen.)

Heartbreak abounds. In Tuttle, Okla., Kelby, the girl with the alternative take on meteorology, has been bullied unmercifully, and her family has been treated as outcasts, ever since she came out as a lesbian. In Yazoo County, Miss., a 14-year-old honor student, Ja’Meya, still faces an uncertain fate after ceaseless bullying led her to bring her mother’s loaded handgun on to a school bus and brandish it to intimidate her tormentors; at first she was charged with multiple felony counts and faced decades in prison. In Perkins, Okla., Kirk and Laura Smalley are launching a national campaign against bullying after the suicide of their 11-year-old son Ty. (The film’s power is undercut by its narrow geographic focus, which seems to associate bullying with conservative or working-class areas in red states. The filmmakers could easily have found similar cases involving the children of urban sophisticates.)

What “Bully” says about our species is dismaying, if unsurprising; many boys—and girls—will prey ruthlessly on their weak classmates, especially at the age of raging hormones and incomplete brain circuitry. What it says about some educators in positions of power is troubling. Instead of embracing a policy of zero tolerance to protect the students entrusted to their care, several—though not all—of the functionaries in the film seem baffled by what amounts to an epidemic, with no moral compass to guide them.

All of which makes it disappointing, to say the least, that the Motion Picture Association of America decided to give the film an R rating—requiring minors to be accompanied by a parent or guardian—because of the brief use of explicit language. To counter the MPAA’s decision, the film’s distributor, the Weinstein Company, is sending it out as unrated, a tactic that will gain access to some theater chains but not to others. If reason prevails, the film will be seen, and seen widely. “Bully” is a teaching tool, and the language in question turns on words routinely heard or used by the very kids who should be seeing it, both for enlightenment and solace.

‘The Island President’

The docs have it this week. Jon Shenk’s fascinating documentary feature “The Island President” personalizes the threat of global warming, and nationalizes it too, by focusing on Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives. A sparsely inhabited though frequently touristed string of some 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, the Maldives is the lowest-lying nation on the planet. Since it might be the first nation to be swamped by a significant rise in sea level, the Maldives could become the canary islands by providing early warning of calamity to come. (A democratically elected reformer who ended his predecessor’s three-decade rule in 2009, Mr. Nasheed was still president when the film was shot, but left office in February amid violent demonstrations and pressure from the army and police.)

The filmmaker could hardly have found a more alluring setting—azure atolls, dazzlingly white beaches, a capital chockablock with modern buildings that seem from a distance to have been Photoshopped onto some pristine tropical isle—or a more appealing apostle of the anticarbon cause. Eloquent, short and wiry, with a quick wit and a high-wattage smile, Mr. Nasheed once called attention to his nation’s vulnerability by holding a cabinet session underwater, and pledged to make the Maldives carbon-neutral within a decade through the use of green technology. He also used overheated rhetoric on occasion; after seven months in office, he likened global warming to a Nazi invasion. (From a few concerning but anecdotal accounts in the film, it’s impossible to know if the Maldives are already losing land to rising sea levels.)

Mr. Shenk’s cameras follow his subject to Denmark. There, during his first year in office, Mr. Nasheed navigates with considerable aplomb the perilous waters of international diplomacy at the Copenhagen Climate Summit. He knows that he represents, as he puts it, “a bunch of small islands with no clout.” But he wants to shake things up and he does, attracting media attention with impassioned appeals for an agreement on reducing carbon emissions. His clout deficit becomes apparent when he finally gets to meet Chinese premier Wen Jiabao—a Chinese security guard turns the camera away before a word is said by either man. After the conference has ended, though, Mr. Nasheed is able to call his mother from his car and tell her that the assembled nations reached an agreement in principle, albeit no requirement for action. That’s high drama for a mother and son from such a low country.

Perseus braves the treacherous underworld to rescue his father, Zeus, captured by his son, Ares, and brother Hades who unleash the ancient Titans upon the world. Video courtesy of Warner Bros.

‘Wrath of the Titans’

When the Titans last clashed two years ago, their dialogue was idiotic, their plot machinations impenetrable and their 3-D process an add-on disaster. The best I can say for this sequel—not such a bad best—is that you’ll want to keep your 3-D glasses on. Some of the action sequences, and a few of the performances, are enjoyable enough to make up for the dialogue, which has been upgraded to cheerfully absurd, and the plot, which has been simplified to the point of actual coherence. (Sam Worthington’s demigod, Perseus, would rather live a quiet fisherman’s life with his young son than save the universe, but the Titans are fighting among themselves and the universe needs all the help it can get.)

Among the many and clangorous effects, the most special pit Perseus against a three-headed Chimera; take him and his companions-in-arms through a labyrinth whose sliding slabs suggest the interior of a titanic Rubik’s Cube; and plunge him vertiginously down into the bowels of the earth. Among the additions to a cast that once again includes Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, the standouts are Bill Nighy as Hephaestus, a riotously funny blacksmith to the gods (how does Mr. Nighy come up with such wonderful stuff?); Toby Kebbell as Agenor, Poseidon’s long-lost and charmingly raffish son; and Rosamund Pike as Queen Andromeda. The queen doesn’t get to lead men into battle as much as she might—you wouldn’t mistake her for Henry V at Agincourt—but the marvelous and beauteous Ms. Pike gets to do a succession of reaction shots that would charm the eyes off both heads of an Amphisbaena.

DVD Focus

‘Heathers’ (1988)

Three queen-bee bullies—all of them named Heather—get their comeuppance and then some in this now-classic dark comedy about the cruelties of high-school life. Winona Ryder is Veronica, sick of the clique she has joined and wishing its members were dead. Christian Slater is the mysterious—and possibly psychotic—J.D., who gives Veronica an education in advanced malevolence that she could never have anticipated. The three Heathers are played by Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk and Kim Walker. Michael Lehmann directed from an original screenplay by Daniel Waters.

‘Silent Running’ (1972)

A sci-fi classic with a green message directed by Douglas Trumbull, who supervised the special photographic effects in “Blade Runner,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and, last year, “The Tree of Life.” At a time when Earth’s vegetation has been destroyed by pollution and overcrowding, a biologist played by Bruce Dern serves as a steward of precious forests that are flourishing aboard a giant spaceship. The scuttling little droids that serve him were progenitors of R2-D2 and WALL•E. The script, with its unfortunate downbeat ending, was written by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino and Steven Bochco.

‘Still Crazy’ (1998)

Bill Nighy plays a fallen demigod of rock in this British comedy about middle-age losers trying to reassemble their 1970s band, Strange Fruit, for a 20th-anniversary concert. Mr. Nighy is hilarious and touching as Ray, the group’s ravaged lead singer, who’s coming up on his 50th birthday. The brilliant script, by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, an original score and delicious production numbers make a mercifully incomplete mockery of glam rock’s ancient excesses. “Still Crazy,” directed by Brian Gibson (“What’s Love Got to Do With It?”), sings a bittersweet song of aging, yearning and unlikely reconciliation.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 30, 2012, on page D3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Cruel Kids, Weakling Schools, Hard-Hitting ‘Bully’.

Lost in Yonkers

TACT/The Actors Company Theatre,

Beckett Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St.

($20-$56.25), 212-239-6200,

closes Apr. 14

New York

Stephen Kunken

Finnerty Steeves and Cynthia Harris in ‘Lost in Yonkers.’

Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and whose original production ran for 780 performances on Broadway, is being revived for the first time in New York—in a 99-seat off-Broadway house. How are the mighty fallen! But here’s the surprise: TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, one of the best small companies in Manhattan, is giving “Lost in Yonkers” a production that will make even confirmed anti-Simonites rethink their position. I’ve never seen a more emotionally persuasive Simon revival, not even David Cromer’s short-lived 2009 Broadway staging of “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

The plot of “Lost in Yonkers” sounds like the premise for a second-rate sitcom: Eddie (Dominic Comperatore) gets into hot water with a loan shark, stows his two boys (Matthew Gumley and Russell Posner) with his gargoyle-like mother (Cynthia Harris) and goofy sister (Finnerty Steeves) and goes on the lam. What makes it work is that Mr. Simon has upped the ante by turning Eddie into a grieving widower, his mother into a loveless monster and his sister into a slightly retarded woman-child with mature sexual urges. The result is a play whose wisecracks float atop a roiling current of anger and despair.

How to balance these seemingly disparate elements? Jenn Thompson, the director, does it by staging “Lost in Yonkers” as though it were a straight-down-the-center family drama. No winks, no nudges, no slapstick: Every scene is played for truth. Yes, you’ll laugh—a lot—but never at the expense of believability, and when the characters stop trying to be funny and tell you what they feel, you’ll feel it with them.

None of this, of course, would work had Ms. Thompson not assembled an ideal cast. Ms. Steeves, who was so striking in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s 2007 production of “The Norman Conquests,” is no less passionate and potent in “Lost in Yonkers.” You can hear the audience holding its collective breath during the climactic speech in which she admits to her mother that she “let boys touch me.” But her colleagues shine as brightly, and Ms. Thompson has directed them all with a hand so sure that you could easily mistake them for a permanent ensemble. (A special word of praise to Ms. Harris for playing the mother as a human being, not a cartoon.) In addition, Mr. Simon has allowed Ms. Thompson to make a handful of cuts that help to tighten and desentimentalize “Lost in Yonkers,” and I very much hope they will be incorporated into the published version of the script.

Great set, great costumes, great sound design—great everything, in fact. Off-Broadway or not, this is a major revival.

***

Ah, Wilderness!

Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage,

|Mead Center for American Theater,

1101 Sixth St. S.W., Washington

($40-$85), 202-488-3300, closes Apr. 8

Washington

Everything that’s right with TACT’s “Lost in Yonkers” is wrong with Arena Stage’s in-the-round version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” It’s like an illustrated lecture on how not to stage a period comedy, a protracted exercise in joke-jerking that seizes every opportunity to be obvious. The only way to perform a play like this one, in which Mr. O’Neill imagined the tranquil family life that he never had as a boy in turn-of-the-century Connecticut, is to do it without a trace of irony. Kyle Donnelly, on the other hand, has directed “Ah, Wilderness!” so broadly that you have to wonder whether she takes seriously Mr. O’Neill’s expressly stated intention to write a comedy that was “not in the satiric vein.” (Here’s a clue: Jonathan Lincoln Fried plays Sid, the family alcoholic, as if he were also a not-so-deeply closeted homosexual. Somehow I doubt that was quite what Mr. O’Neill had in mind.) The last act is much better than the first two, and Rick Foucheux and Nancy Robinette perform the final scene with sweet, unaffected simplicity, but you’ll have to wait an exhaustingly long time for the rest of the cast to settle down and let the play speak for itself.

One last thing: The floor of Kate Edmunds’s set is emblazoned with a giant reproduction of the first page of the manuscript of “Ah, Wilderness!” That might well work as a proscenium-stage backdrop, but it distracts the eye when the actors are forced to spend 2½ hours walking on top of it.

***

Deen van Meer

The ensemble in ‘Newsies.’

Newsies

Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41st St.

($91-$125), 866-870-2717,

extended through Aug. 19

New York

Imagine, if you dare, a cross between “Waiting for Lefty” and “High School Musical.” Should you find such a combination appealing rather than appalling, you’ll like “Newsies,” the droningly earnest new Disney musical about the newsboy strike of 1899. Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, has turned all the characters into flimsy cardboard cutouts, and the songs, by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman, are namby-pamby pop-rock sprinkled with phony-sounding period touches. Christopher Gattelli’s somersault-laden choreography is repetitive but excitingly lively, and the boys in the chorus tear into it with thrilling zest, especially the knockout tap ensemble at the top of the second act. I also liked Tobin Ost’s fire-escape set. Otherwise, this one’s a loser.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

A version of this article appeared March 30, 2012, on page D11 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Rediscovering Neil Simon.