When it rains talent, it pours.
In a Broadway season that has already been blessed with two Tony-winning actresses ( Christine Ebersole and Donna Murphy) matching or even surpassing their past musical efforts, plus a strong showing by two new faces (Lea Michele and Laura Bell Bundy), has reclaimed her mantle as the era's premier musical-theater actress.
Even when she's miscast, as in the Roundabout's capable new revival of "110 in the Shade," Ms.
McDonald is the anti-diva, incapable of singing a note or saying a word that in any way steals focus from or diminishes the material. Despite her effortless glamour, she has turned , a spinster in the making who's "as plain as old shoes" and terrified of growing old alone, into a touching, forthright, and abidingly real creation.
If Lizzie's name rings a bell, it may be from "The Rainmaker," N.
Richard Nash's 1954 play about a mountebank who sweeps into a drought-plagued town and, between promises of bringing "a good Old Testament wade-in-the-water and shoutin'-glory rain," helps poor not-so-old Lizzie feel pretty with the help of a little roll in the hay. Despite its eyebrow-raising gender politics, "The Rainmaker" has shown itself to be a durable script and was revived successfully in 1999 with Jayne Atkinson as Lizzie and Woody Harrelson as Starbuck, the would-be miracle worker. Nash retooled the script himself for "110," and the extended book scenes are quite strong.
(Lyricist Tom Jones and composer , making their Broadway debut, were arguably too deferential toward their collaborator, with some songs largely restating ideas that were already established through dialogue.)
Messrs. Jones and Schmidt are far better known for their smaller-scale efforts: "The Fantasticks," of course, but also the two-person "I Do!
I Do!" Their 1963 evocation of an insular Texas community clearly took a page or two from " Oklahoma!," right down to its Agnes de Mille choreography.
Notwithstanding Mr. Schmidt's expansive, Americana-inflected harmonies, though, the two were no match for Rodgers and Hammerstein when it came to painting on a broad canvas.
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