New York

Was Kathleen Turner ever an actor? Maybe, but she's not one anymore. All she does nowadays is waddle onstage and hawk the self-parody that long ago became her stock in trade. To say that Ms. Turner plays an alcoholic nun in Matthew Lombardo's "High" comes close to giving away the whole game. Yes, Sister Jamison Connelly is a foul-mouthed, tough-talking dame with a heart of brass-plated gold, and yes, Ms. Turner's Janie-One-Note performance is so thickly mannered as to suggest that the producers of "High" have engaged a Kathleen Turner robot instead of the real thing. She rattles off her lines in a hoarse, staccato baritone voice that sounds as if it had been brought into being through daily doses of Drano administered by mouth, and she never does anything that you can't see coming several hundred miles away.

Kathleen Turner as an alcoholic nun and Evan Jonigkeit as a dope-addled street hustler in 'High.' Joan Marcus


Booth Theatre
222 W. 45th St.

Neither does Mr. Lombardo, a specialist in coarsely wrought vehicles for Hollywood refugees of a certain age. Last year it was "Looped," in which Valerie Harper played Tallulah Bankhead. This year it's "High," in which Ms. Turner attempts to save the body and soul of Cody (Evan Jonigkeit), a dope-addled street hustler whose self-destructive behavior is enabled by the solicitude of a well-meaning but foolish priest (Stephen Kunken). "High" is the sort of play in which a character (Ms. Turner, naturally) utters sentences like "Okay, God, here's the deal," then expects the audience not to giggle contemptuously in response.

Not all of "High" is as bad as that. Mr. Lombardo, who is himself a recovering drug addict, has written several speeches for Cody that have the bright, hard ring of remembered nightmares. If the whole play had been that honest, it might have been worth seeing. But Sister Jamison is a star-turn, not a person, and every time she makes her entrance, truth makes its exit.

Rob Ruggiero, who is one of the best musical-comedy directors on the East Coast, does all he can to make "High" seem real, though his staging of the nude scene (whoops, forgot to mention that!) is painfully gratuitous. For what it's worth, Messrs. Jonigkeit and Kunken are both excellent.



The problem with Frank Wildhorn musicals is that they contain Frank Wildhorn songs. "Wonderland," an updated stage version of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," is stuffed full of easy- listening pop ditties written in the out-the-other-ear style to which Mr. Wildhorn long ago accustomed his fans. As for Jack Murphy's lyrics, suffice it to say that he lays his creative cards on the table in the very first number: "Larger smaller—keep it real / Change just happens, learn to deal."


Marquis Theatre
1535 Broadway

If you've spent any time watching the junk dished up on contemporary children's TV, you'll have a pretty good idea of what Mr. Wildhorn and his collaborators have done to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." The time is right this second and the place is New York City. Alice (Janet Dacal) is a well-dressed, temporarily single working mom whose unemployed, temporarily unenlightened husband (Darren Ritchie) has left her because he's embarrassed not to be the family breadwinner. Chloe (Carly Rose Sonenclar), their daughter, is an unnaturally mature-sounding 11-year-old Broadway diva who is incapable of uttering an unsarcastic word. Alice bumps her head in the elevator, lies down to take a nap and finds herself in Wonderland, a country whose inhabitants all speak the same tired argot, half smart-assery and half metahumor:

"I'm tardy, I'm tardy!"

"I thought it's 'I'm late, I'm late!'"

"Disney owns the rights."

Mr. Murphy and Gregory Boyd, the director, share credit for the book, all of which is just that lazy. The secondary characters are a stock assortment of supersafe ethnic types, and Carroll's protosurrealism has been watered down into an ultrawholesome sermonette so vapid that Polonius would have blushed to deliver it: "We move too fast / We miss too much / We seldom see / All the miracles in front of us."

Mr. Boyd, a top-class director who has given us, among other good things, Hartford Stage's unforgettable 2007 production of "Our Town," keeps things moving with dispatch, and his cast is no less reliable, especially the exceedingly likable Ms. Dacal. The word on the street was that Neil Patel's sets were almost worth the price of the ticket, and the word was right on the money. Taking John Tenniel's original Victorian-era illustrations for the Alice books as his starting point, Mr. Patel has made use of the latest digital-projection trickery to conjure up a fantastically colorful world of his own.

And what of the target market for "Wonderland"? Regrettably, the children who came last Friday showed every sign of enjoying it. That's no surprise, since they've been carefully taught to swallow such predigested pap. But if you grew up watching Bugs Bunny and "The Wizard of Oz" instead of Nickelodeon and "High School Musical," then you'll likely find "Wonderland" to be too namby-pamby for words.
