TT: Men behaving badly (and predictably)

I crammed four shows into today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, a feat of compression made possible by the fact that I didn’t like any of them. I reviewed reasons to be pretty, Happiness, Irena’s Vow, and Hair. Here’s an excerpt.
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Neil LaBute, Off-Broadway’s most prolific playwright, has finally made it uptown. “reasons to be pretty” (the absence of capitalization is the author’s inexplicable affectation) is now playing on Broadway after a successful run at MCC Theater. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it does as well this time around, for what we have here is a kinder, gentler Neil LaBute, one who lets his hapless protagonist part way off the hook instead of letting him twist and turn all night long. That’s what makes “reasons to be pretty” suitable for uptown consumption. It’s Mr. LaBute’s first semi-optimistic play–which turns out not to be a good thing….
“reasons to be pretty” is standard-issue LaBute, a fast-paced sequence of ante-upping scenes in which the men are pigs, the women are victims and everyone (including the women) talks dirty. If you’ve never seen any of Mr. LaBute’s plays, you might well find this one fresh, but this is the sixth one I’ve reviewed, and I’m sorry to say that his style has hardened into a set of tricks and mannerisms that he uses to say the same things over and over again….
Susan Stroman and John Weidman, who last collaborated nine years ago on “Contact,” have reunited for “Happiness,” a musical inspired by “Outward Bound,” Sutton Vane’s 1923 play about a group of travelers on an ocean liner who discover that they are (A) dead and (B) en route to their Final Destination. Mr. Weidman, who wrote the book, has changed the setting to modern-day Manhattan and the ocean liner to a subway car, in the process inserting every theatrical cliché and social, sexual, ethnic and political stereotype known to man…
Dan Gordon has performed a feat of upside-down alchemy with “Irena’s Vow”: He’s taken the true story of a Polish Catholic girl (Tovah Feldshuh) who saved the lives of 11 Jews by hiding them in the cellar of a Nazi major (Thomas Ryan) and turned it into an egrgeiously sappy piece of what can only be called Holocaust kitsch….
The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park revival of “Hair” has moved to Broadway, restaged and recast but identical in spirit to the outdoor version that I saw in Central Park last August. The direction and choreography, by Diane Paulus and Karole Armitage, are as festive as ever, and the onstage band is still lava-hot, especially Bernard Purdie on drums. The show itself, alas, is also unchanged: The first act is lively but smug, the second act a hopelessly incoherent mess…
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Read the whole thing here.