Horton Foote, America's chronicler of folksy, small-town Texas, just won the American Theatre Critics New Play Award for this folksy, small play. A series of interwoven monologues, it gives us three sisters (if there's a Chekhovian connection here it is more in the wishing than in the doing) and the history of their family. Their father, the tyrannical carpetbagger of the title, was a private in the Union army during the Civil War who settled in the South. When the big plantations were breaking up, he acquired thousands of acres of land that his children were bound never to sell off or divide. This big land becomes the focus of their narrow-minded narrow lives. The hymn that runs through The Carpetbagger's Children, "O, the Clanging Bells of Time," says it all, a kind of tame Faulknerian meditation on the Old South becoming the New South. Jean Stapleton, Roberta Maxwell and Hallie Foote (the playwright's daughter) provide lovely, textured performances.
Toby Zinman

Through June 30, Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, 150 W. 65th St., 800-447-7400.

The Elephant Man

A brilliant revival of Bernard Pomerance's intensely emotional and theatrical play about a 19th-century patient and his doctor. Based on the true story of grotesquely deformed John Merrick (Billy Crudup in a remarkable performance that walks a razor-sharp line between heartbreaking and horrific) who is rescued from a freak show by Dr. Frederick Treves (Rupert Graves plays, with great subtlety, the righteous and self-righteous surgeon who discovers much about human nature -- his and ours -- through his patient). With cultivation and protection, Merrick becomes a civilized, imaginative and witty man whose head is "so big because it is full of dreams." Kate Burton does a star turn as the famous actress Mrs. Kendal who befriends The Elephant Man. Philip Glass provides haunting music, and Sean Mathias directs this luminous, stylized production full of distorting mirrors and Magrittian umbrellas and superb silences. TZ

Oklahoma!

From the first song ("Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'") sung by full-voiced, open-faced Patrick Wilson in chaps, to the last production number ("Oklahoma") three hours later, you feel the Americanness and the Broadway-ness and the old-fashioned-ness of Rodgers & Hammerstein's famous musical. The gunslinging pioneer spirit and the high kicks are all on stage again, in this British revival (directed by Trevor Nunn, much celebrated for his American musicals). As several couples pair and part, feisty old Aunt Eller (Andrea Martin) presides over the romances and the fights, the picnics and the weddings. A spectacularly designed production, it is beautiful to look at (big sky, big land) although the show feels less lively than it might. Josefina Gabrielle is a chilly Laurey -- she's a lovely dancer but somehow doesn't make the audience fall in love with her. These potentially complex characters seem all too simple, with only Shuler Hensley as Jud Fry providing an interesting dark side. The super-Stroman choreography is terrific. TZ

Topdog/Underdog

Suzan-Lori Parks just won the Pulitzer for this play, and no wonder. A high-energy laugh-out-loud tragedy, Topdog/Underdog is a very American play about very American issues: race, money, manhood. Family history -- abandoned children, rejecting women, brother against brother, the unsettled score with Mom and Dad -- emerges under the aegis of national history: With two black men, one named Lincoln and his younger brother named Booth (Dad's idea of a joke), the conclusion is as inevitable as it is troubling. Lincoln is a former three-card-monte hustler whose current job is to play Abraham Lincoln in an arcade: Strangers pay to assassinate him with a blank-shooting gun. Booth is sweeter, less educated, more violent, good at stealing, bad at cards. (He comes home wearing many layers of new, flashy clothes: "I stole and I stole generously.") The direction by George C. Wolfe goes for broke and wins. The highly dramatic lighting and ferocious, pounding soundtrack up the ante, which is already set very high by the sensational actors: Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def are riveting -- both hard and soft, sad and fierce, always individuals, always brothers. And what a pleasure to see an audience both racially mixed and full of young people on Broadway. TZ

Into The Woods

A revival of Stephen Sondheim's fairytale musical, in which The Baker and His Wife, Rapunzel, Cinderella, two Princes (both Charming), Jack (of beanstalk fame) and his mother and their cow, Little Red Riding Hood, her Wolf (who briefly bumps into his brother wolf chasing three pigs) all meet in the woods when the Giant's Wife shows up to avenge her husband's murder by Jack the Giant-killer. Sondheim's lyrics are -- as always -- clever and astute, and Sondheim's music is--as always--difficult to sing. As Red Riding Hood tells us, "nice is different from good," and this splashy, effect-filled revival is distinctly "nice": too Disneyfied, too cheery, with Vanessa Williams as the witch giving these edgy songs an easy-listening, pop sound. TZ

Thoroughly Modern Millie

Fans of the 1967 movie will want to know that this Millie has been refitted with a score (by Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan) that incorporates just two of the old songs. Fear not. The new material is tuneful; the cute story -- plucky small-town girl comes to New York to find a husband and enters the Jazz Age -- is intact. Better still, production values are sumptuous, and the fun-for-the-family show is livened by some adult wit. Sutton Foster's adorable Millie and Harriet Harris as Mrs. Meers (the Woman We Love to Hate) are sterling, with the rest of the company nearly as good. Millie is a throwback to another era, when musicals did no more than leave the audience feeling good. Guess what? You will. On its own terms, it's hard to imagine a more pleasant evening.
David Anthony Fox