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The Revisionist, actor Jesse Eisenberg’s meager play about a Holocaust secret, has nothing on Sophie’s Choice or a more recent play about the Armenian genocide, Red Dog Howls for shock value.

David, a struggling author desperate to finish a new book, travels to the Polish port of Szczecin where his distant cousin Maria lives alone. Why this New Yorker finds it necessary to spend thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles when he could just hunker down somewhere closer isn’t explained, but then we wouldn’t have a play.

David and the 70-ish Maria’s interaction is rendered in broad strokes: she hopes to take David sightseeing; he wants to remain in her bedroom—she sleeps on the couch while he’s there—with his laptop. His narcissistic personality notwithstanding, the two call a truce over a bottle of vodka and bad tofu: he loosens up by reciting the “Who’s on first?” routine, and she admits her wartime secret, which puts a new light on their relationship.

This wouldn’t be much from a veteran playwright: from a moonlighting Oscar nominated actor, it’s attitudinizing and unfeeling. Under Kip Fagan’s direction, Eisenberg trots out his nervous tics as David; Daniel Orestes plays Maria’s friend Zenon (who speaks Polish exclusively) with good humor; and Maria, enacted by a theatrical grand dame, Vanessa Redgrave, would be a worthy protagonist in a better play. The lone authenticity comes from set designer John McDermott’s spot-on rendering of Maria’s apartment interior.

Falco in The Madrid (photo: Joan Marcus)

In The Madrid, the endlessly resourceful Edie Falco hits a wall in this shallow comic drama by Liz Flahive, a producer on Falco’s show Nurse Jackie, proving the actress is nothing if not loyal. Falco plays Martha, a middle-aged kindergarten teacher who leaves her classroom and disappears one day; after that, we follow Martha’s college-graduated daughter Sarah in the fallout of Mom leaving without a word.

Flahive’s play might have been onto something by showing Sarah and her father John coming to terms with Martha’s disappearance, rebuilding their own lives and dealing with Martha’s cranky mother Rose, a stubborn grandmother who can’t accept that she can no longer get behind the wheel of her own car.

Instead, Flahive is too busy avoiding the elephant in the room: why Martha leaves to set up housekeeping in a rundown downtown apartment complex, the Madrid, near where she, her husband and daughter lived in the suburbs. Martha never gives a straight answer when she starts meeting her daughter surreptitiously: we also discover that she’s run away before, including after Sarah was born, but nothing rings true to these characters; it’s a lazy conceit to avoid the deeper, darker themes her history suggests.

Despite director Leigh Silverman’s sensitive hand, an excellent cast is hamstrung by their writer. In addition to Falco, John Ellison Conlee (John), Frances Sternhagen (Rose), Phoebe Strole (Sarah) and, as concerned neighbors, Heidi Schreck, Seth Clayton and Christopher Evan Welch deserve far better material than they’ve been given.

Hawke in Clive (photo: Monique Carboni)

Bertolt Brecht’s plays still resonate, but Jonathan Marc Sherman’s updating of Brecht’s early effort Baal is an uninspired 1990s’ hipster comedy that evaporates while you watch. Clive is named after its rock star protagonist, whose downfall is shown through a series of scenes that wallow in his partying, screwing and eventual demise after he kills his one true love—and it’s not one of the many women he seduces.

Brecht’s anti-hero has been transformed by Sherman into a clichéd grunge rocker; and, as Ethan Hawke plays him—his peroxide-drenched hair making him look like Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong—Clive is gleefully amoral, and the actor chews Derek McLane’s imaginative post-industrial scenery in a role that obviously appealed to him because he could sing, strum a guitar, snort coke, scream and screw nearly everyone onstage.

The other problem is that director Ethan Hawke allows everyone else to ham it up, mitigating his own unsubtle star turn. Vincent d’Onofrio gives an epically lunatic performance as Doc, Clive’s closest friend, barking, howling, and braying, all in a Southern accent. Brooks Ashmanskas wanders around in wide-eyed bluster, Zoe Kazan pretty much disappears every time she walks on as one of several interchangeable women whom Clive discards, and the playwright himself plays a few roles without distinction.

In keeping with the Brechtian spirit, the performers’ dialogue includes their stage directions, and the songs warbled include Brecht and Kurt Weill’s classic “Alabama Song,” which in this context sounds as forgettable as everything else onstage.

Dizzia and Keller in Belleville (photo: Joan Marcus)

Amy Herzog’s inflated rep as a bright young playwright far outpaces her achievements. 4000 Miles, The Great God Pan, and now Belleville are weightless concoctions posing as something deeper, with uncompelling characters battling one another’s psyches and the playwright’s contrivances.

Belleville might be her worst offender since Herzog’s promising setup is completely undermined by her tacked-on “thriller” plot. Abby and Zack are a young American couple living in the unexotic Parisian neighborhood of the title (Herzog surely “discovered” it through the animated French whimsy The Triplets of Belleville). Abby is a failed actress turned failed yoga teacher—how, when she doesn’t speak French?—while Zack works for Doctors Without Borders. Or does he?

Herzog soon exposes small tears in what seems a fabric of happiness. At the beginning, Abby returns home and catches Zack jerking off while—he says—he’s playing hooky from his job. And Zack, who’s behind four months on the rent (which Abby doesn’t know), likes smoking weed with their Senegalese landlord Alioune. Abby is still reeling from her mom’s death years before, can’t handle not taking her medication, gets drunk easily and worries about her sister in New Jersey, about to deliver a baby at any minute.

When these dramatic shortcuts crash into one another, Belleville accelerates its descent into oblivion; when a large knife is ominously brought onstage to slice a baguette, there’s no doubt it will be used for bloodier ends later on. Far too much remains unexplained and unexplored: would Abby be so clueless about Zack that she wouldn’t catch on to his months-long ruse? Could a pothead like Zack function normally? Would a responsible mother—Alioune’s wife Amina—leave her baby monitor in the Americans’ apartment? And why that an inscrutable final scene, even for French speakers?

Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller enact Herzog’s couple persuasively, but are defeated by Herzog’s flat dramatics, which also hamper director Anne Kaufmann’s desperate attempts to ramp up thrills and suspense with a glacial pace. Paris is worth returning to, but avoid Belleville.

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Originally written as a TV musical with Julie Andrews in 1957, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella comes to Broadway an ungainly hybrid: wedded awkwardly to the pair’s elegantly tuneful—if often forgettable—songs is a new book by playwright Douglas Carter Beane, whose smartass cleverness is at odds with the beloved fairy tale.

The schizophrenia probably won’t have much effect at the box office—parents who take their kids will laugh at the jokes that go over the youngsters’ heads—but why did this marriage take place in the first place? Why tamper with a surefire hit property by the most beloved songwriters in Broadway history?

Beane scores occasional laughs with anachronisms and snark, but his additions (especially his silly political and social commentary) drag down the second act. Mark Brokaw’s snappy direction, while overcoming Josh Rhodes’ routine choreography, has trouble with Beane’s sloppy dramaturgy, but he’s helped immensely by William Ivey Long’s magical costumes and Anna Louizos’s elaborate sets.

The cast comprises scenery-chewing stage veterans like Harriet Harris as the Evil Stepmother and Robert Bartlett as the prince’s hypocritical guardian Sebastian: but they gleefully toss off Beane’s bitchiest lines. Victoria Clark is an immaculate fairy godmother and Santino Fontana a goofily endearing prince—who only lacks panache.

Then there’s the incandescent Laura Osnes, rapidly becoming our best Broadway leading lady. Lovely of voice, presence, demeanor and affect, her delightfully unaffected singing and acting make her a Cinderella for all ages, even if the show ultimately is not.

In theory, Steven Sondheim’s intimate Passion would be well served by the off-Broadway Classic Stage Company’s tiny space. Too bad that, in the hands of director John Doyle, it’s more gimmicky than organic, a failed opportunity to home in on this master composer’s least typical musical theater piece.

Based on Italian director Ettole Scola’s 1981 film Passione d’amore, Sondheim’s musical is essentially a chamber piece for an unorthodox ménage a trois: Giorgio, a dashing soldier in a passionate affair with the beautiful—but married—Clara, finds himself inexplicably drawn to Fosca, the sickly cousin of his new sergeant. Sondheim and book writer James Lapine alternate between Giorgio and Clara’s loving letters with scenes showing how he slowly falls for the physically repulsive and emotionally frail woman.

Sondheim’s music, which apes Puccini without ever reaching the necessary, ahem, passion, aurally spins its wheels for 105 minutes: there’s not only a paucity of memorable tunes, but a paucity of tunes themselves; much of Passion takes place in a no-man’s land in which the similar-sounding musical motifs repeat with unsatisfying variations.

If Sondheim’s music is dispassionate, Doyle’s directing is anemic. The small stage’s intimacy should bring us closer to this strange romantic trio, but Doyle—unlike his earlier Sondheim successes d’estime of performers playing their instruments in Sweeney Todd and Company—does nothing original here, reverting to minimal scenery have characters mime eating to increasing risible effect.

In the leads, Melissa Errico (Clara) and Ryan Silverman (Giorgio) are commendable and Judy Kuhn (Fosca) is even better—her plainness as scarily effective as Donna Murphy’s repulsiveness in the original Broadway staging—but it’s all ultimately for naught.

Chronicle of a Summer

This remarkable piece of cinema verite is still relevant, despite comprising interviews with young French adults in 1960, who talk about—engagingly or haltingly but always fascinatingly—their place in a confused world.

Anthropologist and director Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin’s document is historically and socially important, and kudos to the Criterion Collection for releasing a restored version that looks striking on Blu-ray. Extras include Un ete + 50, a 75-minute feature made in 2011 that revisits the film; archival interviews with Rouch and participant Marceline Loridan; and an interview with anthropology professor Faye Ginsburg.

The Kid with a Bike

Belgian directors the Dardenne brothers ask us to suspend disbelief as they follow a young orphaned boy who wants his bike back. A selfless woman gets back his bike and becomes his mother/guardian angel; a medical miracle damages the end of a movie that, aside from its fairy-tale female lead, has been intensely realistic.

Amid the implausibilities are admirable performances by natural newcomer Thomas Dorset in the title role and the winning Cecile de France as a too-good-to-be-true heroine. Criterion’s Blu-ray image is superb; extras are a substantial directors’ interview, short interviews with Dorset and de France, and a 30-minute documentary, Return to Seraing.

The Master

Despite pretensions to greatness, director P.T. Anderson fails miserably in his latest attempt to out-Kubrick Kubrick, out-Scorsese Scorsese and out-Altman Altman. This stultifying psychological drama—centering on a damaged WWII vet, a cult leader and his wife—contains threadbare characterizations, pretty but empty compositions and a stubborn refusal to make minimal internal sense.

None of these would be particularly damaging on its own: taken together, they end up wasting good actors like Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams. The Blu-ray image is impeccable (Anderson shot his film in 65 mm); extras comprise deleted scenes and a making-of featurette.

Sansho the Bailiff

This 1954 tragedy may be Kenji Mizoguchi’s best film, an emotionally devastating drama less stylized and more honest than his other “classics” Ugetsu and Life of Oharu. The brutality of slavery and peasant life is rendered with rigorous economy, making the bittersweet reunion ending more powerfully memorable.

The B&W imagery shimmers in Criterion’s first-rate transfer; extras include commentary by Japanese literature expert Jeffrey Angles, and interviews with critic Tadao Soto, Mizoguchi assistant director Tokuzo Tanaka and actress Kyoko Kagawa.

DVDs of the Week

In her first hit series since Party of Five, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s sexy but desperate single mother goes to work at a massage parlor and soon finds herself giving little favors on the side—for extra cash, natch. It’s silly and sexist—but, done in as middlebrow a way as possible, it avoids bringing up nuances like prostitution.

The always game Hewitt is decent, as are Cybill Shepherd and other cast members, and the show is almost too nice about a would-be salacious topic. Extras include deleted scenes and outtakes.

Freaky Deaky

This Elmore Leonard adaptation is a missed comic opportunity, despite a cast—led by Christian Slater and Crispin Glover—which contains Breanne Racano and Sabina Gadecki, two of the most appealing new American actresses in years.

But despite writer-director Charles Matthau’s actors spouting Leonard’s bizarrely quotable dialogue (beating poseur Quentin Tarantino by light years), the movie’s convoluted plotting too often interrupts the talk. A short making-of featurette is included.

The Loneliest Planet

Julia Loktev’s myopic study features a couple whose relationship starts unraveling while traveling through Georgia’s foreboding Caucasus Mountains with a local guide. Despite her visual mastery, Loktev is unable to handle the psychology of her couple, which causes her to lose dramatic focus almost immediately.

We are left to admire the tenacity of stars Gael Garcia Bernel and Hani Furstenberg, who trudge through the film increasingly more dejected and confused. Extras include a making-of documentary and photographs by mountaineer Bidzina Gujabidze (who plays the guide).

Maigret

Georges Simenon’s classic Parisian detective—for whom he wrote dozens of best-selling novels—is brought to life in this early-‘90s British series starring the imposing Michael Gambon, who’s not very French but in every other way embodies the thorough sleuth humanely and humorously.

The 12 episodes on these four discs are delightfully entertaining, as Maigret solves murder and burglary cases, even investigating wrongdoing inside his own department Guest stars include younger versions of Minnie Driver, Michael Sheen and Brenda Blethyn.

Silent Souls

Director Alexei Fedorchenko’s meandering mystical feature follows a middle-aged widower’s journey to return his dead wife’s body to her homeland, with an acquaintance for companionship.

Although Mikhail Krichman’s widescreen cinematography is stunning, his compositions obscure the fact that Fedorchenko’s concerns are so sketchy that he tries to compensate by transforming deadly dullness into pseudo-profundity. But even at a brief 75 minutes, this feels like a long slog of a road movie.

CDs of the Week

Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti smartly programmed her movie music disc around Erich Korngold’s fabulous Violin Concerto, which borrows themes from his own film scores, and which Benedetti dispatches with her trademark brilliance.

In addition to two excerpts from Korngold’s opera Die Tote Stadt, Benedetti shows her impeccable taste with Shostakovich and Mahler selections alongside mainstream fare like Scent of a Woman, Jane Eyre and the disc’s opener, John Williams’ yearning Schindler’s List theme.

Geza Frid—Fantasia Tropica

This little-known Dutch composer by way of Hungary—a student of Hungarian masters Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly—is represented by four of his five string quartets, all of which are highly accomplished if not sonically earth-shattering.

But these works, particularly the third, Fantasia Tropica, show off his assured ear, and the Amaryllis Quartet—comprising four of Germany and Switzerland’s best young players—gives them a rigorous workout that makes one want to hear more of Frid’s chamber music.