Broadway

If "Fame" and "Glee" joined hands and headed for Broadway, and dragged along little bits of "Rocky," "All About Eve" and "West Side Story," they'd probably come up with something like "Bring It On," the fast-moving musical that opened Wednesday night. High-school cheerleading serves as the medium for a show whose themes touch on teenage angst, jealousy, competition, cultural differences, dreams and friendship. That's a tall order, not always well executed. But "Bring It On," the creation of a bunch of Tony winners, stands to become a hit for its raw energy, its heady mix of gymnastics and dancing driven by the cheerleading plot and its explosive kinetic joy. Plus its accessibly – "Bring It On" is a mega-bucks musical you could see with anyone in your family, a non-offensive show infused with meanies, goodies and people who are clearly both.

As a Megabus rattled through the Lincoln Tunnel, a surprising fact passed among the 11 Philadelphia high school students occupying the back rows: They were under water. "No, we're not," several said in disbelief, turning to their classmates to ascertain that they were, indeed, traveling beneath the Hudson River. Convinced, one student declared, "I'm about to tweet it!"- before finding out that there was no cellphone service below ground. It was the first surprise on a day full of new experiences for the 11 travelers from El Centro de Estudiantes, a school for students who have dropped out or been kicked out of Philadelphia public schools.

NEW YORK - Once won the Tony Award for best Broadway musical in New York, four years after a number from the $150,000 movie upon which it's based won an Academy Award for best original song. Clybourne Park , Bruce Norris' dark comedy about race set in 1959 and 2009 Chicago, was named best play, supplementing its 2011 Pulitzer Prize. The play, inspired by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun ," had a run at Philadelphia's Arden Theatre before this spring before opening on Broadway.

It was Peter Pan who long ago captured a little guy in Overbrook named Stephen C. Byrd and goaded him, during the next several decades, to Neverland. His grandma was an accessory to this - she took him to see the play at a theater in Philadelphia. Byrd thought about it a lot over the years: Not just the sprite who wouldn't grow up but all the rest, the plays he saw with his grandmother after Peter Pan , the theater he later saw on his own. And eventually it struck him that Neverland - hereinafter called Broadway - was not so great at attracting people like him, black people.

The new Broadway musical "Leap of Faith," which opened Thursday night, is really "The Music Man" in a revival tent. A con-artist comes to a backwater town and in this case, he's not a phony musician, he's a phony preacher. And he doesn't get the whole town involved in a marching band, he turns them into a band of believers who march to his collection plate. And there you have it — a formulaic musical right down to the easy-to-see love affair that will develop between the preacher man and the no-nonsense woman who's the town sheriff and his nemesis, the boilerplate subplot that involves trouble and the unrealistic ooey-gooey ending.

You can see the smile creep into actress Patricia Kalember's pretty face as her eyes widen in the role of a married woman named Jacqueline. She has just picked up the phone to hear the voice of Robert, an old friend and the best man at her wedding, and from that smile and those eyes, you know something's going on. That little something turns out to be one of, oh, maybe 15 causes for deception in "Don't Dress for Dinner," a wholly amusing farce...