A less-than-perfect marriage of a first-rate actor with a first-rate play (2:30).

"In 'A Chorus Line,' we took a first-rate play and made a second-rate movie."

What Broadway needs to recover its lost glory is a few first-rate plays, with content relevant to real life, and a few musicals you can listen to and understand and recall with nostalgic pleasure.

Wouldn't the best answer be: first-rate work in a first-rate play?

In the early autumn the theatre's artistic director,Trevor Nunn made a sentimental mess out of a first-rate play: his production of The Tempest was redeemed only by Ralph Fiennes exercising authority as Prospero.

But if you were expecting a seamless, emotionally stirring marriage between a first-rate actor and a first-rate play, then "Butley" disappoints.

Butterfly,' there are no longer 8,000 people a week to fill the 8,000 empty seats that a first-rate play has to fill on Broadway.

We are shown how an artist's lifelong obsession with a formidable mother can embellish many of his dramas and culminate in a first-rate play about her alone, "Three Tall Women."

There hasn't been a first-rate Indian play since Forrest did Metamora over fifty years ago.

Why don't companies that mount second-rate productions of first-rate plays halve their prices for starters and offer a certain number of free performances in addition?