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Critic’s Notebook: Three bright performances on Broadway: Nathan Lane, Michael Cera and Alex Sharp

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Los Angeles Times Theater Critic

In an age of vacuous celebrity, in which body parts can go viral and a good plastic surgeon can get you a bigger pay day than talent, it is heartening to report that Broadway’s leading men still come in all shapes and sizes.

Here, a character actor can receive top billing, and the brightest stars often seem to be the ones with the least muscle tone and the biggest eccentricities.

Nathan Lane, no beefcake centerfold, has renewed his claim to being the king of the Great White Way. Paired once again with Matthew Broderick, he has turned an updated version of Terrence McNally’s backstage bonbon from the 1980s, “It’s Only a Play,” now at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, into the comedy juggernaut of the season.

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Michael Cera, playing a gawky introvert who looks as though he’d like to permanently retreat into a hoodie in Anna D. Shapiro’s production of “This Is Our Youth” at the Cort Theatre, is delivering a virtuosic turn of late adolescent numbness. Even when his character is zoning out, which is fairly often, it’s impossible to take your eyes off him for fear of missing some key behavioral revelation in Kenneth Lonergan’s drama about Upper West Side slackers.

And Alex Sharp, portraying a young protagonist with what appears to be Asperger’s syndrome, is the riveting center of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” the London import based on Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel. Amid layers of technological effects in a production directed by Marianne Elliott (“War Horse”) at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre that tries to bring us inside the character’s perceptual field, Sharp’s performance earns our admiration through its unyielding discipline and unsentimental humanity.

These actors aren’t the first to inhabit these roles, and they surely won’t be the last. But their success can be measured by the way they erase all precedents the moment they take the stage.

Lane, of course, doesn’t so much take the stage as commandeer it. His super-charged presence in “It’s Only a Play” encloses actors and audience alike in a giggly bubble. Not that his fellow performers are guilty of “corpsing,” the British term when an actor breaks character by succumbing to laughter, but how they withstand the temptation is a mystery.

Lane plays James Wicker, a former stage actor who has found success if not self-respect in a long-running network television series. He has returned to New York for the opening of a new play by his old buddy, Peter Austin (mutedly portrayed by Broderick as though he were acting under slight sedation).

All indications are that this new American drama is a giant turkey. Even James, who has flown in from the West Coast expressly for the occasion, reports having flapped his wings and gobble-gobbled to Bernadette Peters during intermission of the aptly named “The Golden Egg.” (McNally’s script is a banquet of Broadway name-dropping and in-jokes.)

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The setting is the Art Deco townhouse of producer Julia Budder (fizzy as usual Megan Mullally), who is hosting the opening-night soiree. Honored guests include the play’s star, a casualty of plastic surgery plotting a last-ditch comeback (played with over-the-top brio by Stockard Channing), and a mentally unhinged hit-making British director (a wired Rupert Grint) as well as a freeloading critic who really wants to be a playwright (a permissibly overripe F. Murray Abraham).

The company is anxiously awaiting the reviews (how wonderfully retro!) along with just about every cast member on Broadway today. (A running gag has Micah Stock’s Gus, a cute wannabe actor, bringing in the coats of arriving performers, whose outwear makes it easy to guess which show they’re in.)

“It’s Only a Play” falters in its farcical construction. It’s too long, and the jokes are better than the play, which turns into a sentimental love letter to theater. McNally could have killed a few mildly humorous darlings, tightened the top of show, sharpened the playwright’s character (whom Broderick portrays as a wandering sad sack) and toughened up the ending so that it doesn’t come off as soppy pandering.

But despite these flaws the production, directed by Jack O’Brien, succeeds as a diverting Broadway confection. This is an old-fashioned comedy served up by top pros, with Lane standing in as dean of this college of wits.

A comedy duo unto himself, he is both clown and straight man. No one can do more with a riposte, and McNally has supplied him with plenty of fresh zingers, invoking Ryan Seacrest, Ellen DeGeneres, Harvey Fierstein and even that star of “The Addams Family” musical whose name temporarily escapes me.

The play also exploits the actor’s hilarious slow-burn, a Jack Benny-like turn of the head suggesting that all rationality has just been destroyed. The plot, climaxing in a New York Times review that’s the journalistic equivalent of an act of terrorism, drags on. But Lane’s levity is fleet and unerring throughout. When shadows of pathos flicker toward the end, he registers them unmawkishly before chasing them away with his unparalleled talent to amuse.

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When “This Is Our Youth” was first done off-Broadway in 1996, the production introduced many to Mark Ruffalo, an actor of uncommon sensitivity who was ideally cast as Warren Straub, a troubled upper-middle-class 19-year-old from a broken home reeling from the murder of his sister years earlier.

Ruffalo’s deadpan style of acting, as humorous as it was somber, made it hard for me to imagine another actor in the part. But Michael Cera (“Arrested Development,” “Juno”) has given Warren a new identity. The play is still set in 1982, but the character belongs as much to our era as to Ronald Reagan’s.

Shapiro’s production, which also stars Kieran Culkin as Dennis Ziegler, Warren’s drug-dealing friend in whose apartment the play is set, and precocious fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson as Jessica Goldman, Warren’s neurotic love interest, is nearly as well observed as Lonergan’s writing.

Culkin is particularly persuasive as a fast-talking New York egoist who likely graduated to Wall Street after his small-time coke business dried up, and Gevinson, while not completely comfortable as a stage actress, shows that she’s more than a passing Internet sensation. But it’s Cera’s naturalism that lights up this revival.

His Warren moves with a gangly, post-pubescent awkwardness, as though he’s still acclimating to his adult body. Arriving at Dennis’ studio with a briefcase filled with money stolen from his father, he’s divided between wanting to toss around a football and score some coke and pick up a couple of prostitutes.

Dennis is the alpha dog of this friendship; Warren is the submissive pal who every now and again arises from his general stupor to challenge one of Warren’s edicts. Cera reveals a young man who, surrounded by bullies, has been tamping down his intelligence to avoid making waves. Smoking pot helps keep his mind cloudy, but his eyes regularly flash with outraged logic when Dennis pushes his browbeating too far.

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This is a performance that communicates psychology through slouched posture and general distractedness. Yet the internal damage isn’t written in bold font. Cera inhabits it as a physical reality. Loss and alienation have been made flesh

Joy too is experienced with animal vigor. When Warren and Jessica are left alone in Dennis’ apartment, the two move from tentative small talk to an ecstatic dance that is as goofy as it is magical. Lonergan’s play grows a bit too explanatory in its final stages, but it contains moments of behavioral truthfulness that allow Cera to self-effacingly soar.

Fresh out of Juilliard, Alex Sharp makes a memorable Broadway debut in “The Curious Incident.” As the accidental detective of the play, adapted by Simon Stephens, he delivers a performance that is at once highly theatrical and impressively realistic — no small feat when portraying a character with a condition as socially differentiating as Christopher’s.

This 15-year-old who lives with just his father doesn’t like to be touched. Strangers cause him anxiety, as does any break with routine. Emotions are processed in nontraditional ways and metaphors confound him. Oh, and he’s a mathematical whiz, determined to win a place at university, something no one at his special school has done before.

The story revolves around Christopher’s investigation of the murder of a neighbor’s dog, a case that leads him, à la Oedipus, to discover some truths about his parents and his own potential. It’s a touching if not especially neatly plotted drama notable for the way it brings us inside Christopher’s mind.

Elliott’s staging creates the effect of a kind of subdued video game, though there’s nothing gratuitously modern about the flashes and beeps that accompany Christopher’s detective work. The multimedia swirl urges us to experience Christopher’s situation through his eyes, with the choreography approximating the geometric rigor with which he makes his way in the world.

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When I saw the play in London, I was transfixed by the virtuosity of Luke Treadaway’s performance. Sharp’s portrayal is less sensational but might be more genuine. He never lets theatrical expectations interfere with the accuracy of his characterization. His Christopher manages to move us without ever betraying that neutrality that sets him apart.

Like Lane and Cera, Sharp delivers a star turn that never aspires to be anything but true to the play. These actors don’t worry about making audiences fall in love with them, and the result is three of the most irresistible performances in a long while.

Follow me on Twitter: @CharlesMcNulty

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