The journey he and Peters make is fascinating but at the crunch points they don’t deliver. Rose’s monomaniacal clincher “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” should enthrall and terrify the other characters and the audience but Peters is no longer up to it vocally. The character is fighting desperation but the actress needs to be relaxed and Peters knows she doesn’t have the power. She can’t sustain the notes to reveal the emotions so instead we see the desperation of the actress. She copes better with the knock-’em-dead showstopper “Rose’s Turn”, but even there you find yourself watching Peters when you should be glued to the character. Director Jonathan Kent is also back on Broadway, this time helming a revival of Man of La Mancha This always was a one-hit wonder.

“The Impossible Dream” was a Sixties chart sensation but the rest of the score is undistinguished and despite the best efforts of Kent’s gifted designer Paul Brown who has built a jaw-droppingly immense set, they cannot save what always was a dangerously naive piece.David Leveaux fares better with Nine, his revival of Maury Yeston’s musical of Fellini’s film 8 1/2 (Well, you try rhyming “eight and a half”). Leveaux first staged this at the Donmar Warehouse but reconceived for New York it now boasts Antonio Banderas as film director Guido who sings up a storm and oozes pheremones, an essential in a show with an otherwise all-female cast. Smouldering Chita Rivera and lustrous Jane Krakowski – a hot contender for Best Featured Actress – are just dandy but the show has more premise than plot. Even Leveaux can’t animate it.Speaking of which, Best Choreography will, deservedly, go to Twyla Tharp for Movin’ Out. Always a whizz with popular material – her Nine Sinatra Songs is much imitated but never bettered – she has tied Billy Joel songs into a loose narrative depicting a generation before, during and after Vietnam. Sung by a band led by the shockingly impressive Joel-soundalike Michael Cavanaugh the songs are choreographed on a company of electrifying dancers who make the best casts of Chicago look as if they’re on Valium. The more literal and like The Deer Hunter the show is, the less successful it is, but nothing on Broadway can touch the second half which whips up an emotional level of all-consuming exhilaration.

There is, however, a performance of similar joy in Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg’s gripping portrait of American identity politics viewed through the prism of baseball. This too began at the Donmar and is now a dead cert for Best Play, but at its heart is Denis O’Hare stealing hearts and minds as the shy lawyer who rises up to rhapsodic self-assurance.For Best Featured Actor he’s up against Philip Seymour Hoffman firing up a starry revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night as the furious elder son. Larded with self-disgust, his is the most complete performance but even he falls prey to the production’s need to over-illustrate This is a production for people who love ACTING. Vanessa Redgrave gives the mother a feast of frets and worries but with everything so deliberately presented to us there’s nothing to discern or discover beneath the surface. We admire but grow worryingly disengaged.Of course, you can do the surface thing and get away with it Take Hairspray. Nominated for 13 Tonys, you don’t have to be Mystic Meg to know that this superbly crafted, dizzying confection will sweep the boards and if Harvey Fierstein doesn’t win for his ravishingly shameless Edna Turnblad – a wildly overweight Baltimore housewife who takes in ironing and dreams of being a fashion designer – there’ll be a riot.The original movie had a great idea – teens fight segregation in Sixties America via TV stardom, black music, American values and Ultra Clutch hairspray – but was seriously patchy Not any more. The production’s zany bubblegum colours and pointy late-Fifties styling make you feel like you’re in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon and the songs are loving, blessedly hilarious hommages to the Shangri-Las, Ronettes et al.In other words, it’s joyously retro – Look Back in Ankle Socks – and thrillingly knowing.