OUT OF FOCUS

"Pictures from Home" and "Cornelia Street."

- HELEN SHAW

Larry Sultan’s groundbreaking photo-memoir, from 1992, is recast for Broadway.

Nathan Lane and Danny Burstein are Broadway veterans and consummate showmen, greeted as beloved tummlers whenever they appear onstage. Purveyors of the same wry bonhomie, these two throwbacks to the vaudevillian era could almost be brothers—Lane is sixty-seven to Burstein’s fifty-eight— but in “Pictures from Home,” at Studio 54, they play father and son. What to do? The production has decided to fake an age gap with hair styling: a white swoosh for Lane and a glossy dark emo-coif for Burstein. Whenever my mind wandered, I watched the lights play on these oddly reflective hairpieces. The shine—Burstein’s head occasionally turns a kind of bronzy purple—isn’t only a question of wigs. It also illuminates the deeper trouble with the playwright Sharr White’s stage adaptation of the photographer Larry Sultan’s book, an endeavor that, in its follicles, is a case of tonal mismatch.