This afternoon I got to see the handiwork of those three young chargers from Boca Raton -- Philip Morgaman (27 years old), Frankie J. Grande (28) and Brian Kapetanis (28) -- the lead producers of the new revival of Born Yesterday that opened last Sunday night to very favorable reviews. That was the opening I missed taking a three-hop flight to New York by way of Detroit.

It remains to be seen whether they can make money on the venture, since the show’s male stars, Jim Belushi and Robert Sean Leonard, are only committed to the production until July, when they head back to the West Coast for their television responsibilities. Still, the chemistry between them and particularly with their co-star Nina Arianda, who gives a certifiable star-making performance as smarter-than-she-looks Billie Dawn, is evidence that these emerging producers have good taste and theatrical savvy.

From the start, after Morgaman came up with the idea of reviving Born Yesterday and persuaded the estate of playwright Garson Kanin to issue them the performance rights, they knew that they wanted two stageworthy television veterans to play thuggish scrap metal magnate Harry Brock and crusading New Republic writer Paul Verrall, plus an unknown with strong comedy chops for Billie. And that is exactly what they got.

The play, which first met audiences in 1946 but comes off as remarkably relevant to the political scene today, is kind of a 20^th-century Pygmalion tale, with chorus girl Billie visiting the nation’s capital for the first time ever, brought to Washington by her brusque, bullying beau Brock, who has come to lean on a bought-and-paid-for senator to get favorable treatment on tariffs and taxes. Knowing he will need to take Billie to D.C. social functions, he hires Paul to educate her, a task Paul succeeds at all too well.

Written in three acts, for an audience with far more patience than a 2011 audience has, the script can be pokey, but director Doug Hughes finesses the problem nicely and the cast also more than compensates.

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My New York theatergoing ended on a disappointing note, seeing the musical Catch Me if You Can, based on the 2002 Steven Spielberg/Leonardo di Caprio movie about real life con man-counterfeiter Frank Abagnale, Jr. It reunites the creative team of Hairspray -- songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, director Jack O’Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell -- with none of the same buoyant results.

Much of the problem stems from the device of telling the story in the style of a ’70s TV variety show, which leads to a homogenized, upbeat score and precious little emotional impact. Ultimately, the show is not very involving and leading performer Aaron Tveit (Next to Normal) is not charismatic enough, does not have the star power, to make us care.

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Karole Armitage, the choreographer of the Hair revival, called me Saturday, apologized for the interview that did not happen on Friday and rescheduled for this morning. So instead of going for a leisurely brunch with my friends, I will try again to meet with Karole at the Joyce Theatre downtown before catching my plane home.

Avenue Q arrived on Broadway some eight years ago with its snarky, often off-color humor to claim that puppet shows are not necessarily mere kids’ stuff. That heretical suggestion has now been confirmed forever by the emotionally charged War Horse, an epic tale of a young man and his trusty steed, set against the horrors of World War I.

A transfer from the National Theatre of Great Britain, it now resides at Lincoln Center’s vast Vivian Beaumont. This used to be considered a highly problematic playing space, but to see how beautifully a huge, yet intimate production like War Horse fits here -- or South Pacific or The Coast of Utopia before it -- one wonders how there could have ever been naysayers about the physical plant.

Anyway, War Horse is based on a children’s book by Michael Morpurgo about Albert, the son of an alcoholic Devon farmer who falls in love with a chestnut-colored horse named Joey that his father purchases on a jealous whim. When Joey is sold into the cavalry to aid the war effort, Albert runs away from home and enlists in the army in an attempt to reunite with the semi-thoroughbred.

It is not a particularly complex or subtle story and the production is more narrative pageant than play, but the stagecraft of the life-sized puppets and a backdrop of animated hand-drawn projections make this one of the must-sees -- you’ve never seen anything like it before -- of this Broadway season.

The animals were created by the Handspring Puppet Company and they are awe-inspiring. Joey is manipulated by three people, visible at all times, either standing next to the horse or inside him. But the miracle of what Handspring hath wrought is that the humans virtually disappear as Joey comes to life, turning his head with such expression, flicking his tail or slogging through the mud of war-torn France.

And while it seems silly typing these words, another astonishing Handspring creation is an adorable goose puppet on wheels that is the sole comic relief of the 2-hour-40-minute production.

Ultimately, War Horse is about the brutality and destruction of war, but if you are willing to stipulate from the start that war is rotten, you can concentrate instead on the alchemy of live theater. And puppetry.

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The only downside of my trip so far -- OK, after my horrendous day of flying to get here and after the painfully bad People in the Picture -- was a broken interview with Karole Armitage, the choreographer of Hair, who agreed to sit and talk with me about the show coming to the Kravis Center next season. So I schlepped down to the Joyce Theatre on 19^th Street, where her modern dance company is performing and waited for a half hour for her to show up, before I had to hurry uptown to see War Horse.

Karole, where were you? Call me.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been freaking out television’s Standards and Practices folks (a/k/a censors) for almost 15 years with their purposely profane animated series South Park, so it should come as no surprise that their first Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, will never get any awards for good taste.

They should, however, clear off their mantelpieces for the imminent arrival of multiple Tony Awards for this runaway hit musical, by all accounts the season’s best.

It is the tale of a couple of squeaky-clean, though enormously misguided Mormon missionaries who head off to Uganda to spread the word of Joseph Smith to the perfectly content natives. It shows not only Parker and Stone’s well-established talent for irreverence, but a firm awareness of the tenets of musical theater and a working knowledge of its history.

For when, late in the second act, the carefully but erroneously taught Ugandans enact their version of the genesis of Mormonism, Parker and Stone are savvy enough to relate it in a tongue-in-cheek send up of the Little House of Uncle Thomas sequence from The King and I.

Joining the South Park guys to write the score and script is Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), and the songs have a similar infectious sweetness, with plenty of that show’s shock punch line language. (CBS, which is already wondering how to identify the play The Motherf**ker with the Hat on the Tony Awards, will also have to be resourceful to find a musical number from The Book of Mormon that can be aired intact.)

The main thing is that Broadway has a big fat hit in Mormon, one that is likely to attract a new young audience to the theater, which is great. And even though the religion is certainly the target of lots of ridicule, do not be surprised if this show attracts new disciples to it.

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During the day, I pursued a feature story on casting directors, specifically the New York-based casting pros who have South Florida theater clients, talking about how they aid in matching theaters and performers long distance. I had lunch at the Edison Hotel Café (a/k/a The Polish Tea Room) with Janet Foster, who casts shows for Palm Beach Dramaworks. Then I headed downtown to the Pearl Studios, where I met and interviewed Bob Cline, whose clients include the Maltz Jupiter Theatre. It’s turned into a good story.

Then, before dinner with Bill Hirschman of the South Florida Theater Review, my former on-air partner on the Internet TV show Aisle Say, I high-tailed it to Bloomingdale’s to buy a guilt gift for my wife, who stayed home in Florida while I got to play this week in New York.

Mark Rylance may just be the best actor working in the theater today.

You might agree if you saw Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, a powerful, but somewhat overwritten three-hour marathon drama about an iconoclastic former daredevil stunt rider and occasional drug dealer who rails against the world.

Rylance originated the role of Johnny “Rooster” Byron at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where he won every award in sight for his performance and there is reason to think he will do the same over here.

He, of course, won a Tony Award already a few years ago for elevating the farce Boeing-Boeing -- no small feat -- and again sent critics to their thesauruses earlier this season to find ways to praise his supporting work in the modern verse satire, La Bete.

I did not see either of those productions, but I first encountered Rylance about eight years ago playing the role of Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre in London, where he served as artistic director for 10 years from 1996 to 2006. The production was cast as The Bard would have -- all roles played by men -- and Rylance’s performance as the young shipwrecked heroine had not an ounce of camp or irony, but was virtually kabuki in its feminine delicacy and authenticity.

Which is to say it had absolutely nothing in common with his “Rooster” Byron. The two roles are simply the most astonishing display of performance versatility I have ever seen. If there is time this week, I’m going to try to see his Boeing-Boeing performance at the Lincoln Center Library’s performing arts video collection and am determined to see whatever he does onstage in the future.

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Stars can often elevate the material they are in, but even the terrific Donna Murphy can do little to help the new musical, The People in the Picture, a mawkish little show that so wants to leave us in puddles of tears, but never bothers to earn the emotional responses it seeks.

I saw the show Wednesday afternoon at one of its final previews, where there were certainly some audience sniffles evoked, but not from yours truly, and I am an easy crier.

Murphy plays a Jewish stage actress in Warsaw, Poland, just before and during World War II, and then as a grandmother in the United States, where she is frail and starting to drift into dementia. Of course, with the switch of a wig and a change of posture and dialect, she keeps bouncing back and forth in time.

The problem is the show wants to be about Holocaust remembrance, Jewish identity and survival instinct, but it conveys those complex subjects with button-pushing shorthand that grates. Nor does it help that the lyrics (and book) by Iris Rainer Dart (who wrote the novel Beaches) are painfully predictable when they are not merely clunky.

Murphy acquits herself well enough, but other talented performers like Chip Zien, Lewis J. Stadlen and Joyce Van Patten are distressingly underutilized. When The People in the Picture opens this evening, it will be the official last show of the season, an unfortunate end to a year with numerous high points.

Tuesday was an even better weather day in New York, with the temperature climbing into the 80s, and locals shedding their clothes like it was the second coming of summer.

My dance card was busy with interviews and, in the evening, a much-anticipated viewing of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

But first, always in search of a Florida angle on the Broadway season, I met and spoke with three former Boca Raton residents -- Philip Morgaman (27 years old), Frankie J. Grande (28) and Brian Kapetanis (28) -- high school pals who are the lead producers on the acclaimed new revival of Born Yesterday.

How they wore down playwright Garson Kanin’s estate to get the performance rights to the play when others had previously been turned down, how they raised the $3 million budget and shepherded it from pre-production to rehearsals to a star-studded opening night (yes, even Liza Minnelli attended and endorsed the show) is a great, upbeat story. Stay tuned.

I also stopped by the new 42^nd Street Studios to talk with Diane Paulus, director of the Tony-winning revival of Hair, currently on tour, headed back to Broadway this summer and on to the Kravis Center next season. Over her lunch half-hour, she talked about mounting the show, a passion project that has turned into a cash cow.

Somewhere around 1 p.m. I noticed that my cellphone had lapsed into a coma, refused to make or receive calls. But this is New York, so I popped into one of the many AT&T stores, where a friendly, efficient sales/technician staffer performed emergency surgery on the phone and send me on my way with it in working condition in a matter of minutes.

If I could have used it inside the Barrymore Theatre, I could have called for assistance trying to understand Arcadia. Stoppard is my single favorite playwright, but sometimes he packs his scripts so densely with ideas that you feel your head will explode trying to take in all the information and processing it. I’m afraid that is the way I felt about Arcadia, and I had already seen the play, back in 1985 when it had its American premiere at Lincoln Center.

Operating on parallel tracks with characters existing in 1809 England and today, dealing with the laws of thermodynamics and British landscape gardening techniques, there is plenty of Stoppardian wordplay along the way, but also a lot of cerebral thought that eluded me. Worse, I had always heard that the original London production had been an overwhelming emotional experience, but I found both American versions to be dry-eyed head trips.

There was some nice work from the cast -- notably Tom Riley, Lia Willams and Miami’s Raul Esparza -- but I’m still waiting for a truly satisfying production of what many call Stoppard’s masterwork.