Following last season’s Best Musical Tony Award win for “Kinky Boots”, Harvey Fierstein is back on Broadway with a new play, “Casa Valentina”, staged by mainstem veteran Joe Mantello. The show began previews April 1 and opened at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater April 23, 2014.

Something of a surprise for the playwright, “Casa Valentina” is about heterosexual men – well, sort of. These New York, urban men would have ordinary, straight lives but then vacation for two weeks in New Jersey in a special, secluded house where they could dress up and act like women. Based on a true story about “Casa Susana” from the 1950s, the play’s conflict comes from the men having to decide whether to go public with their retreat.

A four-time Tony winner, actor-playwright Fierstein created “Torch Song Trilogy”, as well as “La Cage aux Folles” (with Jerry Herman) and the cabaret evening, “This is not Going to be Pretty”. Lined up for his latest play are Broadway and TV veteran John Cullum (“Urinetown”, “Northern Exposure”), Patrick Page (“Spider-Man”, “A Time to Kill”), Reed Birney, Tom McGowan, Lisa Emery and Mare Winningham.

So will the New York critics give “Valentina” valentines or will they slam “Casa’s” puerta?

Time’s Richard Zoglin falls in the latter camp, finding the play “an odd duck” about a “weekend of cross-dressing hijinks” [that] quickly devolves into “another preachy plea for tolerance” and a “series of sober, angst-ridden discussions about the survival of the financially challenged resort.”

In her *** review, USA Today’s Elysa Gardner finds more to the play than Zoglin and sees the drama as “a reflection on the prejudices and the personal conflicts that challenge these characters.” Though “the tone grows increasingly dark” in act two, the ensemble cast is “superb,” including Tom McGowan as “an immensely endearing Bessie” and Reed Birney, who is “hilariously starchy.”

Variety’s Marilyn Stasio also likes “the trim ensemble” cast but skewers the play because “the plot is messy, the action static, and attempts to probe the psychosexual dynamic of transvestism are tentative and superficial… The piece lacks the dramatic structure for any bold discussion of the postwar socioeconomic and political pressures on men — heterosexual and otherwise — that made them act out their fantasies of the dollhouse lives of women.”

Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz grants the play *** and calls it “intriguing but diffuse.” He enjoys the play’s lively makeover scene but like several other critics finds the second act a drag: “the play goes pear-shaped,” he writes, “and sinks into Joan Crawford melodrama” with a “frustratingly murky” message.

Also granting “Casa Valentina” ***, New York Post critic Elisabeth Vincentelli is more kindly disposed to the piece, which is “tightly directed” by Joe Mantello. She, too, finds that “things bog down after intermission” with “one too many earnest speeches.” However, “the entire cast is a delight… and it’s especially fun to watch [Reed] Birney, a specialist of milquetoast characters, play a villainess with a messiah complex.”

Appreciating Fierstein’s play more than most of the other critics, Linda Winer finds “Casa Valentina” “moving, beguiling and, yes, again historically significant without lecturing or threatening.” The “pitch-perfect cast” helps Fierstein show “the vast spectrum of gender and sexuality. Along the way, bless him, he understands how to entertain.”

Though he has issues with the play’s “speechifying,” New York Times critic Ben Brantley also acknowledges the show’s “beguilingly gentle magic” that is “directed with unexpected ripples of beauty.” Fierstein’s writing is “intelligent and sometimes even provocative,” notes the critic, “but the air often feels filled with the dry dust of chalk erasers being batted together by a painstakingly instructive schoolteacher.” Ultimately, for Brantley, the play poses provocative questions but is often hamstrung by the playwright thrusting his themes at us like a schoolmarm.

David Rooney, of the Hollywood Reporter, concurs, writing that although the play is replete with “snappy comedy, tenderness, highly individualized character studies and thematic ambition,” it’s also “a workshop or two away from being fully realized… Having set up these wonderful characters, Fierstein stumbles dramaturgically once the conflict is introduced, as if he's unsure where to go from there.”

As with the other critics, Entertainment Weekly’s Adam Markovitz (who grades the show with a B-plus) finds that the crisis in the second act “hits the loudest false note,” but it doesn’t spoil the evening for him because “Fierstein’s meticulous dialogue, Joe Mantello’s smooth and confident direction and the cast’s flawless performances” save the day.

OVERALL: most of the critics are moderately positive about the show, though the consensus is that act two should have gone through another draft before the glare of Broadway. Kudos for the cast and Fierstein’s dialogue; not so much for his plotting or the clarity of his vision for the play. Not money reviews, to be sure, but the Times and others will afford the marketers pull quotes, and Reed Birney’s agent should be pressing the flesh for a Tony nomination.