Something bad happened on the way to Broadway for smash hit Next Fall. Seen at Playwrights Horizons last summer, the critical darling (which I also adored) has been transplanted to Broadway, cast and script intact. But some of the thrill is gone.

A dramedy about the fraught relationship between the older Adam (Patrick Breen) and the younger Luke (Patrick Heusinger) and Luke’s eventual hospitalization, most of the show’s new problems can be attributed to its larger home. What once felt light and airy now feels pushed, and the extra efforts on the cast’s part highlight the show’s sitcom rhythms. Connie Ray and Maddie Corman, as Luke’s spitfire mother an Adam’s hippie best friend, respectively, seem more like stock characters than they did last year. Ray, in particular, has to work much harder to achieve the same effects in her chattering first scene.

Still, Geoffrey Naufft’s script about gay rights, religion and friendship is still more interesting and less didactic than most gay-themed plays these days, approaching its themes of hospital visitation rights for gay couples and the inner turmoil of gay Christians in a sneaky way that never feels preachy. And Breen and Heusinger have kept their adorable dynamic intact. But when a Broadway transfer involves little more than making the set more sprawling (especially a hospital waiting room set), the transfer can’t be said to be a total success.

Broadway star Tallulah Bankhead has been exhumed once more for the delectation of an actress and her audience in the abysmal Looped. Instead of Elizabeth Ashley or Kathleen Turner, we get TV’s Valerie Harper, contributing, among other dubious delights, her version of Tallulah doing a monologue from Streetcar Named Desire and an impressive Elizabeth Ashley impression.

But Harper’s mediocre Tallulah is the least of Matthew Lombardo’s problems. Outrageous and demanding in the first act, his version of Tallulah turns into Barbara Walters in the second act, sitting next to the prissy editor of her final film and coercing him into coming out and giving him life advice instead of re-recording the single line of dialogue she’s been asked to do. As if that weren’t bad enough, Lombardo’s script sounds as if it were written by one of the prim people who found Tallulah too outré for public consumption. When she lists her accomplishments, Brian Hutchison’s editor cattily tears each one down by pointing out that her co-stars and Hollywood detested her. I’m not sure how that detracts from the actual performance, but once more Tallulah’s outsized personality has thrown her genuine talent into shadow.

Even worse are the deliberate (one assumes) factual errors that pepper the script. Much is made of Tallulah being reduced to performing Streetcar at Florida’s Coconut Grove Playhouse. What Lombardo leaves out is that the Florida production was an out-of-town tryout for a City Center run in New York. But that wouldn’t leave the impression that Tallulah abandoned her professional ambitions in the pursuit of celebrity. That performance is derided as camp in Looped, but Lombardo has written a play that works only as camp for heterosexual theatergoers with no notion of or interest in who Tallulah really was.

>Next Fall

Open run, Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W. 44th St. (betw. B’way & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $81.50–$116.50.

>Looped

Open run, Lyceum Theater, 149 W. 45th St. (between 6th & 7th Aves.), 212-239-6200l $25–$111.50.