|
  Theatre in Review: Twelfth Night (New York Shakespeare Festival/Delacorte Theater)
To celebrate the return of the Delacorte Theater after its top-to-bottom renovation, the New York Shakespeare Festival is throwing a party. It's a chic bash, complete with a cheeky set design, an onstage string quartet, contemporary ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Sulfur Bottom (Jerry Orbach Theatre)
The dead speak in Sulfur Bottom; indeed, so voluble are they, the living struggle to get a word in edgewise. That the play's characters incessantly return from the grave, loaded with exposition to impart, does little to aid ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Jeff Ross: Take a Banana for the Ride (Nederlander Theatre)
Insult comics aren't born; they're made. That's the takeaway from the latest entry in this summer's parade of solo comedy shows. You might not know who Jeff Ross is -- before last week, I certainly didn't -- but his bona fides as "Th ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Lili/Darwin (The Tank)
Lili/Darwin is a solo piece about two women: Lili is Lili Ilse Elvenes, aka Lili Elbe, a Danish painter and one of the first subjects of gender reassignment surgery. This was in 1930, and, as you can imagine, her story is ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Well, I'll Let You Go (The Space at Irondale)
We may now classify Bubba Weiler as a double threat. The actor, who often works in Chicago theatres, earned plenty of attention and a Drama Desk Award nomination as a troubled, substance-abusing Midwesterner in the Off-Broadway ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: AVA: The Secret Conversations (City Center Stage II)
As an actress, Elizabeth McGovern has plenty going for her; as a playwright, she is much too generous. Really, she ought to hog the stage a little more.
Having cast herself as the legendary screen siren Ava Gardner, McGovern has ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Can I Be Frank? (Soho Playhouse)
Three shows jostle for your attention in Can I Be Frank?, and they often threaten to crowd each other out. Whenever Morgan Bassichis is busy commenting caustically on their life and career, the results are delightful. ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Gene and Gilda (Penguin Rep Theatre at 59E59)
Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner were two of the most indelible, outsized comic personalities of the 1970s -- he an explosive bundle of nerves that made him a star in the Mel Brooks universe, and she a deadly accurate sketch comedy ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Ginger Twinsies (Orpheum Theatre)
Am I glad I did my homework: The Parent Trap, the 1961 version with Hayley Mills, was probably the first film I ever caught in a theatre. (It was either that or The Guns of Navarone, and now you have my childhood in a ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Rolling Thunder (New World Stages)
The thunder is muted in this new attraction at New World Stages. On paper, I suppose, it must have seemed a likely proposition. After all, no less an authority than the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes called the Vietnam ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: ta-da! (Greenwich House Theatre)
The new show at the Greenwich House has a cast of one, but it's the story of a close, even tortured, relationship -- between a man and his screen. "Standup is bullshit," Josh Sharp announces, sweepingly dismissing the epidemic of ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Joy (Laura Pels Theatre)
Betsy Wolfe could sell snow to the Inuit. She can charm the birds from the trees. Her singing makes strong men weep. I resort to such cliches because she is the riveting still center of Joy, a musical exercise in ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Polishing Shakespeare (59E59)
Brian Dykstra's cockeyed, often hilariously cankered view of the American theatre, begins with a modest proposal. Janet, a young playwright, is summoned to a not-for-profit theatre company where the artistic director, Ms. Branch, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Berlindia! (The Tank)
In this odd little comic anxiety dream, everything is slip-sliding away, leaving the characters stuck on constantly shifting ground. In one case, they even crash-land onto it, but that's only to be expected in the faintly treacherous ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Memnon (Classical Theatre of Harlem)
The playwright Will Power has sometimes drawn on classical material in works like The Seven, based on Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, and Seize the King, a contemporary riff on Richard III. In Memno ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Heathers (New World Stages)
According to our modern playwrights, high school is a living hell; abandon all hope ye who enter there. Musicals such as Mean Girls, The Prom, and Dear Evan Hansen depict life in grades nine through 12 as a maze of ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Angry Alan (Studio Seaview)
Think of Angry Alan as an act of cultural spelunking: It follows Roger, its lead character, into a psychological cave darker than the one that trapped Floyd Collins, hemmed by grievance and a distorted world view, and unable ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Trophy Boys (MCC Theater)
"What are we pretending to be experts on today?" That's the question before the title characters of Emmanuelle Mattana's often delightfully barbed new play. Members of the debate team from a private school for overprivileged boys, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Lowcountry (Atlantic Theater Company)
Bad decisions are at the heart of Abby Rosebrock's new play, which depends entirely on its characters reliably acting on their worst impulses. Fortunately for the playwright, they rarely disappoint; less so for audiences who may ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Duke & Roya (Lucille Lortel Theatre)
We have so many playwrights whose idea of politics extends only to personal identity issues that one is instinctively grateful to Charles Randolph-Wright for tackling the thorny subject of the American misadventure in Afghanistan. ...
|
