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  Theatre in Review: Rope (The New Group/Theatre at St. Clement's)
Rope is a play loaded with secrets and furnished with psychological closets, and playwright Gordon Greenberg is bent on prying them open and exposing their contents. His rewrite of Patrick Hamilton's venerable ...
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Theatre in Review: 860 (Imperial Theatre)
For Billy Crystal, comedy and tragedy are two sides of a single mask, so it's no surprise his shows freely combine both elements. His first Broadway outing, 700 Sundays, was filled with warm, funny stories about his Long ...
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Theatre in Review: The Imaginary Invalid (Roundabout Theatre Company at Todd Haimes Theatre)
The Imaginary Invalid is a delightful contradiction: an outrageous farce delivered with Euclidean precision. Brandon J. Dirden's direction of Moliere's lusty spoof of those who practice the healing arts ...
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Theatre in Review: Specky Clark (Irish Arts Center)
If you're still in a Halloween mood, consider Specky Clark, a macabre theatre/dance piece, written, choreographed, and directed by Oona Doherty. It's more an anecdote than a fully worked-out story, equally inflected ...
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Theatre in Review: A Few Good Men (Lincoln Center Theatre/Vivian Beaumont Theater)
When court finally convenes, A Few Good Men generates some electricity, but the discovery phase could use some juice. Aaron Sorkin's military-legal drama, which had a decent run a few decades back, is a slick, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Heart (Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre)
Musical theatre is like modern architecture: Form follows function. (This fact is sadly ignored by the purveyors of jukebox and bio musicals, but what can you do? These are not the happiest of times.) Wise creatives know: If you take on ...
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Theatre in Review: Other Desert Cities (Hudson Theatre)
Broadway producers are like astrologers: They follow the stars. Thus, the current revival of Other Desert Cities draws on a quintet of luminaries from film, the stage, and video. Surprisingly, this is its least meticulous ...
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Theatre in Review: Livia: A Roman Tragedy (The Flea Theater)
Livia: A Roman Tragedy is a sermon for the stage, and playwright Paul David Young is preaching to the choir. His chosen mouthpiece is, I guess, a version of Livia Drusilla, wife of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, ...
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Theatre in Review: Aftermath (A.R.T. New York/Mezzanine Theatre)
An entire flock of chickens comes home to roost in Aftermath, a bombshell-packed family drama plagued by rookie errors. Playwright David Zax, a journalist with a couple of film and television projects in development, ...
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Theatre in Review: Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen (The Night Egg at the Culture Club)
If you're going to the trouble of visiting a bordello, you should have a little pleasure, a quality hard to find in Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen. This new musical, based on a manga graphic novel, unfolds mostly inside The ...
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Theatre in Review: Phyl (Mint Theater Company/Theatre Row)
Phyl introduces us to two women you should know better: Cicely Hamilton and Lily Ganser. Hamilton is best known for Diana of Dobson's, a charming 1908 comedy staged at the Mint a quarter-century ago. (I ...
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Theatre in Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button/Triumph (Public Theater)
There's nothing like a musical that knows what it is about, has a style all its own, and a knack for storytelling, qualities that sometimes seem vanishingly rare these days. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button wants to charm ...
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Theatre in Review: Copperfield! The New Musical (The Duke on 42nd Street)
People willtry to make a musical out of David Copperfield, but Charles Dickens' hero remains uncooperative, standing stalwart against those who would turn him and his story into song-and-dance entertainment. The above ...
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Theatre in Review: King of the Yees (Signature Theatre Company)
Francis Jue is carving out an entirely new career for himself. In Yellow Face two seasons back, he won a Tony Award for playing David Henry Hwang's irrepressible, interfering father, who ends up mired in political scandal. In ...
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Theatre in Review: ANON (MCC Theater)
In ANON, Anne Washburn turns her attention to the dueling ideologies tearing this country apart, a subject tailor-made for drama yet one that leaves her licked. It's the tale of two households in a San Antonia suburb. ...
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Theatre in Review: I'm Not Even Half (Bushwick Starr)
S, the heroine of Layla Khoshnoudi's solo play -- who, to be clear, seems an awful lot like Khoshnoudi -- begins flat on her back, having been rear-ended by a car. It's a true tale of our times: She failed to look up from her ...
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Theatre in Review: A Ghost in Your Ear (Audible Theater at Minetta Lane Theatre)
It's official: The UK is now the world's biggest exporter of theatrical hokum. And it's a cash crop: On Broadway right now, Paranormal Activity is spooking audiences to the tune of $1 million-plus per week. Last season, the walk ...
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Theatre in Review: Good Time Charlie (Public Theater)
Ryan J. Haddad, king of the solo shows (typically exploring the complications of being gay with cerebral palsy), now takes a flyer on a real, honest-to-God play. Well, not quite; even Haddad admits that Good Time Charlie
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Theatre in Review: Soon (The Loft at St. Luke's)
Soon is a little musical that only wants to be loved. It always shows its company manners, chases away its darker implications, and works hard to ingratiate itself. As a result, it often seems slightly demented. The heroine, ...
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Theatre in Review: Kramer/Fauci (St. Ann's Warehouse)
Kramer/Fauci is in the latest entry in the found-drama genre, which draws on transcribed broadcasts, official inquiries, and even wiretaps for textual material (Recent examples include Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, about ...
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