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  Theatre in Review: Fun Home (Circle in the Square Theatre)
About halfway through Fun Home, Alison, the narrator, tells it to us straight: "I leapt out of the closet -- and four months later my father killed himself by stepping in front of a truck." Musicals don't come more honest, or ...
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Theatre in Review: Airline Highway (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
In Airline Highway, playwright Lisa D'Amour invents an entire tribe of losers, New Orleans-style, and scatters them about the stage like so many colorful Mardi Gras beads. They include Sissy Na Na, a black drag queen ...
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Theatre in Review: Grounded (The Public Theater)
Anyone who reads Lighting&Sound America knows about the enormous advances that have been made in video technology. Projectors become brighter by the month. LED screens offer higher and higher resolutions. Pixel-mapping allows one to ...
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Theatre in Review: Living on Love (Longacre Theatre)
We're doing a lot of time traveling on Broadway these days. Last week, It Shoulda Been You hearkened back to the '60s, the last days of the sex comedy. Now comes Living on Love, which wants to take us back to the ...
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Theatre in Review: The King and I (Lincoln Center Theater)
In the current issue of Lincoln Center Theater Review, Sandy Kennedy, who appeared in the original production of The King and I, says that Rodgers and Hammerstein "were afraid it was going to be a bomb and everybody ...
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Theatre in Review: The Belle of Belfast (Irish Repertory Theatre)
If nothing else, The Belle of Belfast makes one thing clear: If you're going to make a play for the one you love, the confessional booth is probably not the place to do it. The title character of Nate Rufus Edelman's ...
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Theatre in Review: It Shoulda Been You (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)
Stepping into the Brooks Atkinson the other night, I may as well have been stepping into a time machine. It Shoulda Been You, a musical farce about a wedding gone wrong, strikes me as nothing less than a trip back to those ...
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Theatre in Review: Doctor Zhivago (Broadway Theatre)
I hate to point out the obvious, but when a musical begins with three funerals in a row, trouble is probably lurking in the wings. That's the case with Doctor Zhivago, which moves swiftly from one harrowing situation to ...
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Theatre in Review: The Tailor of Inverness (Dogstar Theatre Company/59E59)
For the first third of its brief running time, The Tailor of Inverness appears to be a fairly routine example of the theatre of testimony, a moderately interesting account of a Polish survivor of World War II -- but wait a ...
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Theatre in Review: Hamlet (Classic Stage Company)
It's a fine thing when an actor tries to stretch himself, but if you're going to tackle the biggest and most challenging role in the classical repertory, surely you need to prepare. Did nobody suggest that Peter Sarsgaard, a fine ...
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Theatre in Review: Finding Neverland (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre)
As you probably know, Finding Neverland tells the story of how James M. Barrie came to write Peter Pan, the story of the boy who wouldn't grow up. As it happens, Finding Neverland, the musical, won't grow up, ...
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Theatre in Review: Wolf Hall, Parts I and II (Winter Garden Theatre)
Hilary Mantel's world-domination plan continues apace; having penned two best-selling novels -- Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies -- which were turned into West End hits and also a popular BBC series, she now adds ...
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Theatre in Review: Iowa (Playwrights Horizons)
Iowa is billed as a new musical play, but this is a misnomer, since it is only nominally musical and it certainly isn't a play. Defining it is a tricky business; let's call it the biggest head-scratcher of the season and leave it at ...
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Theatre in Review: Skylight (Golden Theatre)
It's remarkable how much casting can affect a play: When David Hare's Skylight opened on Broadway nearly 20 years ago, was it this funny, this pointed, this exacting in its analysis of the breakup of a love affair -- and, by ...
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Theatre in Review: Underland (terraNOVA Collective/59E59)
It's not often that a playwright sets out to mystify an audience as resolutely as Alexandra Collier does in Underland. The setting is "a small, dusty town in the middle of Australia," and believe me, this Underland
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Theatre in Review: Hand to God (Booth Theatre)
I'm late to this party -- this is the third New York production of Robert Askins' play -- so you may already know that Hand to God is the demon sock-puppet play. Then again, "party" hardly seems like the right word. "Walpurgis ...
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Theatre in Review: Clinton, the Musical (New World Stages)
Clinton, the Musical is a lot like Clinton, the Administration: initially hope-inducing, then by turns farcical, crass, and embarrassing. In providing us with a satirical recap of Bill Clinton's two tumultuous terms in the ...
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Theatre in Review: Buzzer (The Public Theater)
A professional couple moves into a changing neighborhood, exposing a minefield of prejudices and resentments in Tracey Scott Wilson's tense, suspenseful new play. This is gentrification with a twist: Jackson, a successful, Ivy ...
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Theatre in Review: Gigi (Neil Simon Theatre)
That nice little Parisienne Gigi may have had some growing pains -- who hasn't? -- but, having arrived at the Neil Simon, she really is rather fetching. The word from Washington, where Gigi tried out, was that the show was ...
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Theatre in Review: Cry, Trojans! (Troilus and Cressida) (The Wooster Group/St. Ann's Warehouse)
In Cry, Trojans!, the artists at The Wooster Group have achieved something remarkable: They have managed to make Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida even more alienating and hard to follow than it already is. ...
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