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  Theatre in Review: Indian Ink (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)
In Indian Ink, Tom Stoppard invents a minor literary mystery and then solves it, taking he his sweet time in doing so; the result is sometimes intriguing and touching but often rather sluggish. It is typical ...
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Theatre in Review: The Country House (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
When The Country House finally gets down to brass tacks and bared emotions, it becomes a drama with the vigor to match its intelligence. Elliot, a 50ish actor of no distinction with an alarmingly thin resume, has decided to ...
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Theatre in Review: Tail! Spin! (Lynn Redgrave Theater at Culture Project)
Who doesn't love a juicy political sex scandal? That's the theory behind Tail! Spin!, which revisits four of the squirrelier episodes involving elected officials of recent years. Lest you think that these hypocritical ...
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Theatre in Review: The Money Shot (MCC/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
From Kaufman and Hart to Douglas Carter Beane, it seems that every playwright sooner or later must take a knife to the (lack of) manners and (appallingly low) morals in Hollywood. Fine by me: Some the tastiest satires in the American canon ...
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Theatre in Review: You Can't Take It With You (Longacre Theatre)
You Can't Take It With You ends in a display of fireworks, which, however colorful, pales compared to the human sparklers on stage at the Longacre. Scott Ellis' production of Kaufman and Hart's utopian farce, ...
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Theatre in Review: Almost Home (The Directors Company/Theatre Row)
There's not much to be said about Almost Home, an amateurish effort that The Directors Company has done no favors by giving a full mounting with a name cast. The setup of Walter Anderson's drama is a little bit like Frank D. ...
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Theatre in Review: This is Our Youth (Cort Theatre)
Arrested development has rarely been as uproarious or as touching as in This is Our Youth. By nailing his trio of characters and their milieu--- three lost Jewish kids from well-off Upper West Side families, circa 1982-- - down to ...
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Theatre in Review: Love Letters (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)
Considered from a distance, A. R. Gurney's Love Letters probably looks like the last word in stunt theatre: A two-character play told entirely in letters, designed to be read rather than acted out, and featuring a rotating ...
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Theatre in Review: Scenes from a Marriage (New York Theatre Workshop)
The director Ivo van Hove has made a career out of turning classic texts into bizarre exercises in style. I am thinking of his version of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Blanche DuBois was repeatedly tossed into a bathtub ...
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Theatre in Review: The Valley of Astonishment (Theatre for a New Audience/Polonsky Shakespeare Center)
How do we know? That's the question nagging at Peter Brook and his colleagues in The Valley of Astonishment, a beguiling and original entertainment that kicks off Theatre for a New Audience's new season. A light-fingered and ...
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Theatre in Review: Uncle Vanya (Pearl Theatre Company)
Pearl Theatre Company opens its new season with a production that demonstrates both the pleasures and limitations of repertory. The Pearl is one of the very few companies in New York that relies on a select troupe of actors; for regular ...
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Theatre in Review: To the Bone (Cherry Lane Theatre)
There must be something in the air: To the Bone is the second play this month examining the plight of undocumented workers who prop up the US economy with nothing but scars to show for it. The first was My Mañana Comes ...
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Theatre in Review: Ndebele Funeral (Smoke & Mirrors Collaborative/59E59)
In drama, as in poetry, I'm all in favor of compression; the more economically one can express one's ideas, the better. But one can go too far, which is the problem afflicting Ndebele Funeral. In writing a classic state-of ...
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Theatre in Review: Mighty Real: A Fabulous Sylvester Musical (Theatre at St. Clement's)
The procession of inside-the-music jukebox tuners continues with Mighty Real, which covers the life of Sylvester, the androgynous disco diva who made his mark on the '70s music scene with such hits as "Can't Stop Dancing," "Do ...
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Theatre in Review: The Fatal Weakness (Mint Theater Company)
Acting students, take note: The all-but-lost art of high comedy technique has been rediscovered and is being given a glittering workout by Kristin Griffith in The Fatal Weakness. As Mrs. Ollie Espenshade, a socially ...
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Theatre in Review: The Wayside Motor Inn (Signature Theatre)
If you've ever spent a lonely night in the cookie-cutter confines of a chain motel, you're bound to experience the shock of recognition at The Wayside Motor Inn. For the first entry of its A. R. Gurney retrospective, ...
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Theatre in Review: Bootycandy (Playwrights Horizons)
A story, running on Playbill Online, about the new show at Playwrights Horizons is titled "Splicing the DNA of Richard Pryor, Jackie Mason, and RuPaul to Create Bootycandy." They might have added Norman Lear, In Living ...
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Theatre in Review: Bauer (San Francisco Playhouse/59E59)
The playwright Lauren Gunderson knows a juicy situation when she sees it; her new play, Bauer, combines dramatic fireworks with a fascinating bit of art history scandal in a package that is all but guaranteed to keep ...
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Theatre in Review: My Mañana Comes (The Playwrights Realm/Peter Jay Sharp Theater)
Talk about timing: At a moment when immigration has become a political hot potato and fast food workers are striking for subsistence wages, along comes Elizabeth Irwin's new play, which casts an unblinking light on back-end ...
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Theatre in Review: And I and Silence (Signature Theatre)
The two women who populate Naomi Wallace's new play are seen in two time frames: as prison mates in 1950 and, nine years later, as the inhabitants of a single room in an unnamed city. In the author's bleak vision, one place is no ...
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