|
  Theatre in Review: 50 Shades! The Musical (Elektra Theatre)
All right, I confess: I've been to see 50 Shades! The Musical, a spoof of E L James' 50 Shades of Grey, the first in a trilogy of bondage porn novels that have been steaming up the reading glasses of American ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Kung Fu (Signature Theatre)
Early on in Kung Fu, David Henry Hwang's oddly truncated biography of film actor and martial arts phenomenon Bruce Lee, a young woman makes the point that there has never been a Chinese hero in American pop culture. It ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Pig (Untitled Theatre Company #61/3-Legged Dog)
The program for The Pig, or Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig, says that it is neither a play nor an operetta, even though it has elements of both; instead, it is best understood as a collage. And, may I say, it is ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: No Exit (Pearl Theatre Company)
If Jean-Paul Sartre now occupies some dark corner of Hades -- heaven would surely be a torment to him -- then he must be gazing up with a smile these days, thanks to the Pearl's revival of No Exit. A work more likely to turn ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Take Me Back (Kindling Theatre Company/Walkerspace)
A young man's life unravels over the course of a single day in Take Me Back, by Emily Schwend, who should be added to your list of names to remember. We are in a kitchen in Muskogee, Oklahoma, belonging to Sue, a ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Open House (Signature Theatre)
Whether he is spinning monologues about existential angst in solo shows like Thom Pain (based on nothing) or building whole communities where reality is a slippery thing, as in Middletown, the playwright Will Eno ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Antony and Cleopatra (The Public Theater)
The script for the Public's new Antony and Cleopatra is subtitled "a radical edit," but I wonder if Tarell Alvin McCraney, who adapted and directed, hasn't gone far enough in reworking Shakespeare's play to his ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Character Man (Urban Stages)
Jim Brochu is a professional Character Man -- as anyone who has seen him in The Man Who Came to Dinner or his one-man show Zero Hour, about Zero Mostel, knows -- but he's also a professional fan, burning ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Satchmo at the Waldorf (Westside Theatre)
Solo biography shows rarely get a performance as monumental as that currently being offered by John Douglas Thompson in Satchmo at the Waldorf, a new play about the last days of Louis Armstrong. But then the author, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Gidion's Knot (59E59)
Gidion's Knot centers around the parent-teacher conference nobody ever wants to have: Corryn, the mother of the title character, shows up at his classroom, ready to keep her appointment with Heather, his teacher. Heather is ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Stage Kiss (Playwrights Horizons)
Jessica Hecht and screwball comedy; it's a match made in heaven. Cast as an actress who has snagged her first leading lady gig in years, she has a hundred different ways of illuminating the indignities that show folk must endure on ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Middle of the Night (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
The Keen Company revival of Middle of the Night is a deeply revealing event; it makes clear why Paddy Chayefsky's play ran 477 performances in the 1956 - 57 Broadway season and also why it has never been revived. ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Ode to Joy (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre)
Adele, the central character in Craig Lucas' new play, is such a warmly appealing personality that you might not realize at first that she is a toxic train wreck, destined to drag to the bottom anyone who loves her. On the other hand, she ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Since Africa (Red Fern Theatre/14th Street Y)
In Since Africa, Mia McCullough takes on a challenging subject, focusing on one of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan as he tries to adapt to a new and completely foreign life in Chicago. She then adds to her challenges ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: London Wall (Mint Theatre Company)
The Mint, known for digging up forgotten works, has outdone itself with London Wall, a title even hard-core theatre fans will find unfamiliar. This isn't surprising; the author, John Van Druten, a reliable mid-20th-century ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Bridges of Madison County (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)
Quality is evident everywhere you look in The Bridges of Madison County. Librettist Marsha Norman and composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown have worked hard and meticulously to translate Robert James Waller ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Transport (Irish Repertory Theatre)
In the 1830s and '40s, approximately 40,000 "undesirables," convicted of minor crimes when they weren't innocent victims of trumped-up allegations, were transported from Ireland to the penal colony of Australia; many of them were women ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Love and Information (New York Theatre Workshop/Minetta Lane Theatre)
Caryl Churchill's new play is much less about love than information or rather the transmission of information. Churchill has taken note of the fact that we live in the Age of Nonstop Information, what with email, social networking, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Bikeman (BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center)
If you're keen to relive the horrors of 9/11 in New York, Bikeman is just the thing for you. Otherwise, you may want to think twice about this singular, and singularly off-putting, piece of work. Thomas F. Flynn, a CBS News ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Dinner with Friends (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)
A marriage falls apart in Dinner with Friends, but Donald Margulies' Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is more interested in the collateral damage caused to the warring couple's best friends. Gabe and Karen, food writers, ...
|
