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  Theatre in Review: Bronx Bombers (Circle in the Square)
Having played Off Broadway earlier in the season, Bronx Bombers has moved to Broadway, just as genial, pleasantly sentimental, and pointless as ever. Eric Simonson's play about the New York Yankees begins promisingly ...
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Theatre in Review: The Correspondent (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
As its name suggests, Rattlestick is a company devoted to writers, and it performs a valuable service, showcasing the works of new and emerging playwrights. Almost necessarily, its track record has been uneven -- that's the nature of the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Tribute Artist (Primary Stages/59E59)
Would you commit a crime to get your hands on a deluxe, mint-condition Greenwich Village town house? If you're a New Yorker, the question is too ridiculous: Of course, you would. That's the premise of Charles Busch's latest comic ...
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Theatre in Review: I Call My Brothers (The Play Company/New Ohio Theatre)
In I Call My Brothers, playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri explores the racing mind of a young Muslim man following a car bombing in New York City, where he lives. (The original script is set in Stockholm, the playwright's ...
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Theatre in Review: Almost, Maine (Transport Group/The Gym at Judson)
New Yorkers who haven't yet gotten their fill of snow should hightail it over to the Gym at Judson, where, in Sandra Goldmark's set design for Almost, Maine, the white stuff is omnipresent. Goldmark has created a wall ...
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Theatre in Review: Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington (New Federal Theatre/Castillo Theatre)
Playwright Clare Coss casts a light on a fascinating relationship -- not to mention an underdramatized bit of American history -- in Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington, and it's a shame she doesn't do more with it. W. E. B. ...
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Theatre in Review: A Man's a Man (Classic Stage Company)
What's in a name? That's quite a question in A Man's a Man, an early work by Bertolt Brecht in which a simple switch of identity can have profound consequences. Set in India during the dying days of the Raj, it centers ...
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Theatre in Review: Intimacy (The New Group at Theatre Row)
Thomas Bradshaw is Off Broadway's exploitation king. Just as the writers and directors of exploitation films aim to cash in on sex or violence, subsuming plot, dialogue, and cinematography along the way, Bradshaw only wants to get ...
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Theatre in Review: Outside Mullingar (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
In Outside Mullingar, John Patrick Shanley explores the eternal contrariness of the Irish in matters of the heart, to delightful and frequently hilarious effect. Shanley has imagined a pair of adjoining farms somewhere ...
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Theatre in Review: The Clearing (Theatre at St. Clement's)
Two brothers share a secret that festers for years, with devastating consequences, in The Clearing, an extremely glum family drama that never quite finds a compelling path into its characters' obsessions and neuroses. Les and ...
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Theatre in Review: Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (Stephen Sondheim Theatre)
The really beautiful thing about the new show at the Sondheim is Jessie Mueller. Ever since she broke out of the revival of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, enlivening that deeply misguided production as a sassy '40s-era ...
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Theatre in Review: Grounded (Page 73 Productions at Walkerspace)
An Air Force pilot's life unravels in Grounded, a work of rare immediacy that dares to examine one of the uglier facts of life in the modern security state. Known only as The Pilot, she describes her career -- flying an F16 ...
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Theatre in Review: I Am the Wind (The Shop/59E59)
The title of Jon Fosse's play is honesty itself; you won't find a windier evening of theatre in town at the moment. In I Am the Wind, a pair of ill-defined characters set sail on a sea of vagueness for an undefined ...
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Theatre in Review: Machinal (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
According to my French-English dictionary, the word "machinal" means "pertaining to machines." The term is all too appropriate, for Machinal, the play, is a kind of machine built to drive its protagonist to destruction. As ...
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Theatre in Review: Loot (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
"Has no one in this house any normal feelings?" So cries out one of the desperate characters in Loot. Well, it depends on what you mean by normal. In the world of Joe Orton's 1966 farce, murder, grand theft, torture, ...
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Theatre in Review: Helen and Edgar (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
"Mother always used to say to us, 'Beware of Savannah!'" So says Edgar Oliver at the beginning of his one-person show, in which Southern Gothic mannerisms spread out through the Anspacher Theatre like an outbreak of kudzu. Actually, Edgar ...
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Theatre in Review: Tyson vs. Ali (COIL Festival/3LD Art & Technology Center)
Just how dominant can projections be in a theatre production? Can they be the whole show? This question has driven the career of Reid Farrington, a kind of theatre auteur who has built a number of works around the daring, inventive ...
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Theatre in Review: Rodney King (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
Some performers shout to get one's attention; Roger Guenveur Smith barely has to raise his voice to make one spellbound. Smith understands that outrage is all the more compelling for being held in check, carefully coiled, ready to ...
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Theatre in Review: Cirkopolis (Skirball Center)
If you enjoy the circus in its more modern manifestations and have grown a little weary of the bombast and overdesign that often plagues Cirque du Soleil's attraction, then Cirkopolis may be just the thing for you. It's the ...
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Theatre in Review: Chéri (Signature Theatre)
Passion duels with practicality in Chéri, Martha Clarke's beguiling distillation of a pair novels by Colette. Written in the 1920s, they present a situation that still shocks: The title character is barely out of his ...
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