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  Theatre in Review: Annie (Palace Theater)
There's nothing like professionalism, a quality the current revival of Annie has in spades. None of the blemishes affecting modern musical theatre are present: there's no overbearing spectacle, no score borrowed from ...
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Theatre in Review: Radiance (Labyrinth Theatre Company/Bank Street Theatre)
So this guy walks into a bar... and it turns out he bombed Hiroshima! Really, it's no joke; this is the deadly serious premise of Cusi Cram's historical drama, Radiance. The action is set in 1955 in a seedy Los Angeles ...
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Theatre in Review: A Christmas Story (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre)
I often complain about musicals based on beloved films, which, in their slavish devotion to their sources, all too often result in lumbering, relentlessly unamusing entertainments that fail to take advantage of what the theatre can do best ...
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Theatre in Review: Giant (The Public Theater)
As we all know, they do things bigger in Texas, and that goes for musicals, too. But the bigger they are, the harder they fall. That's the case with Giant, a new musical carved out of an old Edna Ferber potboiler about a ...
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Theatre in Review: The Good Mother (New Group/Theatre Row)
In the heavy irony department, the title of The Good Mother pretty much takes the cake, since we spend the entirety of Francine Volpe's drama watching the title character skidding down a slippery slope to disaster. The ...
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Theatre in Review: The Heiress (Walter Kerr Theatre)
No expense has been spared in mounting the latest revival of The Heiress. Derek McLane's set, depicting a Manhattan parlor, circa 1850, is suitably eye-filling, with its deep-red floral wallpaper, stately columns, ...
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Theatre in Review: Ivanov (Classic Stage Company)
"Isn't it possible that you just don't understand me?" So asks Ethan Hawke as the tragically self-obsessed title character of Ivanov. It's a question that has unfortunate reverberations, as CSC, a theatre company that ...
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Theatre in Review: Sorry (Public Theater)
If you want to experience really fine ensemble acting, you can't do better than the cast of Sorry. Appearing for the third time as the beleaguered Apple family -- classic New York liberals struggling with a changing world and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Whale (Playwrights Horizons)
Even theatregoers who think they've seen everything are likely to get a shock when the lights come up on Shuler Hensley in The Whale. Cast as Charlie, who weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 pounds, the huskily ...
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Theatre in Review: A Summer Day (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre/Cherry Lane Theatre)
A couple of minutes into A Summer Day, Karen Allen looks at us and, employing the blank-verse form that the author, Jon Fosse, seems to prefer, says: "And this is where we lived/He and I/We lived here together." ...
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Theatre in Review: Wild With Happy (The Public Theater)
Wild With Happy is a comedy about a man's attempts at disposing of his late mother's ashes, and the oddest thing about Colman Domingo's play is how strenuously it tries to live up to that outrageous premise. The ...
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Theatre in Review: Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want to Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them
The main characters of Jon Kern's new play at the Second Stage Theatre are Rahmin, Qala, and Yalda, all young Muslims; eager for revenge against America, they are planning a disaster of massive proportions. When the lights come up, ...
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Theatre in Review: Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (Ars Nova)
The first law of the American theatre dictates that, in the future, everything will become a musical. This rule is immutable, the outcome inevitable. For example, many years ago, I used to make jokes about a musical based on Anna ...
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Theatre in Review: The Freedom of the City (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Those of you who think of Brian Friel as the Irish Chekhov -- all broken hearts and missed opportunities among the peat bogs -- will get a shock from The Freedom of the City. This 1973 drama, inspired in part by the ...
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Theatre in Review: Cyrano de Bergerac (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
As this season proves, we are living in the age of the perpetual revival. At times, it feels as if Broadway is stuck in a time loop, forced to present the same titles over and over. We're getting Glengarry Glen Ross seven years ...
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Theatre in Review: Grace (Cort Theatre)
If Grace does nothing else, it reminds us that, to make theatrical magic, all you need is Michael Shannon and a telephone. Two seasons ago, in Craig Wright's uproarious Mistakes Were Made, he remained ...
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Theatre in Review: Heresy (The Flea Theatre)
In its basement space, The Flea Theatre is presenting Thomas Bradshaw's Job, which combines graphic depictions of incest, homosexual rape, and castration with lines like "Dad! Dad! Uncle Satan is here to see you!" Upstairs, you'll ...
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Theatre in Review: Him (Primary Stages/59E59)
You could probably write a master's thesis on the ways in which the plays of Daisy Foote resemble, and differ from, those of her father, Horton, but, five minutes into Him, it is clear that both are poets of ...
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Theatre in Review: Ten Chimneys (Peccadillo Theatre Company/Theatre at St. Clement's)
In Ten Chimneys, playwright Jeffrey Hatcher takes Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and ensnares them, sometimes awkwardly, in the plot of The Seagull. It is 1937, and the celebrated pair are ensconced in their ...
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Theatre in Review: An Enemy of the People (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
You can quite plausibly sum up the current Manhattan Theatre Club revival of An Enemy of the People as the Warner Brothers version.
If you're a vintage film fan, you'll instantly know what I mean. The typical Warner ...
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