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  Theatre in Review: Chaplin (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
The writer Ken Mandelbaum once noted that Broadway musicals about the silent film era never really succeed, and certainly Jerry Herman's cult flop Mack and Mabel, Carol Channing's long-ago disaster The Vamp, and Elaine ...
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Theatre in Review: Lovers (The Actors Company Theatre/Theatre Row)
Lovers consists of a pair of one-acts, "Winners" and "Losers," but the line between the two, as is usually the case in the world of Brian Friel, is precariously thin. Not seen in New York since 1968, Lovers ...
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Theatre in Review: Through the Yellow Hour (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre)
You begin to experience the distinctive mix of suspenseful drama and utter nonsense that is Through the Yellow Hour even before you enter the theatre. The audience is refused entry until just before the play begins, a ...
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Theatre in Review: If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)
There were two questions buzzing around the theatre community during previews of If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, so let's get them out of the way:
How is Jake Gyllenhaal? The noted young leading man of film, ...
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Theatre in Review: Job (The Flea Theatre)
You are, no doubt, acquainted with the story of Job as presented in the Bible, but here are some of the new features added by the playwright Thomas Bradshaw:
Joshua, one of Job's sons, strangles his sister, Rachel. He then lifts ...
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Theatre in Review: Red Dog Howls (New York Theatre Workshop)
Red Dog Howls climaxes with a speech so horrifying that a deathly silence prevails at New York Theatre Workshop. (At the performance I attended, the only sound came from the woman in my row who sobbed uncontrollably ...
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Theatre in Review: The Exonerated (Culture Project)
It was ten years ago that Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's The Exonerated first froze our blood with its true tales of justice denied and lives derailed, if not destroyed altogether. Drawing from statements and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Train Driver (Signature Theatre)
Athol Fugard's ongoing skill at cauterizing his country's unhealed wounds is on full display in The Train Driver. Just as some wondered if the fall of the Soviet Union might hobble the career of John Le Carré (he's ...
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Theatre in Review: Detroit (Playwrights Horizons)
Lisa D'Amour's play is called Detroit, but her gaze is focused on the endless suburbs that encircle most cities, which, with street after street of prefabricated houses arranged in neat little grids, until recently ...
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Theatre in Review: Mary Broome (Mint Theater Company)
The servant problem couldn't be more acute in Mary Broome, Allan Monkhouse's surprisingly ambiguous comedy of class and sex. It is 1912, and the members of the upper-middle-class Timbrell family are busy preparing for a ...
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Theatre in Review: Forbidden Broadway: Alive and Kicking (47th Street Theatre)
Alive and kicking, indeed: After a three year-sabbatical, Gerard Alessandrini's long-running spoof is back with a vengeance, cutting like a buzz saw through the follies of contemporary Broadway. Nothing escapes his withering notice ...
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Theatre in Review: Heartless (Signature Theatre)
Sam Shepard surely has the strangest imagination of any contemporary playwright. Maddeningly elusive one moment and thuddingly obvious the next, he seems to be engaged in a game of hide-and-seek with his audiences. Trouble is, too ...
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Theatre in Review: Harrison, TX: Three Plays by Horton Foote (Primary Stages/59E59)
Wharton, Texas is loaded with natural resources, having produced cotton, sugar cane, oil, and the plays of Horton Foote. Under the name of Harrison, this town of 9,200 has been the setting for so many works by one of our most ...
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Theatre in Review: Bring It On: The Musical (St. James Theatre)
No, it is not the George Bush story. In point of fact, Bring It On is a bright and breezy entertainment, staged with plenty of pizazz and featuring a cast of personable young people who, in addition to possessing awe ...
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Theatre in Review: Into the Woods (Delacorte Theatre)
In our revival-happy world, the distance between productions is getting shorter and shorter. Broadway has seen A Streetcar Named Desire three times in the last 20 years. This season, we're getting Cyrano de Bergerac and Gl ...
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Theatre in Review: Bullet for Adolf (New World Stages)
Surely this has happened to you: You're somewhere -- say a bar or a party -- and you find yourself talking to a pair of acquaintances. You don't know them well, but they've been friends forever. They tell you a story from days gone by; the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Last Smoker in America (Westside Theatre)
Nicotine addicts who, in the depths of winter, huddle outside Manhattan bars, desperate to get a fix, might get a laugh or two out of The Last Smoker in America. After all, they truly, deeply understand the meaning of ...
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Theatre in Review: New Girl in Town (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Bob Merrill and Eugene O'Neill; for a little while in the 1950s, they made quite a team. O'Neill was dead, of course, but Merrill had a good thing going, turning O'Neill's works into musicals. Take Me Along was quite ...
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Theatre in Review: Dogfight (Second Stage Theatre)
Dogfight is a show with many problems, but they do not include dishonesty or lack of craft. On the contrary; the librettist, Peter Duchan, and the songwriters, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, are almost hell ...
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Theatre in Review: 7th Monarch (Theatre Row)
Every so often, in a nostalgic mood, I lament the fact that nobody produces crime dramas anymore. Having grown up on the likes of Sleuth and Deathtrap -- and having pored over the film of Witness for the Prosecution so ...
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