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  Theatre in Review: In Acting Shakespeare (Pearl Theatre Company)
It has happened to everyone who works in the theatre, and to anyone who simply loves it: that moment when a performance shakes you to the core, leaving you changed forever. For James DeVita, it happened in 1984, when he saw Ian ...
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Theatre in Review: Zero Cost House (Public Theatre/Under the Radar Festival)
It's a truism that in the theatre -- in all art, really -- the best work is personal. Only hacks worry over what the audience wants before the work of writing begins. The rule isn't so much write what you know, but write about what ...
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Theatre in Review: Blood Play (Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival)
"Never mix, never worry." The characters in Blood Play would do well to heed this maxim, offered unforgettably by Honey, the soused academic wife in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Such a warning would probably fall on deaf ...
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Theatre in Review: Water by the Spoonful (Second Stage Theatre)
Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes provides drama by the bushelful in Water by the Spoonful, even if she doesn't quite know what to do with it. Leading the play's parade of troubled souls is Yaz, who at 31 is beset by a litany of ...
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Theatre in Review: Golden Age (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center)
Art is long; life is short -- a statement that is one of the cornerstones of Terrence McNally's remarkable body of work. (The playwright would probably add that life is complicated, often violent, usually frustrating, and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Great God Pan (Playwrights Horizons)
The Great God Pan begins with a meeting between Jamie and Frank, childhood playmates who haven't seen each other in a quarter of a century. (They are now 32.) To say the least, they make a study in contrasts. Jamie, a ...
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Theatre in Review: Golden Boy (Belasco Theatre)
If you want to understand why Lincoln Center Theater is so crucial to the life of the New York theatre scene, go see Golden Boy. Clifford Odets' epic indictment of the American Dream is a big piece, in every sense of the word ...
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Theatre in Review: Bare (New World Stages)
The great world spins faster these days, but musicals are made at an increasingly glacial pace. This is not to their advantage. Consider the case of Bare, which first saw the light of day near the end of the Clinton administration, ...
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Theatre in Review: 13 Things About Ed Carpolotti (59E59)
Penny Fuller is having a few people over for the holidays; I'd drop in if I were you. Actually, the soiree in question is being hosted by Virginia Carpolotti, the put-upon Pennsylvania housewife who is the center of 13 Things ...
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Theatre in Review: P.S. Jones and the Frozen City (TerraNOVA Collective)
This may be a case of splitting hairs, but: P.S. Jones and the Frozen City is described in its publicity materials as a comic-book superhero adventure story -- and it is true that the title character cherishes comic books, which, as ...
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Theatre in Review: Working (Prospect Theater Company/59E59)
"I hear America singing." That's the first line of Working, in a nod to Walt Whitman, and there couldn't be a better time to hear these voices, each of them a brilliant detail in a theatrical mural of everyday people on the ...
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Theatre in Review: Dead Accounts (Music Box Theatre)
I'm beginning to think the time has come for somebody to start an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Broadway Stars. You might think that such happy individuals don't constitute a disenfranchised minority, but, based on this ...
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Theatre in Review: Glengarry Glen Ross (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)
If we're going to have certain plays revived over and over again, it is at least interesting to have the opportunity to compare different productions. From the minute the curtain goes up on the current revival of Glengarry Glen Ross
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Theatre in Review: Volpone (Red Bull Theatre/Lucille Lortel)
That Volpone is a tricky one, and not just because of his suave and swindling ways. If Volpone, the character, is hard to pin down, the play that bears his name can prove just as elusive. My only other experience with Ben Jonson's ...
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Theatre in Review: Restoration Comedy (The Flea Theatre)
At the Flea these days, they're partying like it's 1696. The theatre has been transformed into a Restoration playhouse, with all its attendant disorder and flirtations. When you enter, a full company of rakes, bawds, harlots, and other ...
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Theatre in Review: The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Roundabout Theatre/Studio 54)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is an evening full of revelations -- murderers unmasked, mystery men identified, hidden lovers brought to light -- but the biggest revelation involves the show's cast; watching them cavort on stage ...
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Theatre in Review: The Songs I Love So Well (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Contra the old show business saw, Phil Coulter is a man who needs an introduction -- at least to American audiences -- and, in The Songs I Love So Well, he gets a dilly. The show opens with a video sequence featuring Sinead O' ...
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Theatre in Review: Ingenious Nature (Soho Playhouse)
Baba Brinkman isn't your average confessional monologist. For one thing, his medium of choice is rap, despite his provenance as a white native of Vancouver, Canada. (His mother's assertion that he is "the greatest rapper alive" ...
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Theatre in Review: My Name is Asher Lev (Westside Arts Theatre)
Playwrights find inspiration in all sorts of places, but lately I've begun to feel that they are relying a little too heavily on the bookshelf marked "fiction." All too often, when literature and drama get together, the result is awkward, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Piano Lesson (Signature Theatre)
Is The Piano Lesson August Wilson's finest play? After seeing Ruben Santiago-Hudson's stellar revival at the Signature, I'm inclined to say yes. Wilson was given to all sorts of excesses -- a couple of which we'll deal ...
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