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  Theatre in Review: The Twenty-Seventh Man (Public Theater)
The place is a prison in Soviet Russia. The year is 1952. The cell we see before us is occupied by a trio of writers, all of whom have run afoul of Joseph Stalin. They are Moishe Bretzky, a poet of a notably non-political bent and a ...
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Theatre in Review: Golden Child (Signature Theatre)
There is a moment at the end of the first act of Golden Child that crystallizes the enormous ambivalence that informs David Henry Hwang's vision of a traditional household profoundly challenged by modernity. It is 1918 ...
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Theatre in Review: Emotional Creature (Pershing Square Signature Center)
There are six absolutely marvelous things about Emotional Creature, and their names are Ashley Bryant, Molly Carden, Emily S. Grosland, Joaquina Kalukango, Sade Namei, and Olivia Oguma. In addition to their ...
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Theatre in Review: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Lincoln Center/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre)
Christopher Durang's new comedy begins with two of his title characters, the middle-aged siblings Vanya and Sonia, contemplating the void. It's a sunny day, and their Bucks County home is lovely, but, having wasted most of their ...
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Theatre in Review: Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson (Neil Simon Theater)
Almost everyone on the creative team of Scandalous is a Broadway neophyte, which goes a long way toward explaining what is going on at the Neil Simon. Scandalous looks like a musical, and it sounds like a musical. But ...
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Theatre in Review: The Outgoing Tide (Primary Stages/59E59)
Bruce Graham pulls off a neat trick at the very top of The Outgoing Tide, showing us what seems like a perfectly straightforward scene, and thoroughly overturning our expectations. We are introduced to Gunner, a ...
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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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