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  Theatre in Review: The Blue Flower (Second Stage)
The Blue Flower represents a milestone of sorts, I think. In recent years, we've seen many productions to which projections have made a valuable contribution. More recently, we've seen plays in which projections are ...
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Theatre in Review: King Lear (The Public Theater)
King Lear, as Shakespeare wrote it, begins with pomp and ceremony and rapidly moves toward chaos and ruin. Oddly enough, The Public Theater's current revival moves in the other direction. Ill-designed and ...
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Theatre in Review: Other Desert Cities (Booth Theatre)
Christmas has come early on Broadway this year, as the members of the spectacularly troubled Wyeth family are once again convening for a holiday filled with zingers, recriminations, and the unearthing of some shattering secrets. It's a ...
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Theatre in Review: Queen of the Mist (Transport Group/The Gym at Judson)
"I am a phenomenon," says Mary Testa in Queen of the Mist, and -- let's face it -- she is speaking God's honest truth. Cast as Anna Edson Taylor, who, at the unlikely age of 63, rode over Niagara Falls in a barrel, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Atmosphere of Memory (Labyrinth Theatre Company/Bank Street Theatre)
Basically, there are three kinds of bad plays -- ambitiously bad, run-of-the-mill bad, and oh-my-god-this-is-indescribable. The Atmosphere of Memory falls firmly in the last category, and it doesn't waste any time getting ...
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Theatre in Review: Chinglish (Longacre Theatre)
"Take notice of safe: The slippery are very crafty." What's that, you say? Try this instead: "Slippery slopes ahead." That's one of the wildly mistranslated signs that turn up at the beginning of Chinglish, a play in which ...
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Theatre in Review: Dancing at Lughnasa (Irish Repertory Theatre)
It's funny how the size of a theatre affects one's perceptions of a play. When Dancing at Lughnasa opened on Broadway 20 years ago, I was among the very few who found it to be dramatically static, a literary memoir that ...
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Theatre in Review: Love's Labor's Lost (The Public Theater)
Love's Labor's Lost is a director's dream -- or nightmare, depending on your point of view. A deeply schizophrenic work -- fizzy and featherbrained at the beginning, grave and gloomy at the final curtain -- it presumably ...
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Theatre in Review: Milk Like Sugar (Playwrights Horizons/Women's Project Theatre)
Milk Like Sugar begins with a bit of a Beyoncé tune, which features the refrain "Who Runs the World? Girls!" And, for the first ten minutes or so of Kirsten Greenidge's gripping tale, it's a proposition that seems ...
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Theatre in Review: Children (The Actors Company Theatre/Theatre Row)
The characters in Children are worried about erosion, as well they might be. The family's matriarch, standing on the terrace of her Massachusetts beach house, nervously eyes the Atlantic Ocean and says, "Some night, we'll ...
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Theatre in Review: Asuncion (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre/Cherry Lane Theatre)
Asuncion is a young woman from the Philippines, and, frankly, she's a bit of mystery. Her origins are a little vague and, as pretty and pleasant as she is; her intentions are a little hard to read. She's not alone; the intentions of Je ...
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Theatre in Review: Sons of the Prophet (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)
It's always a treat when a playwright finds a new slant on familiar material, and, in Sons of the Prophet, Stephen Karam enlivens his dysfunctional family saga with any number of invigorating and amusing details. If the ...
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Theatre in Review: Relatively Speaking (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)
On Broadway today, you can see any number of vintage shows, such as Anything Goes, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Follies, or Godspell -- but if you want a truly retro experience, there's Relatively ...
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Theatre in Review: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (The Public Theater)
The Public Theater's uncanny ability to find new works that speak to this exact moment continues with The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Rumor had it that, after Jobs' death two weeks ago, some argued that Mike ...
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Theatre in Review: The Mountaintop (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
This is the week of Martin Luther King tributes. In Washington, DC, his new memorial was dedicated a couple of days ago, and, on Broadway, Katori Hall's new play, The Mountaintop, offers a portrait of him on the last ...
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Theatre in Review: Man and Boy (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
Some theatre companies are devoted to new plays and playwrights; others devote themselves to the classics. Roundabout Theatre Company is largely about stars and their vehicles. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you have the ...
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Theatre in Review: We Live Here (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center)
As I left Manhattan Theatre Club the other night, I was surrounded by groups of theatergoers struggling to parse the action of We Live Here. One or two expressed frank disbelief that it had gotten a production at all. I ...
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Theatre in Review: Beyond Words (Urban Stages)
Bill Bowers calls himself a mime, but I'm not sure that the term does him justice. Yes, his current vehicle, Beyond Words, features a number of wordless sequences, as did his last piece, It Goes Without Saying, ...
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Theatre in Review: Any Given Monday (59E59)
Imagine a sitcom written by Thomas Hobbes and you have an idea of the peculiar nature of Any Given Monday. The show doesn't simply posit the idea that human existence is nasty, brutish, and short -- it celebrates it, with ...
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Theatre in Review: Motherhood Out Loud (Primary Stages/59E59)
There's not much that doesn't get said in Motherhood Out Loud, a fine, friendly, and funny examination of the many ages of maternity. Taking a leaf from the playbook established by the long-running Love, Loss, and What I ...
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