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  Theatre in Review: Being Harold Pinter (Belarus Free Theatre/Ellen Stewart Theatre at La Mama)
It's one thing to feel the bone-penetrating chill of Harold Pinter's later political plays in any normal production; it's another thing altogether when you know that the cast members have experienced firsthand the terrors depicted ...
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Theatre in Review: The Motherf--ker With the Hat (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)
Forget David Mamet and his many imitators; Stephen Adly Guirgis is our new reigning poet of the obscene. Consider what he can do with the popular four-letter word that begins with "F." In his hands, it functions as a noun, verb ( ...
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Theatre in Review: Anything Goes (Roundabout Theatre Company/Stephen Sondheim Theatre)
There are exactly two moments in Anything Goes when pure, untrammeled musical comedy exuberance takes over, shaking the Stephen Sondheim Theater to its foundations -- and both of them are led by Sutton Foster. The ...
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Theatre in Review: Wonderland (Marquis Theatre)
The two people most responsible for putting the wonder in Wonderland are Neil Patel and Sven Ortel. Assigned the task of taking Broadway audiences through the looking glass into Lewis Carroll's famous, and ...
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Theatre in Review: Love Song (59E59)
Love Song is billed as a romantic comedy, but that's a misnomer. John Kolvenbach's new play touches on married love, sibling love, and illusory love, but at its heart it's about a certain very specific and ...
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Theatre in Review: Go Back to Where You Are (Playwrights Horizons)
Is there a new play shortage I haven't heard about? Are companies so strapped for new material that they're putting on first drafts? That's the only explanation I can think of for Go Back to Where You Are. David Greenspan's ...
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Theatre in Review: Epona's Labyrinth (HERE)
You'll find plenty of alluring, disorienting, or just plain disturbing imagery in Epona's Labyrinth, all of it the product of the video designer Keisuke Takahashi. Working with a four-sided set piece, designed by S ...
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Theatre in Review: Urge for Going (The Public Theater)
In the most gripping and lyrical sequence in Mona Mansour's new drama, Adham, a Palestinian literature scholar, recalls the day in 1967 when he gave a lecture in London on William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. He had been ...
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Theatre in Review: Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Richard Rodgers Theater)
"This place is lousy with ghosts," remarks the title character in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. The place he's talking about is Baghdad in 2003, in the months following Operation Iraqi Freedom. The comment turns out to be ...
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Theatre in Review: Born Bad (Soho Rep)
In all good writing, God is in the details, right? If you're telling a story, it only improves by being made more concrete, correct? Even the mysterious universes of Beckett and Pinter have their distinctive features; we may not fully ...
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Theatre in Review: The Other Place (MCC/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Laurie Metcalf is one of the theatre's great quick-change artists, and it's a talent that has nothing to do with her costumes. Instead, her genius lies in how, with stunning economy, she picks the essential dramatic tension out of ...
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Theatre in Review: Benefactors (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
No good deed goes unpunished; that's the moral of Michael Frayn's Benefactors, a tense, compact drama that begins as the tale of a soured friendship and ends up asking some very knotty questions about the impulse to do good ...
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Theatre in Review: Marie and Bruce (The New Group/Theatre Row)
In the first few minutes of Wallace Shawn's play, Marie calls her husband, Bruce, "a damned cheap, God-damned idiot pig," a "God-damned f---ing incredible pig," and a God-damned filthy c---s---ing turd." When he asks for his ...
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Theatre in Review: The Book of Mormon (Eugene O'Neill Theatre)
When I was a boy, the nuns who taught me were fond of saying that God writes straight with crooked lines. I finally understand what they meant - how else to explain how a pair of atheist cutups have come up with a sophisticated analysis ...
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Theatre in Review: My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (Barrow Street Theatre)
Mike Birbiglia is never such good company as when he wanders off topic. My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, like his earlier piece, Sleepwalk With Me, has a definite throughline -- if only he could stick to it. The ...
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Theatre in Review: Between Worlds (New World Stages
New genre alert: Between Worlds is billed as a "flamenco fantasia." Siudy, the show's one-named star and choreographer, has teamed up with Pablo Croce -- who, according to the program notes, has directed more ...
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Theatre in Review: Ghetto Klown (Lyceum Theatre)
In 1998, when I saw Freak, I remarked to my companion, "John Leguizamo is a very funny man -- and I hope his parents are dead." I wasn't being malicious; Freak, the first of Leguizamo's one-man rants to hit Broadway, ...
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Theatre in Review: Arcadia (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
Tom Stoppard must be the most respected and least loved of modern playwrights. Consider the notices for David Leveaux's revival of Arcadia, which got the most lukewarm set of positive notices in many a season, ...
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Theatre in Review: Three Men on a Horse (The Actors Company Theatre/Theatre Row)
God love James Murtagh. He barges on stage late in the action of Three Men on a Horse and wakes up a sleeping production with a pure jolt of comic adrenaline. He plays Mr. Carver, an irascible, superannuated greeting ...
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Theatre in Review: Double Falsehood (Classic Stage Company)
The difficult thing about Double Falsehood is that the play is nowhere near as interesting as its rather squirrelly provenance. To wit: William Shakespeare wrote a number of plays in collaboration with John ...
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