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  Theatre in Review: The Shark is Broken (Golden Theatre)
To give you a sense of what Broadway is like these days, last week I saw back-to-back productions based on Steven Spielberg films; clearly, pre-existing IP rules. First up: Back to the Future (which SS executive-produced in 1985) ...
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Theatre in Review: Back to the Future (Winter Garden Theatre)
Back to the Future represents the state of Broadway today. Is that good or bad? It depends.
Even as Hollywood discovers that the shelf life of intellectual property may not last beyond the seventh or eighth sequel, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Half-God of Rainfall (New York Theatre Workshop)
The last time we encountered playwright Inua Ellams, the occasion was Borders and Crossings, a modest, but pointed and powerful, collection of poems, featured in an online presentation at the Under the Radar Festival in the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Cottage (Hayes Theatre)
Plays, like buildings, need solid foundations, the very thing The Cottage so obviously lacks. Playwright Sandy Rustin has concocted a farcical spoof of early twentieth-century British comedies, but she hasn't noticed ...
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Theatre in Review: Here Lies Love (Broadway Theatre)
An Off-Broadway hit in 2013, Here Lies Love has landed on Broadway, hugely expanded but with its gaudy, glittery, neon-lined heart thoroughly intact. David Byrne and Fatboy Slim's musical traces the rise and ...
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Theatre in Review: Flex (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)
Director Lileana Blain-Cruz deploys a varsity squad of fresh faces in Flex, starting with playwright Candrice Jones, who shows how a lively new voice can revivify what might otherwise be a fairly standard ...
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Theatre in Review: Orpheus Descending (Theatre for a New Audience)
It's only July, I know, but I wonder if the new season will produce another reclamation job as accomplished as Erica Schmidt's staging of this trouble-plagued Tennessee Williams work. Its checkered career stretches across ...
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Theatre in Review: The Saviour (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Each time we meet up with Marie Mullen, she has advanced another generation, but her remarkable talent remains evergreen. In 1998, she stunned New York audiences as the frustrated, ultimately homicidal spinster in Martin McDonough' ...
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Theatre in Review: Once Upon a One More Time (Marquis Theatre)
I'm afraid that, this time, Cinderella has stayed too late at the ball. That's my takeaway from this strenuously gyrating romp through fairytale land, which applies a not terribly fresh feminist twist -- and a batch of Britney Spears
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Theatre in Review: One Woman Show (Greenwich House Theater)
Are you tired of earnest solo shows? The sort of piece in which a terribly serious actor relates his/her/their downward slide, inevitably caused by some terrible trauma that, ultimately, must be faced, cuing plenty of tears and a hopeful, ...
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Theatre in Review: Just for Us (Hudson Theatre)
Beginning with its late 2021 New York debut at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Alex Edelman's scathingly hilarious solo show has moved around town, now occupying Broadway's Hudson Theatre for a summer run. If anything, the piece, about ...
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Theatre in Review: Hamlet (New York Shakespeare Festival/Delacorte Theatre)
The current Hamlet at the Delacorte features the spectacle of a designer destroying a set created for a previous production. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
In 2019, Beowulf Boritt designed a revival ...
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Theatre in Review: Rock & Roll Man (New World Stages)
Give credit where it is due: The creators of Rock & Roll Man want to reinvent the pop bio-musical formula. But, oh baby, what they've come up with. Of course, such creative initiative is admirable; this musical genre is so ...
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Theatre in Review: The Doctor (Park Avenue Armory)
The Doctor is based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1912 drama Professor Bernhardi, but it takes a direct and deadly aim at the identity crisis currently plaguing the West. The title character, Ruth Wolff, is an astonishingly ...
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Theatre in Review: The Gospel According to Heather (Theatre 555)
Ah, adolescence: The social awkwardness. The hormones. The ability to work miracles. Wait -- what?
These are the dilemmas facing the heroine of The Gospel According to Heather, who cannot be termed your typical teen. For one ...
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Theatre in Review: Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground (Theatre at St. Clement's)
Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground is both a new play and a revival of sorts: It brings back the Dead Celebrity Playhouse format in which a famous person, sitting in his or her living room, relives the past in detail. In this ...
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Theatre in Review: Good Vibrations (Lyric Theatre, Belfast/Irish Arts Center)
The pop bio-musical appears to be headed backstage and maybe that's a good thing. We've had dozens of shows, from Jersey Boys to A Beautiful Noise, about the sheer hell of being rich, famous, and the possessor of multiple ...
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Theatre in Review: Days of Wine and Roses (Atlantic Theater Company)
They've watered down the wine in this well-intentioned but strangely stilted musical about the ravages of boozing. Blake Edwards' 1962 film, written by JP Miller (based on his Playhouse 90 teleplay), remains an astonishingly frank ...
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Theatre in Review: Love + Science (City Center Stage II)
"It's the 80s. It's the best time in the history of humanity to be gay." That line, which gets a bitter, knowing laugh at City Center Stage II, is spoken by Jeff, a young doctor, to Matt, his colleague and boyfriend. Well, sort-of ...
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Theatre in Review: Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons/MCC Theater)
"Wet brain" is the vulgar term for Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, caused by an acute deficiency of Vitamin B1. It's a condition associated with alcoholism, and it afflicts Joe, who staggers around his Scottsdale home, unable to speak but ...
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