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  Theatre in Review: The Welkin (Atlantic Theatre Company)
For three-quarters of its running time, The Welkin is distinguished by such vigorous, imaginative, and intensely dramatic writing that it is especially distressing when it tips over into mannerism and rhetorical excess. ...
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Theatre in Review: Dark Noon (A fix+foxy Production at St. Ann's Warehouse)
Dark Noon has two problems: There is no point of focus in its staging and no point of focus in its satirical point of view. The work of a Danish writer and co-director collaborating with a (mostly Black) South African cast ...
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Theatre in Review: The World According to Micki Grant (New Federal Theatre at WP Theater)
It's time to talk about Micki Grant; truthfully, it's usually time to talk about Micki Grant, something we haven't done enough lately, leaving her considerable achievements in danger of being forgotten. Her 1971 revue, Don't ...
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Theatre in Review: Home (Roundabout Theatre Company/Todd Haimes Theatre)
Sometimes the glory of a tale is in the telling; so it is with Home, which, casting its beguiling spell, earned both Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations in the 1980 -- 81 season. Forty years later, it retains its spell ...
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Theatre in Review: Breaking the Story (Second Stage/Tony Kiser Theatre)
It's getting to be a tradition and a welcome one, I might add: the arrival, along with the warm weather, of Maggie Siff on a New York stage. She was hair-raising as the matriarch of a spectacularly dysfunctional Sam Shepard clan in ...
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Theatre in Review: The Opposite of Love/Midnight Coleslaw's Tales from Beyond the Closet!!!
It has been a bad week for sex in the theatre. One of the above offerings treats everyone's favorite activity as a purely economic transaction, the other delivers transgression without much wit. Neither -- I'm sorry to say -- will advance ...
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Theatre in Review: Molly Sweeney (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Molly Sweeney is so elegantly written, so brimful of penetrating insights, that I'm sorry to report that it never quite rises to the level of drama. Employing three interwoven monologues -- a strategy that made his 1979 ...
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Theatre in Review: The Hours are Feminine (INTAR)
In his program note, the Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera calls The Hours are Feminine "this lost, realistic, almost old-school play that contained little of the sexy, so-called 'magic realism' I was best known for ...
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Theatre in Review: The Fires (Soho Rep)
Off Broadway these days, things come in threes: Monday saw the opening of Three Houses, a tripartite musical about COVID lockdown; now comes The Fires, set in a Brooklyn apartment that is a temporal triplex inhabited ...
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Theatre in Review: Three Houses (Romulus Linney Theatre at Signature Theatre Company)
The design collective known as dots has collectively outdone itself with the set for Three Houses. They've come up with a tavern that, over time, has acquired the kind of seedy patina that only makes it more appealing; ...
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Theatre in Review: Here There Are Blueberries (Tectonic Theater Project at New York Theatre Workshop)
It's been a banner year for documentary theatre but, even so, few examples of the genre exert the terrible grip of Here There Are Blueberries. Not a play in the conventional sense, it recounts the astonishing real-life ...
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Theatre in Review: All of Me (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)
In Laura Winters' invigorating romantic comedy, boy meets girl when their motorized wheelchairs cross paths in a hospital parking area. He is Alfonso, a public health official partially paralyzed due to a childhood accident; she is ...
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Theatre in Review: October 7 (The Actor's Temple)
In a year that has seen such magisterial works of documentary theatre as Agreement and Grenfell: in the words of survivors comes October 7, drawn from eyewitness accounts of the Hamas attack on Israeli citizens, ...
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Theatre in Review: Just Another Day (Theatre 555)
"Did I sleep with you last night?" This question, posed by Dan Lauria to Patty McCormack in the first few minutes of Just Another Day, is the first hint that something is off with the characters known only as ...
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Theatre in Review: The Heart of Rock and Roll (James Earl Jones Theatre)
Stop the presses! The headline news of the day is The Heart of Rock and Roll is...not bad.
It is obvious by now that we at Lighting&Sound America take a dim view of the jukebox musical format, seeing it as the ...
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Theatre in Review: Uncle Vanya (Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont)
The title character of Anton Chekhov's play is permanently at sixes and sevens but, in the new production at the Beaumont, his distress is surprisingly undistressing. Vanya, of course, is a virtuoso complainer, and he has plenty to ...
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Theatre in Review: Staff Meal (Playwrights Horizons)
Before it comes down with a bad case of the apocalyptic vapors, Staff Meal reveals a new and entirely delightful side of Abe Koogler's talent. The playwright's previous works examine American life from the bottom of ...
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Theatre in Review: Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions (Second Stage at the Hayes Theater)
In the most remarkable sequence of Paula Vogel's new fractured family portrait, Jessica Lange silently communicates the state of her character's soul. She is Phyllis, a middle-aged Washington, DC divorcee, living alone and ...
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Theatre in Review: Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club (August Wilson Theatre)
When did Cabaret become so effortful? It's a recent development for a nearly sixty-year-old musical that has been remarkably supple in terms of bending with the times. A ground-breaking, norm-rattling work in 1966, it ...
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Theatre in Review: Mary Jane (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
I don't want to drive people away from the Friedman, but Mary Jane is that most singular thing, a portrait of an everyday saint, and a compelling one to boot. The title character of Amy Herzog's haunting drama is the ...
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