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  Theatre in Review: Lunch Bunch (The Play Company/Clubbed Thumb at 122CC)
Lunch Bunch is a workplace comedy with a twist, a culinary entertainment served with piquant hints of frustration and sadness. Playwright Sarah Einspanier posits a quintet of cubicle dwellers who make up the collective ...
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Theatre in Review: A Doll's House (Hudson Theatre)
I worry about the director Jamie Lloyd. A gifted artist, he seems to have slipped into some sort of decline. How else to explain how his productions have become drained of color and vitality? It all started out so well, too: His ...
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Theatre in Review: Parade (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
Parade begins with a gesture so sweeping it takes one's breath away. The opening number, "The Old Red Hills of Home," begins in 1863 with a young Confederate soldier bidding farewell his girl. Pledging himself to "a way of ...
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Theatre in Review: Sancocho (WP Theatre/The Sol Project)
The title dish in Christin Eve Cato's new play is a stew brimming with meat and vegetables, in this case spiced up with a rackful of family secrets. Cato brings together sisters Renata and Caridad in an East Harlem kitchen for an ...
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Theatre in Review: Hang Time (The Flea Theater)
The first thing one sees in Hang Time is an image of such unmitigated horror that one fears director Zora Howard has set an impossible hurdle for Zora Howard, the playwright. It features three Black men, the play's ...
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Theatre in Review: Misty (The Shed)
How much self-consciousness can a play handle before it tumbles over? That's the stress test playwright/star Arinzé Kene applies in Misty, a play about a play, or maybe a monologue about a monologue, with a side order ...
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Theatre in Review: Black Odyssey (Classic Stage Company)
Playwright Marcus Gardley is no stranger to ambition, having previously dramatized a fictional lawsuit over the killing of Malcom X in X: Or, Betty Shabazz v. The Nation and transferred Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of ...
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Theatre in Review: Arden of Faversham (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Who wants to kill the title character of Arden of Faversham? Actually, who doesn't? The list of those plotting the murder of this prosperous bourgeois man of affairs begins with his wife, Alice, and her lover, Mosby a (horrors ...
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Theatre in Review: The Harder They Come (Public Theater)
Ask any show fan and you'll get the same answer: A musical has a score (recorded on an original cast album) and a film has a soundtrack. (In certain theatre chat rooms, if you confuse the two, they will flay you alive.) The distinction is ...
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Theatre in Review: The Coast Starlight (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse)
The Coast Starlight may be the first play written in the conditional tense. Playwright Keith Bunin assembles a half a dozen strangers on a train headed from Los Angeles to Seattle, focusing on, of all things, an ...
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Theatre in Review: How to Defend Yourself (New York Theatre Workshop)
How to Defend Yourself left me deeply grateful not to be twenty-one. Liliana Padilla's new play, which announces them as a talent to watch, looks at college students exploring the treacherous terrain of dating and sex ...
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Theatre in Review: Dark Disabled Stories (Bushwick Starr/Public Theater)
"If you came here to pity me, you can leave." So says Ryan J. Haddad, fearlessly eyeballing the audience at the Public's Susan Stein Shiva Theatre. Indeed, you can check any sentimental notions at the door of this eye-opening, often ...
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Theatre in Review: The Rewards of Being Frank (New York Classical Theatre/ART NY Theatres)
How many actresses can slay when playing Liza Minnelli and/or Lady Bracknell? Christine Pedi long ago emerged from several editions of Forbidden Broadway as a celebrity spoofer nonpareil, especially her peerless Liza, a side ...
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Theatre in Review: Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
If, following the 1995 premiere of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, someone had predicted to me that Lynn Nottage would one day become a top American playwright, I would have nicely suggested they pull the other one. A ...
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Theatre in Review: Elyria (Atlantic Theater Company)
Ambition is a great thing in a playwright but, in the case of Elyria, Deepa Purohit's reach exceeds her grasp; this tangled, multi-generational tale might test the skills of her more accomplished colleagues, and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Best We Could (a family tragedy) (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)
For a play to qualify as a tragedy, the people in it must, at a minimum, be interesting. That's the problem, with The Best We Could, a road trip drama that steers uncertainly toward a big revelation that destroys a family of ...
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Theatre in Review: The Trees (Playwrights Horizons/Page 73 Productions)
Consider this premise. Siblings David and Sheila come stumbling in, blotto, from a party. (She, a resident of Seattle, is visiting him at the family home in Connecticut.) Wandering around a local park, they suddenly find themselves stuck ...
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Theatre in Review: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (Brooklyn Academy of Music)
When The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window opened in 1964, New York Times reviewer Howard Taubman noted that it "lacked concision and cohesion. One remembers isolated passages rather than the work as a whole." Fine; ...
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Theatre in Review: Love (National Theatre/Park Avenue Armory)
"We need to find a way to talk about things that we don't want to see." That's playwright/director Alexander Zeldin talking, and he achieves his goal magnificently in Love. Set in a UK homeless shelter, the play ...
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Theatre in Review: Becomes a Woman (City Center Stage II)
"You have to fight like hell all the time just to get the ordinary things that you're entitled to. If you don't want trouble, you don't want much else, either." Wise words from a shopgirl named Florry and, perhaps, the theme of this ...
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