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  Theatre in Review: Mr. Saturday Night (Nederlander Theatre)
Unsure about seeing Mr. Saturday Night? Take this simple quiz. Do you enjoy watching Billy Crystal do what he does better than anybody, weaponizing punchlines and detonating them for explosive laughs? Head to the ...
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Theatre in Review: Wedding Band (Theatre for a New Audience)
The Alice Childress revival continues apace with this revival of a 1966 work, first produced in 1972. Those dates will give you an idea what the persistently undervalued Childress had to put up with; only now, years after her death, ...
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Theatre in Review: A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre)
A Strange Loop was startling enough when it premiered in 2019 at Playwrights Horizons. At the Lyceum, it feels like a seismic event. When was the last time Broadway saw a musical as brazenly original and brutally candid as ...
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Theatre in Review: Macbeth (Longacre Theatre)
This is the first Macbeth to come with a warmup act. That's right: Michael Patrick Thornton, who plays Lennox (among other roles), assigned to work the room, chats up the audience, asking everyone how they're feeling ...
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Theatre in Review: Paradise Square (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
The good news: Paradise Square is a big, sprawling tale, a vivid slice of New York City history with a meaningful message for today's audiences, served up with an often-soaring score and ferociously gifted cast. The bad news: ...
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Theatre in Review: POTUS (Shubert Theatre)
POTUS wastes no time in jump-starting its down-and-dirty business: Its first line of dialogue is a four-letter slur beginning with C. If that shocks you, hang on; you'll hear it 28 more times before the final curtain. The word, we ...
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Theatre in Review: Wish You Were Here (Playwrights Horizons)
In the theatre, context is everything. Wish You Were Here opens with a gathering of five female friends, assembled to assist one of them on her wedding day. The lively, overlapping conversation touches on all sorts of issues ...
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Theatre in Review: A Case for the Existence of God (Signature Theatre Center)
"Polyphony just means that there are two different melodies being played at the same time that complement each other harmonically." So says Keith, one half of the cast of A Case for the Existence of God, and it's an apt ...
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Theatre in Review: The Skin of Our Teeth (Lincoln Center Theater/Vivian Beaumont Theater)
The Skin of Our Teeth is an American classic, a play with which each generation must wrestle; it's a highly original work, the product of a fiendishly theatrical imagination, and it very well may be unstageable. Yes, Eliza ...
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Theatre in Review: For Colored Girls... (Booth Theatre)
Forty-six years after it first stunned audiences, Ntozake Shange's classic "choreopoem" -- full title: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf -- is back at the Booth, once again ...
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Theatre in Review: Hangmen (Golden Theatre)
Martin McDonagh has been specializing in his own brand of bloodstained comedy for a quarter of a century now, so it's probably inevitable that the blood might get a little tired. That's the main trouble with Hangmen, a ...
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Theatre in Review: The Minutes (Studio 54)
In plays like Man from Nebraska, Superior Donuts, and especially August: Osage County, Tracy Letts has established himself as a specialist in Midwestern malaise. He's also something of a national diagnostician, ...
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Theatre in Review: How I Learned to Drive (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
Many plays make a strong impact when first seen, but the world moves on and they fade with time. Twenty-five years after its debut, How I Learned to Drive has only gained in power. It takes an extremely nervy playwright to ...
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Theatre in Review: Cyrano de Bergerac (The Jamie Lloyd Company/BAM Harvey Theater)
Director Jamie Lloyd can't get Cyrano de Bergerac out of his system. Ten years ago, he staged a generally straightforward, workmanlike production of Edmond Rostand's classic drama at Roundabout Theatre Company, ...
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Theatre in Review: Songs About Trains (Working Theater/Radical Evolution/New Ohio Theatre)
You won't find a more descriptive title than the one above; this musical revue combines, yes, songs about trains with fictional accounts of workers, mostly immigrants, whose lives were shaped by the building and maintenance of the US ...
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Theatre in Review: The Little Prince (Broadway Theatre)
Why are people so hell-bent on adapting The Little Prince? Yes, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novella is beloved, having sold millions of copies, and if you took French in high school, you probably read it. But is it stage or ...
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Theatre in Review: Birthday Candles (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
The folks at the Roundabout are in a Thornton Wilder mood these days, thanks to Birthday Candles, which covers ninety years of its heroine's life in ninety minutes. Her name is Ernestine, and, at 17, she announces, "I am a ...
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Theatre in Review: Take Me Out (Second Stage/The Hayes Theatre)
Take Me Out begins with a baseball superstar coming out of the closet. It features several scenes with half a dozen naked men. And it's not about sex. Go figure.
To be sure, once the big announcement gets made, things do ...
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Theatre in Review: Harmony (National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene)
Harmony is a notably double-edged title for a show that celebrates a once-famous singing group yet which, given the time and place, can't help skidding into tragedy. The Comedian Harmonists were a real-life German troupe ...
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Theatre in Review: To My Girls (Second Stage/Tony Kiser Theater)
Ever since Mart Crowley threw that bash for the boys in the band, playwrights have been using social gatherings for status reports on a certain slice of the gay community. I privately file them all under the omnibus title of "six-guys-in-a ...
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