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  Theatre in Review: Mrs. Doubtfire (Stephen Sondheim Theatre)
Mrs. Doubtfire, the not-bad/not-good new show at the Sondheim, offers a clinical case study of the perils of adapting popular film comedies to the stage, a concept that too many producers feel is the quickest, easiest way to ...
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Theatre in Review: Kimberly Akimbo (Atlantic Theater Company)
Because so many contemporary musicals are content to rehash old material, it's notable when a creative team transforms a difficult dramatic work with music, providing it with an identity of its own. When it opened Off Broadway in 2003, ...
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Theatre in Review: Camille O'Sullivan: Where Are We Now? (Irish Arts Center)
Camille O'Sullivan is quite the trickster. She takes the stage, looking rather distrait if not outright frazzled, a bundle of nerves fretting about her shoes and a missing credit card. Carrying on distractedly, rooting around the ...
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Theatre in Review: Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons)
Taroon, the young Afghan at the center of Sylvia Khoury's new play, is a man without a country. Previously, he worked as a translator for US troops, but it is 2013, the Obama Administration is reducing its military presence in the ...
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Theatre in Review: Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin... (York Theatre Company/Theatre at St. Jean's)
Several decisions have gone into making Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin in Hollywood a cut above the standard songbook revue, all of them linked to one key question: How to deal with the sheer bounty of Irving Berlin's ...
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Theatre in Review: Clyde's (Second Stage/Helen Hayes Theatre)
Are we sure Lynn Nottage is only one person? It's not just that she never repeats herself -- she seems to practically reinvent her talent from play to play. Clyde's may not go down as one of her major works, but it ...
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Theatre in Review: Diana (Longacre Theatre)
You've probably read a great deal about Diana -- very little of it adulatory, I'm sure -- but the new musical at the Longacre doesn't definitively lose its mind until just after intermission. Before that, everyone involved ...
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Theatre in Review: Morning Sun (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center)
In Morning Sun, you will find out everything you might want to know about the central character Charlotte and perhaps a little bit more. The details include up-and-down relationships with her mother and daughter, her job as a ...
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Theatre in Review: Morning's at Seven (Theatre at St. Clement's)
Morning's at Seven is one of American drama's true unicorns, a Chekhovian family comedy that, dismissed in its 1938 debut, has gradually acquired the feel of a classic. And for good reason: It's a peerless study of hidden-in ...
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Theatre in Review: The Alchemist (Red Bull Theater/New World Stages)
Before we get to talking about the frantic, brazenly dishonest, and riotously reprehensible shenanigans that make up this production, one thing must be made clear. This is not Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. Adaptor Jeffrey ...
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Theatre in Review: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Irish Repertory Theatre)
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing demonstrates what is arresting and yet worrying about so much contemporary Irish drama. This remorseless account of a young woman's upbringing is filled with stream-of-consciousness writing, individual ...
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Theatre in Review: Trouble in Mind (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
Having a bad week? Spend some time with LaChanze, a great star in the great role she has deserved for far too long. At the American Airlines Theatre, she enters, decked out in a chic purple coat, opens her arms, unleashes that ...
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Theatre in Review: Cullud Wattah (The Public Theater)
In her two most recent works, playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza functions as a kind of alchemist, transmuting water into theatre that is both magical and disturbing. Given an audio production by the Public last April, shadow/la ...
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Theatre in Review: Trevor (Stage 42)
The title character of Trevor is an adolescent work in progress but Holden William Hagelberger, who plays him, is a fully formed talent. Playing a nonconforming eighth-grader whose heart (and hormones) are pushing him ...
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Theatre in Review: Assassins (Classic Stage Company)
The good news for the theatre is the bad news for us: Assassins is back, as bilious and brilliant as ever, offering its uncanny funhouse-mirror reflection of America at its most cankerous and paranoid. A musical dismissed by ...
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Theatre in Review: A Turtle on a Fence Post (Theatre 555)
You will have heard that Andrew Cuomo has had a difficult year, what with being booted from the governor's office thanks to credible accusations of sexual harassment and suppressing COVID death counts in nursing homes while prepping his ...
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Theatre in Review: The Antelope Party (Dutch Kills Theater Company)
The things one learns in this line of work: Thanks to The Antelope Party, I am now aware of the existence of "bronies," adult male fans of the TV series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and their female companions, who ...
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Theatre in Review: Nollywood Dreams (MCC Theater)
What does it mean when the funniest part of a stage comedy is a film? Near the end of Nollywood Dreams, a broad farce set in Nigeria's movie industry in the 1990s, a screen drops in and we see the trailer for a romantic ...
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Theatre in Review: Gnit (Theatre for a New Audience)
Some playwrights make mountains out of molehills, straining to create important plays out of minor premises. In this case, Will Eno takes the opposite route, adapting a monument of nineteenth century drama -- you can call it a folly ...
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Theatre in Review: Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord (New York Theatre Workshop)
I've been living in dread of an onslaught of COVID plays, imagining all sorts of dreary two-handers featuring locked-down couples laboriously working out their relationship issues. (It could happen yet.) Therefore, it is a special delight ...
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