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  Theatre in Review: The Tempest (The Public Theater)/Caroline's Kitchen (59E59)
The isle is definitely full of noises in Laurie Woolery's production of William Shakespeare's autumnal masterpiece. It is part of the Public's Mobile Unit, a program that brings Shakespeare to community centers, correctional ...
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Theatre in Review: Tootsie (Marquis Theatre)
Tootsie is the kind of Broadway musical that we should get once or twice each season and so often don't: a fast, funny entertainment that brazens out its very real weaknesses to deliver an unapologetic good time. Unlike so many ...
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Theatre in Review: Ink (Manhttan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
As the producers of the Marvel films have taught us, heroes and villains alike need their origin stories: In Ink, the playwright James Graham performs this valuable service for Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media mogul whose ...
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Theatre in Review: All My Sons (Roundabout Theatre Company)
Plays, like people, need to be tending to; aside from the obvious classics, there is an entire (and enormous) subgenre of works from previous centuries that require proper care and feeding if they are to thrive: A good example is All My ...
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Theatre in Review: Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (Booth Theatre)
Gary is Broadway's first comedy set in a charnel house. (I admit to having no supporting evidence for this claim, but I feel confident about it nonetheless.) Taylor Mac, the playwright, has indeed envisioned a sequel to Tit ...
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Theatre in Review: Hadestown (Walter Kerr Theatre)
Quite possibly the most exciting new musical of the Broadway season is a trip to Hell and back. (I could say the same about some of its competitors, but in a far-less-positive spirit.) It also takes the nod for most-improved new musical: ...
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Theatre in Review: Grief is the Thing with Feathers (St. Ann's Warehouse)
Metaphors Gone Wild might be a better name for the current attraction at St. Ann's, for, in the American premiere of this new work by Enda Walsh, presented by Wayward Productions in association with Complicité, grief is ...
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Theatre in Review: Beetlejuice (Winter Garden Theatre)
For a show in which half the cast of characters is dead, Beetlejuice is, to an alarming degree, hell-bent on being lively: It's an aggressive, jack-in-the-box package loaded with loud music, blaring colors, distorted angles, blinder ...
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Theatre in Review: Killing Time (59E59)
The title of Zoe Mills' play has a double meaning, since the heroine, Hester Brooke, only has a little bit of time left, and she wouldn't mind cutting her small allotment by a considerable amount. A retired cellist, just on the ...
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Theatre in Review: King Lear (Cort Theatre)
Quite possibly the most exciting theatre event of last season was Glenda Jackson in a glittering revival of Edward Albee's Three Tall Women. Long absent from our stages, thanks to a distinguished career in politics, she ...
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Theatre in Review: The Pain of My Belligerence/Then They Forgot About the Rest
Two new plays examine women in crisis in an increasingly baleful world. The Pain of My Belligerence, at Playwrights Horizons, begins with Cat, a New Yorker writer, on a date with a world-class Mr. Wrong; naturally, she is ...
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Theatre in Review: Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain (59E59)
The Brits Off Broadway season at 59E59 kicks off with this concept-comedy attraction that works the wartime cultural differences of Yanks and Brits across a series of sketches. The four writers -- Dan March, James Millard, Matt Sheahan
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Theatre in Review: Burn This (Hudson Theatre)
Because the male lead role is catnip to young actors looking for a tour de force, Burn This most likely will always be with us, but there's no getting around the fact that Lanford Wilson's 1987 play is one of his minor works. ...
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Theatre in Review: Socrates (Public Theater)
Socrates is a monumental effort, an incisive portrait of a foundational thinker of Western civilization set against a background of Classical Athens teeming with intellectual ferment, which also serves as a mordant, even savage, ...
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Theatre in Review: 17 Border Crossings (New York Theatre Workshop)
What with presidential threats to shut down the Mexican border, the fractious national debate about immigration, and the wave of nativist organizations sweeping across the UK and the Continent, a piece titled 17 Border Crossings ...
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Theatre in Review: Benny and Joon (Paper Mill Playhouse)
Bryce Pinkham's skill at embodying characters who are lost, lonely, deeply eccentric, or just plain weird is put to excellent use in Benny and Joon. As Sam, a rather strange young fellow who models his sartorial style on ...
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Theatre in Review: All Our Children (Sheen Center)
One of the more horrifying aspects of life under the Third Reich is given surprisingly bland treatment in this new drama. All Our Children focuses on Aktion T4, the program of extermination for German citizens suffering from Down ...
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Theatre in Review: Nantucket Sleigh Ride (Lincoln Center Theater)
Some years ago, I knew a guy who worked as an accountant for one of the big fast-food companies. The corporate slogan, he said, was "what to eat when you don't know what to eat." I thought of him at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater the other ...
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Theatre in Review: Juno and the Paycock (Irish Repertory Theatre)
In Sean O'Casey's classic work, comedy and tragedy -- like the characters -- are forced to occupy close quarters; after a while, it becomes almost impossible to tell them apart. Gifted with an unfailingly accurate eye for the life ...
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Theatre in Review: Oklahoma! (Circle in the Square Theatre)/Sincerely, Oscar (Theatre Row)
I'm having my own personal Oscar Hammerstein Week, thanks to the opening of two shows featuring his immortal lyrics. While one works far better than the other, it's fun to speculate what he would have made of them. ...
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