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Theatre in Review: Toni Stone (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

If nothing else, Toni Stone unearths a fascinating, underreported aspect of baseball history while simultaneously delivering one of the more memorable heroines of recent months. If the playwright, Lydia R. Diamond, has ...

Theatre in Review: The Mountains Look Different (Mint Theater Company/Theatre Row)

The Mountains Look Different is a golden opportunity to get acquainted with two names you should know: Micheál Mac Liammóir and Brenda Meaney. Neither is as well known in New York as he or she deserves and, once again, ...

Theatre in Review: We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time (The Public Theater/Goodman Theatre)

David Cale's new piece at the Public is his most personal, and also his gutsiest. In solo works written for himself and others, he has conjured a universe of richly imagined characters; here he turns his sights on himself and the ...

Theatre in Review: Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson (Working Theater/ART New York Theatres)

If ever a title told all, this is it: The main action of Rob Ackerman's barbed comedy is stated directly above. His play unfolds on the set of an AT&T commercial, in which the star of The Royal Tenenbaums and dozens of other ...

Theatre in Review: The Secret Life of Bees (Atlantic Theater Company)

Early in the second act of The Secret Life of Bees, one suddenly notices what one has been missing all along. Lily, an adolescent runaway, and Zachary, her young friend -- they both work for August, a beekeeper -- take part in "What ...

Theatre in Review: The Great Novel (New Light Theater Project/The Flea Theater)

Some families have a servant problem. Bertha, the heroine of Amina Henry's play, is a servant with an employer problem: The Brennan family, for whom she works as a housekeeper/governess/ chief cook and bottlewasher, is a ...

Theatre in Review: Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom (Irish Repertory Theatre)

One of twentieth-century literature's greatest female characters takes the stage at the Irish Rep, and what a salty, funny, unforgettable example of Irish womanhood she is. Undaunted by the thick brick of text that is Molly Bloom's ...

Theatre in Review: A Strange Loop (Playwrights Horizons/Page 73 Productions)

A Strange Loop takes a highly unpromising premise and spins it into something startlingly, brutally honest. Michael R. Jackson, a young, overweight, gay, black writer of musicals, has come up with a show about a struggling, ...

Theatre in Review: Square Go (59E59)

Square Go is a brief but comprehensive guide to the middle-school jungle, written and staged with considerable invention and wit. The Scottish playwrights Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair need only sixty minutes to reveal ...

Theatre in Review: [Veil Widow Conspiracy] (NAATCO/NYTW Next Door)

[Veil Widow Conspiracy] achieves a trifecta of sorts, introducing three different narrative lines, none of them with a compelling situation or characters. The centerpiece of Gordon Dahlquist's drama consists of scenes from a ...

Theatre in Review: Long Lost (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

Donald Margulies has a knack for writing small plays that resonate far beyond their boundaries; this is especially true of Long Lost, a black-sheep drama that, at first glance, looks like yet another tour through a ...

Theatre in Review: Handbagged (59E59)

The one disappointing thing about Peter Morgan's The Audience -- about Queen Elizabeth II and her many prime ministers -- is the scene in which an importunate and humorless Margaret Thatcher bullies a monarch who, for the ...

Theatre in Review: Little Women (Primary Stages/Cherry Lane Theatre)

Kate Hamill's apparent plan to dramatize every canonical nineteenth-century English-language novel, up to and including The Castle of Otranto, runs aground with her take on Louisa May Alcott's classic. With this one, she has ...

Theatre in Review: Much Ado About Nothing (New York Shakespeare Festival/Delacorte Theatre)

When first announced, this new Much Ado About Nothing seemed deeply unnecessary, given Jack O'Brien's delightful production at the Delacorte only five years ago. A screwball staging with a prosecco fizz, it featured the ideal ...

Theatre in Review: Dying City (Second Stage Theater/Tony Kiser Theater)

Dying City is a tightly focused, intimate drama that aims to lay bare the divided soul of America. (The play is set in 2004 and 2005, but the rips in the social fabric that it depicts are very much of today.) It's a tall order, and ...

Theatre in Review: Public Servant (Theater Breaking Through Barriers/Theatre Row)

Bekah Brunstetter's new drama examines small-town governance and its discontents; it also posits some distinctly odd ideas regarding how democracy should work. Ed Sink, proprietor of a furniture store, has decided it is time to give ...

Theatre in Review: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (Broadhurst Theatre)

Terrence McNally's plays are amazingly tensile works, able to reshape themselves around wildly varying personalities without losing their fundamental structures. I've seen four markedly different stars -- Zoe Caldwell, Patti LuPone ...

Theatre in Review: Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 (Access Theatre)

A hard-to-describe play can benefit from a vividly realized set design, and Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 has one that is just the ticket. (By the way, I have searched long and hard to discover any evidence of a Brief ...

Theatre in Review: The Ferryman (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)/The Prom (Longacre Theatre)

I recently had the chance to revisit two of the past season's most notable Broadway shows, and am happy to report that both are in excellent shape. The Ferryman has undergone a near-total change of cast -- the original ...

Theatre in Review: Octet (Signature Theatre)

In Octet, Dave Malloy keeps charting his own singular musical-theatre path, this time takin on a challenge that, even by his own exacting standards, is fraught with peril. The show unfolds at a twelve-step meeting for ...