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  Theatre in Review: Boesman and Lena (Signature Theatre Company)
It's hard to think of anything in world drama more influenced by Samuel Beckett than Boesman and Lena. The difference is that Waiting for Godot unfolds in an arid wasteland that existed only in Beckett's mind, while 
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Theatre in Review: If Pretty Hurts, Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka (Playwrights Horizons)
I'm beginning to worry about some of our young playwrights, for whom childhood seems to be an inescapable web. Only a few days ago, I saw Jeremy O. Harris' "Daddy," in which a twentysomething artist hooks up with a sixtyish ...
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Theatre in Review: Dying in Boulder (La MaMa)
Dying in Boulder (or the perfect place to die if you have good karma!), as per the full title, has a bit of a karma problem -- to go along with a plot problem, a character problem, and, most of all, a credibility problem. ...
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Theatre in Review: Chick Flick: The Musical (Westside Theatre)
Chick Flick: The Musical -- with that title, this is a show that knows its target audience and how to woo it. A girls'-night-out entertainment about a girls' night out, it is almost indecently poised to cater to fun-seeking females ...
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Theatre in Review: Imagining Madoff (New Light Theater Project)
If you're going to call a play Imagining Madoff, you're going to have to do a little, well, imagining. Deb Margolin's play delves into the mind of a notorious criminal -- a king of fraud whose Ponzi scheme left ...
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Theatre in Review: "Daddy" (The New Group at Pershing Square Signature Center)
Jeremy O. Harris has the kind of problem colleagues his age might envy -- but it's a problem, nevertheless. Having arrived in a funnel cloud of controversy while still a student at Yale Drama School, he is, arguably, facing demands ...
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Theatre in Review: The B-Side (Wooster Group/St. Ann's Warehouse)
The full title is almost longer than the show: The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons": A Record Album Interpretation -- all this for a piece running a mere sixty minutes. And yet, what a haunting hour in the ...
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Theatre in Review: Hurricane Diane (New York Theatre Workshop/WP Theater)
The playwright Madeleine George apparently subscribes to the old saw about capturing more flies with honey than with vinegar, at least if Hurricane Diane, now whipping up gales of hilarity at New York Theatre Workshop ...
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Theatre in Review: Recent Alien Abductions (The Play Company/Walkerspace)
We're used to plays -- especially family dramas -- beginning with a character entering and, using direct address, setting the stage for us. Such speeches tend to be on the brief side and are usually loaded with essential information about ...
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Theatre in Review: By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (Signature Theatre Company)
"Welcome to the hall of mirrors, honey." This remark, made by the title character of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, comments on a Hollywood party where practically everyone -- hostess, guests, and staff -- has assumed a false ...
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Theatre in Review: The Price of Thomas Scott (Mint Theater Company)
As it did with the Irish playwright Teresa Deevy, the Mint has launched an initiative, "Meet Miss Baker," to retrieve the works of Elizabeth Baker, who went from office typist to "one of the most widely discussed playwrights in ...
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Theatre in Review: Good Friday (The Flea Theater)
Good Friday begins with a trigger warning of sorts, informing audience members that some scenes may be intense and upsetting. But really, they needn't have bothered: The play carries with it only the most tenuous connection ...
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Theatre in Review: Merrily We Roll Along (Fiasco Theater/Roundabout Theatre Company)
Merrily We Roll Along has the dubious status of being the most picked-over of Stephen Sondheim's musicals. Ever since its doomed 1981 opening -- an event seismic enough to be recorded in the excellent documentary "Best ...
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Theatre in Review: Lolita, My Love (York Theatre Company)
"How did they ever make of a movie of Lolita?" So read the ad copy for Stanley Kubrick's film of Vladimir Nabokov's alternately celebrated and reviled novel. An even more intriguing question is, How did they ever make a ...
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Theatre in Review: To Kill a Mockingbird (Shubert Theatre)
As you may have read, Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird had a somewhat fraught birth, what with the Harper Lee estate objecting to some of the changes the playwright brought to the novel. Among ...
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Theatre in Review: The Shadow of a Gunman (Irish Repertory Theatre)
The Shadow of a Gunman bills itself as a tragedy, and while it does arrive, eventually, at that designation -- in a second act that is savage in its violence and candid about the cowardice of its leading characters -- it ...
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Theatre in Review: Fiddler on the Roof (National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene/Stage 42)
Having begun its journey last July at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a short trip from Ellis Island, this Yiddish production of the classic musical has come uptown, where it can more than hold its own. What originally came across as a ...
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Theatre in Review: The Neurology of the Soul (Untitled Theater Company/ART New York Theatres)
Some men yearn to peer into their lady loves' hearts; Stephen, one of the leads in The Neurology of the Soul, is more of a cerebrum man, forever gazing into the brain of Amy, his wife. Stephen is a cognitive neuroscientist, ...
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Theatre in Review: State of the Union (Metropolitan Playhouse)
Last week, in one of those odd moments of synchronicity that seem to happen every season, I got a crash course in the political philosophy of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Among the most successful theatre men of their ...
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Theatre in Review: My Very Own British Invasion (Paper Mill Playhouse)
Baby boomers looking for a rockin' good time will find a cornucopia of mid-sixties chart-toppers in My Very Own British Invasion; they'll also find a musical at war with itself, thanks to a book and score that never manage ...
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