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  Theatre in Review: Curse of the Starving Class (Signature Theatre)
Some productions climax, or even conclude, with a coup de théâtre; Terry Kinney's production at the Signature begins with one, and it's a honey: As the lights come up, Julian Crouch's set, depicting a rundown farmhouse ...
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Theatre in Review: Mac Beth (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Literature, dramatic or otherwise, has so many examples of mayhem-spreading adolescent girls -- the putative witches of The Crucible, the young murderesses of the film Heavenly Creatures, and little Rhoda Penmark, the ...
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Theatre in Review: Feral (Tortoise in a Nutshell/59E59)
Frequent readers of this column may be familiar with the work of Manual Cinema, the Chicago-based troupe that uses old-fashioned overhead projectors, combined with silhouettes, paper puppets, and shadow effects, to tell stories. Now comes ...
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Theatre in Review: Proof of Love (Audible/New York Theatre Workshop/Minetta Lane Theatre)
Constance Daley, the well-appointed black matron who is the sole character in Proof of Love, isn't the sort who ruffles easily, but she has a situation on her hands of the sort that would challenge anyone. First, her husband ...
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Theatre in Review: Posting Letters to the Moon (59E59)
Anyone looking for a civilized ninety minutes of adult amusement can't go wrong with this lovely, casual piece. The actress Lucy Fleming, daughter of the stage and film star Celia Johnson and the travel writer Peter ...
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Theatre in Review: Enter Laughing: The Musical (York Theatre Company)
The kosher corn is as high as an elephant's eye in Enter Laughing, a shameless hokefest that crossbreeds 1930s nostalgia, Jewish domestic comedy, and backstage farce to often-irresistible effect. Even when the jokes seem to hail ...
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Theatre in Review: Happy Talk (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)
The playwright Jesse Eisenberg draws his characters with such penetrating insight, such ruthless exactitude, that he sometimes leaves the audience with nothing to discover. Consider the case of Lorraine, the central character of H ...
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Theatre in Review: The Pink Unicorn (Episcopal Actors' Guild)
Trisha, the heroine/narrator of The Pink Unicorn, is -- at first glance, anyway -- a thoroughly unremarkable lady, although this is about to change. A widow living in a small Texas town, she works as a cleaner at the local hospital. ...
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Theatre in Review: The Plough and the Stars (Irish Repertory Theatre)
The Irish Rep's Sean O'Casey trilogy ends on a note of triumph with Charlotte Moore's staging of this little-seen report from the embattled streets of Dublin. Each of the plays is set during a different flashpoint in the ...
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Theatre in Review: Paul Swan is Dead and Gone (Torn/Page)
There's a kind of séance taking place these nights in the Chelsea townhouse once owned by the actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. (Hence the venue's name.) The spirit getting called up is one of the more bizarre, wildly self-invented ...
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Theatre in Review: Lockdown (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)/BLKS (MCC Theater)
Two new plays deal with the complexities of being black in America in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Each of them treads a slightly uncertain path between character comedy and starker political realities, although neither ...
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Theatre in Review: Luzia (Cirque du Soleil/Citi Field)
After a few misfires and a couple of failed attempts at taking Broadway, things are looking up again at Cirque du Soleil. The troupe's latest touring show, Luzia, has some fresh design ideas, a number of excellent acts, and an ...
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Theatre in Review: Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real & Imagined/The Bigot
Our theme today is misfits -- and what a pair these two plays offer up. Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined is the product of Ensemble for the Romantic Century, a company that creates potted biographies of famous ...
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Theatre in Review: Hillary and Clinton (Golden Theatre)
Can this marriage be saved? Better yet, can this marriage be escaped? Or even survived? Perhaps as a warmup for her appearance, next season, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Laurie Metcalf is starring in Hillary and ...
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Theatre in Review: Passage (Soho Rep)
A young woman travels to a country not her own, a colony of her homeland, to start a new life with her husband-to-be. On arrival, she finds herself in a minefield of hidden resentments, feelings of entitlement, and social codes that seem ...
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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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