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  Theatre in Review: Intelligence (Next Door @ NYTW)
I worry about our playwrights. I really do. Most of the works I've seen in the last few weeks have tackled important issues and asked probing questions, but too often they have been yoked to plots that beggar belief. Whether it was the ...
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Theatre in Review: On Blueberry Hill (59E59)/Blue Ridge (Atlantic Theater)
Two recently opened plays focus on criminal punishment or rehab; oddly, it is the lifers of On Blueberry Hill who find a strange sort of redemption, while, in Blue Ridge, the participants in a warm and fuzzy, ...
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Theatre in Review: Choir Boy (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
Even with the current wave of gay-themed plays landing on Broadway in the last season or so, Choir Boy finds something new to say. Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney wastes no time, crystallizing his original, ...
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Theatre in Review: Chambre Noir (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
Chambre Noir (Under the Radar/Public Theater) This strange, dreamlike, compelling piece takes the audience into the mind, on her deathbed, of Valerie Solanas, one of the strangest personalities to be coughed up by the cultural ...
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Theatre in Review: Minor Character (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
Uncle Vanya gets the chop in this exercise from the theatre troupe known as New Saloon. The piece offers a quick tour of Chekhov's play, using a mashup of six translations, ranging from Marion Fell's 1918 version to one ...
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Theatre in Review: Frankenstein (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
In such theatre pieces as ADA/AVA and Lula del Ray, the troupe known as Manual Cinema has done remarkable things with its own brand of multimedia, which includes the use of overhead projectors displaying images that combine ...
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Theatre in Review: Slave Play (New York Theatre Workshop)
Advance publicity for Slave Play has anointed playwright Jeremy O. Harris as this season's new provocateur, a fearless talent ready to overturn whatever pieties are left regarding race, sexuality, and history. ...
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Theatre in Review: Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine (Signature Theatre Company)
If, in this 2004 work now getting a dazzling revival under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, the great Lynn Nottage hasn't delivered a fully realized play, she at least provides a hair-raising title character to keep us ...
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Theatre in Review: Christmas in Hell (York Theatre Company)
A piece of holiday fruitcake from 1964 sets off a chain of events that throws open the doors of Hell in this relentlessly jokey new musical featuring book, music, and lyrics by Gary Apple. Unfortunately, a fifty-five-year-old bakery ...
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Theatre in Review: Network (Belasco Theatre)
Network, Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 cinematic jeremiad about the fallen state of television news, warned audiences that the media was being destroyed by slick, soulless technology and audience-pandering. Such accusations ...
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Theatre in Review: The Net Will Appear/Bitter Greens (59E59)
While The Hello Girls continues to connect audiences with a vital piece of American history, the other two venues at 59E59 are presenting distinctly odd takes on human behavior. The characters in The Net Will Appearand ...
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Theatre in Review: Clueless, the Musical (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)
I'll say this for Amy Heckerling: She has gone where no one in the jukebox-musical world has gone before. Most such shows -- not the star bios, like Beautiful or The Cher Show, but those with fictional plots, like ...
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Theatre in Review: Noura (Playwrights Horizons)/The Prisoner (Theatre for a New Audience)
Two new productions illustrate the value of simplicity and the trouble that can come from overcomplication. Noura has a timely and fascinating subject in the psychological and spiritual challenges of Iraqi refugees making ...
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Theatre in Review: The Jungle (St. Ann's Warehouse)
The infinitely malleable space at St. Ann's Warehouse has been turned into something wildly unfamiliar, yet thoroughly pertinent to this troubled moment: One enters through a ramshackle wooden hut, past a tiny kitchen where a cook is ...
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Theatre in Review: The Cher Show (Neil Simon Theatre)
A good portion of The Cher Show is devoted to pointing out that, throughout her long career, nobody -- writers, directors, even her first husband, Sonny Bono -- listened to her, even when it came to issues that deeply ...
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Theatre in Review: The Hello Girls (Prospect Theater Company/59E59)
The musical theatre makers Peter Mills and Cara Reichel have the most eclectic tastes, having dealt with subject matter ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the sixteenth-century composer Carlo Gesualdo to life on the other ...
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Theatre in Review: The Hard Problem (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)
Tom Stoppard is a very, very clever man -- amusingly, in the most recent edition of Lincoln Center Theater Review, André Bishop and Jack O'Brien admit that they often embark on productions of his plays without ...
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Theatre in Review: The Tricky Part (The Barrow Group)
I had a visitation from William Wordsworth at The Barrow Group the other night. Seeing, for the second time, The Tricky Part -- I first encountered it in its 2004 premiere -- I kept thinking of the English poet's admonition ...
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Theatre in Review: Downstairs (Cherry Lane Theatre)
Primary Stages gets into the star-vehicle business with Downstairs, which Theresa Rebeck wrote for siblings Tim and Tyne Daly. In addition to being a star showcase, it's an old-school exercise in psychological ...
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Theatre in Review: Thom Pain (based on nothing) (Signature Theatre)
A great many members of the press -- and, based on the Show-Score numbers, a fair number of regular theatregoers -- have found much to love in Thom Pain (based on nothing). I am baffled by this phenomenon. Indeed, I'm ...
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