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  Theatre in Review: The Waverly Gallery (Golden Theatre)
That Elaine May has spent more than six decades spreading laughter among us makes all the more remarkable her heartbreaking turn in this immaculate revival of Kenneth Lonergan's memory play. She plays Gladys Green, retired ...
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Theatre in Review: Fireflies (Atlantic Theater Company)
The sky is on fire -- streaked with saturated colors that suggest the universe is burning -- in Donja R. Love's new drama; it's a display matched only by the explosions in the mind of Olivia, the wife of Charles, a Baptist minister ...
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Theatre in Review: Inner Voices (Premieres/TBG Mainstage Theatre)
An eleven-year-old boy named Finn Douglas holds the audience in his tiny palm for forty-five minutes in The Costume, the highlight of this edition of Inner Voices, the occasional series of one-act solo ...
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Theatre in Review: Good Grief (Vineyard Theatre)
Nkechi, the heroine of Ngozi Anyanwu's new play, is numbed by grief, stuck in her life, and unable to make up her mind about anything. As a result, it's hard to make up one's mind about her. Anyanwu has set herself a devilish ...
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Theatre in Review: Prinze (Sheen Center)
The meteoric rise and equally fast flameout of comedian Freddie Prinze is the topic of this frequently wrenching solo show. (He broke through in 1973 and was dead by 1977, six months before his twenty-third birthday.) Of mixed ...
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Theatre in Review: Thunderbodies (Soho Rep)
This, more or less, is the premise of Thunderbodies: The United States has just ended a war in another country, leaving it blasted to bits. Mitigating the sense of triumph that might accompany such an event is an outbreak of ...
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Theatre in Review: The Ferryman (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
Jez Butterworth is a playwright of many parts, alternating trim, enigmatic works such as The River with expansive, broad-canvas state-of-the-nation dramas like Jerusalem. The Ferryman may be his most ...
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Theatre in Review: Renascence (Transport Group/Abrons Arts Center)
The Transport Group is currently presenting Renascence, a musical about Edna St. Vincent Millay, and I can't imagine why. The show certainly doesn't provide any clues.
Not that Millay isn't an interesting subject for ...
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Theatre in Review: The Lifespan of a Fact (Studio 54)
Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, and Bobby Cannavale make such a delightfully oddball trio that for the longest time you might not notice that The Lifespan of a Fact, a comedy about the editing of a ...
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Theatre in Review: Sesar (Ma-Yi Theater Company/Theatre Row)
The creators of solo performance pieces -- especially those based on the artists' lives -- often strain to stand out from the crowd, something Sesar does effortlessly: It's the story of a young man and his father coming to ...
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Theatre in Review: Apologia (Roundabout Theatre Company)
The first act of Apologia positively bristles with hostility -- moments of carefully withheld affection, a bevy of abrasive opinions, a mortifying personal revelation wielded like a knife, and, finally, a brutal son-mother ...
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Theatre in Review: Ordinary Days (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
Adam Gwon is back, and it's nice to have him around again. In 2009, the talented Mr. Gwon made a splash with Ordinary Days -- book, lyrics, and score by him -- and one assumed that we would soon be hearing from him regularly. ...
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Theatre in Review: My Parsifal Conductor (Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater)
Allan Leicht's new comedy focuses on that wacky, crazy, fun-loving couple, Richard and Cosima Wagner, embroiling them in a series of farcical mix-ups that play like the pilot for a sitcom called That Darn Composer, or, ...
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Theatre in Review: Mother of the Maid (The Public Theater)
The Public Theater gets into the star vehicle business with Mother of the Maid, a thoroughly entertaining historical drama that oddly recalls the Broadway theatre of an earlier era. Fortunately, there's a fully charged star at stage ...
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Theatre in Review: On Beckett (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Bill Irwin is at home at the Irish Rep these nights, holding forth on one of his favorite topics, his obsession with Samuel Beckett. It is surely stating the obvious to note that if you don't share his interest, or if his ...
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Theatre in Review: Travisville (Ensemble Studio Theatre)
Many first-time playwrights stick close to home, pulling drama out of their own personal experiences. William Jackson Harper has bigger fish to fry, and he does so, impressively, in this wide-ranging work, which poses a compelling ...
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Theatre in Review: Emma and Max (The Flea Theater)
Emma and Max begins with a display of entitled behavior so awful, it can only have been imagined by Todd Solondz. Brooke and Jay, a married couple, are in the process of firing Brittany, their Barbadian nanny. With ...
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Theatre in Review: Midnight at the Never Get (York Theatre Company)
The York, which, over the years, has given us seemingly every type of musical, now presents Midnight at the Never Get, a show that invents an entirely new subgenre -- call it existential cabaret. The Never Get is a 1960s ...
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Theatre in Review: Goodbody (Crook Theater Company/59E59)
What's a lady to do? Marla, the heroine -- if that's the word I want -- of Goodbody cries out, "I just want to know why I'm on a farm with someone who looks like they've been run over by a lawnmower, why I'm hiding cars in ...
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Theatre in Review: Hitler's Tasters (New Light Theater Project) /Mother Night (59E59)
This past week has produced two very different plays about Nazi Germany. One of the more bizarre facts to emerge about the Third Reich was the existence of a cadre of fifteen adolescent girls who were made to taste Adolph Hitler's food, ...
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