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  Theatre in Review: The Other Josh Cohen (Westside Theatre)
The quote ad for The Other Josh Cohen includes the following: "It's Seinfeld meets Rodgers and Hart!" I don't know about the Rodgers and Hart bit, but the Seinfeld reference is right on: Like that fabled sitcom ...
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Theatre in Review: The Chinese Lady (Ma-Yi Theater Company/Theatre Row)
Can you make a compelling drama out of the life of a passive witness to history? In The Chinese Lady, playwright Lloyd Suh gives it his best shot, and he has a fascinating situation with which to work. His heroine, ...
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Theatre in Review: Eve's Song (Public Theater)/India Pale Ale (Manhattan Theatre Club)
The challenge -- the sheer, debilitating stress -- of being the member of an ethnic minority living in a white-dominant America is explored in two new works, each of which highlights, in a different way, how intractable the subject can be ...
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Theatre in Review: Days of Rage (Second Stage)/Gloria: A Life (Daryl Roth Theatre)
The 1960s, the decade that remains lodged, like a bullet, in the American imagination, looms large in two current productions, only one of which has anything interesting to say. In Days of Rage, Steven Levenson takes ...
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Theatre in Review: Waiting for Godot (Druid/Gerald W. Lynch Theater, John Jay College)
This revival, from the excellent Irish company Druid, has been dubbed the "comic" Godot -- a strange distinction for a play that premiered in the US with Bert Lahr and has, over the years, been performed by Steve Martin, Robin Williams, ...
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Theatre in Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (The Public Theater)
The air is filled with festive green pennants, salsa music plays, and the cast is in a festive mood for this Midsummer Night's Dream, now playing the Public with a burst of confetti and a flurry of soap bubbles. If you sit ...
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Theatre in Review: The Thanksgiving Play/I'm Not a Comedian...I'm Lenny Bruce
Two new productions put one in mind of the perishable quality of satire. For example, Larissa FastHorse's farce The Thanksgiving Play, now at Playwrights Horizons, is so packed with up-to-the-minute laughs that, ...
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Theatre in Review: American Son (Booth Theatre)
American Son takes one of the most persistent and vexing social problems of the day and makes it seem unreal. The lights come up on Kerry Washington as Kendra, a psychology professor, sitting in a Miami police station ...
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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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