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  Theatre in Review: King Kong (Broadway Theatre)
The newest, biggest star on Broadway needs an entourage of at least a dozen to prop him up and keep him going. I don't mean this in a bad way; it's merely to acknowledge the extraordinary achievement that is the title character of the new ...
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Theatre in Review: Shadow of Heroes (Metropolitan Playhouse)
An ugly, but gripping, slice of twentieth-century European history is recalled in Shadow of Heroes, which details how Hungary's post-World War II Communist dawn was darkened by the shadow of the Soviet Union and ultimately wiped ...
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Theatre in Review: Bernie and Mikey's Trip to the Moon (Strangemen Theatre Company/59E59)
The emotional price of caring for a disabled loved one is the subject of Scott Aiello's new play; in its best passages, Bernie and Mikey's Trip to the Moon dispatches the idea that there is anything inspirational or ...
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Theatre in Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Classic Stage Company)
If Raúl Esparza ever decides to become a demagogue, we're all in trouble. As the title character in Bertolt Brecht's allegory about the rise of a Hitler-like figure, the actor starts out unassumingly, coming across like a ...
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Theatre in Review: Wild Goose Dreams (Public Theater)
Wild Goose Dreams has such a touching and up-to-the-moment story to tell, it's a pity that Hansol Jung, the playwright, and Leigh Silverman, the director, didn't trust it more. You sometimes have to stare very ...
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Theatre in Review: Lewiston/Clarkston (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
Lewiston and Clarkston may be twin cities in Idaho and Washington State, but, as rendered by playwright Samuel D. Hunter, they make for unequally compelling dramas. Together, they form an unusually ambitious project: two plays in a ...
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Theatre in Review: Natural Shocks (WP Theater)
Can one be mortally menaced by a metaphor? That's the question hanging over Lauren Gunderson's new play. We are in the unfinished basement, somewhere in the Midwest, of Angela's house; she has chosen this gritty space to address us ...
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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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