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  Theatre in Review: Farinelli and the King (Belasco Theatre)
In Farinelli and the King, the noted theatre composer and musical historian Claire van Kampen turns playwright, creating a vehicle that ideally suits her interests and those of her husband, Mark Rylance. This ...
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Theatre in Review: Once on This Island (Circle in the Square Theatre)
It's strange how changing times can affect one's view of a play; of course, the presence of a visionary director might have a bit to do with it, too. Once on This Island has always seemed to me to be a sophisticated piece of ...
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Theatre in Review: Today Is My Birthday (Page 73 Productions)
Susan Soon He Stanton's style is so breezily amusing that it might be some time before you notice that her play is a virtual glossary of eek-I'm-turning-thirty clichés: Almost every scene in Today Is My Birthday takes ...
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Theatre in Review: Counting Sheep (3LD Art & Technology Ctr)/Awake and Sing! (New Yiddish Rep)
The past week brought two separate exercises in non-English-speaking theatre, each of which is thoroughly accessible, even if one is rather more compelling than the other. Reading in advance about Counting Sheep, you might ...
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Theatre in Review: Who's Holiday! (Westside Theatre)/So Long, Boulder City (Subculture)
The past week brought us two high-concept, low-camp one-person shows, each of which takes a different path to engage the audience. The Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) estate managed to stop Who's Holiday! from being seen last ...
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Theatre in Review: De Novo (Houses on the Moon Theater Company/Next Door at NYTW)
The documentary play De Novo is really a collection of scenes from a tragedy, a ripped-from-the-headlines account of a young man caught in the vast, hulking, indifferent machinery of the Immigration and Naturalization Service ...
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Theatre in Review: Hundred Days (New York Theatre Workshop)/Cross That River (59E59)
This week offers two so-called musicals that are really song cycles given concert presentations. I hope this isn't a trend. Hundred Days introduces us to the Bengsons, a musical duo who will, after their current run, return ...
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Theatre in Review: Describe the Night (Atlantic Theater)
A journal by the writer Isaac Babel links a gallery of characters across nine decades, leaving behind a trail of treachery, deception, and acts of terrorism in Rajiv Joseph's ambitious historical drama, the pieces of which ...
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Theatre in Review: SpongeBob SquarePants (The Palace Theatre)
I think it was the late Clive Barnes who, when lost for something to say about some frail attraction or another, would write, "You'll like it -- if it's the sort of thing you like." I always turned up my nose at such tautologies; it was ...
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Theatre in Review: Actually (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage II)
Some years ago, Manhattan Theatre Club gave us Doubt, in which John Patrick Shanley asked us to decide if the main character, a Catholic priest, was a child abuser, or if the nun who accused him of such was acting out of ulterior ...
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Theatre in Review: Peter Pan (Bedlam/The Duke on 42nd Street)
The press materials for Peter Pan quote Eric Tucker, its director, as saying "[it] feels like the perfect play for Bedlam, because J.M. Barrie's dry wit and humor provide so many thrilling possibilities for ...
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Theatre in Review: Downtown Race Riot (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)
A fragile, troubled family implodes over the course of a single day in Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's new play, which succeeds as both a tense drama and a flavorful slice of Greenwich Village life in the bad old 1970s. There's a major caveat ...
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Theatre in Review: The Parisian Woman (Hudson Theatre)
With its Washington, DC, setting, and the name of House of Cards scribe Beau Willimon on the title page, The Parisian Woman holds out the prospect of giving theatregoers the hot skinny on life in the nation's ...
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Theatre in Review: Diaspora (Red Moon Theatre Company/The Gym at Judson)
Nathaniel Sam Shapiro lists several quotes in the program notes for his new play, including this one from the writer Joshua Cohen: "In America, now more than ever, I'm convinced that we Jews have to hold our family conversations out ...
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Theatre in Review: The Briefly Dead (Adjusted Realists/59E59)
Death is the thing with feathers in Stephen Kaliski's new play. Smartly dressed, by Peri Grabin Leong, in a black jumpsuit with matching feathers on her shoulders and a cunning little hat bedecked with monarch butterflies -- ...
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Theatre in Review: Pride and Prejudice (Primary Stages/Cherry Lane Theatre)
The Bennet sisters have those Wedding Bell Blues -- quite literally so in their latest incarnation, at the Cherry Lane: The Fifth Dimension classic is heard as the first act of Pride and Prejudice comes to a close. This is ...
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Theatre in Review: Harry Clarke (Vineyard Theatre)
Most of us, at one point or another, would welcome the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, but few of us ever go to the extremes of the protagonist of Harry Clarke. David Cale, that spinner of theatrical shaggy-dog ...
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Theatre in Review: Twentieth Century Blues (Pershing Square Signature Center)
It's appropriate that Susan Miller's new play begins at a TED Talk, for, in lieu of drama, it offers a symposium -- or, more to the point, a gabfest -- dealing with issues of import for progressive women of a certain age. The talk ...
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Theatre in Review: School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play (MCC Theater)
The mean girls phenomenon has been so thoroughly worked over in books and films -- not to mention a certain musical coming our way this spring -- that one wonders if a writer can bring anything fresh to it; she can if her name is Jocelyn ...
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Theatre in Review: Muswell Hill (The Barrow Group/Pond Theatre Company)
Jess, the put-upon hostess of Torben Betts' new play, struggles to hold together a dinner party entirely populated by uncongenial souls; Betts has much the same challenge, and he fares only marginally better at the task. Nobody ...
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