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  Theatre in Review: The Girl Who Jumped Off the Hollywood Sign (Theater for the New City)
In real life, the girl who jumped off the Hollywood sign was Peg Entwistle, who enjoyed a busy few years on Broadway but struggled in the film industry, earning only one credit -- ninth-billed in a thriller starring Irene Dunne -- before ...
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Theatre in Review: Mankind (Playwrights Horizons)
The main interest offered by Mankind is the spectacle of a playwright painting himself so thoroughly into a corner that, by intermission, it's impossible to see how he can extricate himself. As it happens, he can't. Robert ...
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Theatre in Review: After/Margarete (Under the Radar/The Public Theater)
The Under the Radar Festival, an excellent venue to take the measure of the theatre's current avant-garde, has kicked off with two very different pieces about the nature of life, perception, memory, and identity. Together, they offer a ...
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Theatre in Review: How to Be a Rock Critic (Under the Radar/The Public Theater)
The title of How to Be a Rock Critic is misleading; a better one might be A Guide to Career Burnout Before Thirty. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen have devised this solo show from the writings of Lester ...
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Theatre in Review: The Mushroom Cure (Theatre 80)/Cruel Intentions (Le Poisson Rouge)
I rang out 2017 with a couple of oddball novelty attractions, either of which might amuse you but neither of which should be considered mandatory viewing. The Mushroom Cure, a solo show starring the stand-up comedian Adam ...
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Theatre in Review: The Children (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
In her new play, Lucy Kirkwood has imagined an honestly nightmarish situation: a Fukushima Daichi-style disaster on the east coast of England, spilling God only knows how many gallons of irradiated water into the sea and making a ...
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Theatre in Review: Twelfth Night, or What You Will (Fiasco Theater/Classic Stage Company)
I have a question for the members of Fiasco Theater and their directors, Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld: Where's the fire? After a charming opening, featuring a beguilingly sung sea chantey -- the play begins with a shipwreck, ...
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Theatre in Review: A Regular Little Houdini (Flying Bridge Theatre Limited/59E59)
A Regular Little Houdini is written and performed by Daniel Llewelyn-Williams, who turns out to be a regular little spellbinder. Actually, "little" doesn't do him justice: He is a king-size stage presence with leading ...
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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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