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  Theatre in Review: Invincible (59E59)
It was a funny experience seeing Invincible the night before the snap election that brought Theresa May and the Conservative Party to its knees, for Torben Betts' play aims to examine the cultural and economic divides ...
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Theatre in Review: Bella: An American Tall Tale (Playwrights Horizons)
This isn't a term I toss around loosely, but 42nd Street is becoming the place for theatrical booty calls. Last month saw a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus, in which all of Regency London becomes obsessed with the voluptuous ...
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Theatre in Review: Julius Caesar (The Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater)
The plan was to give Julius Caesar a ripped-from-the-headlines quality; instead, this production, running in Central Park through this weekend, is making headlines. Even as theatre fans watched the Tony Awards on ...
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Theatre in Review: Somebody's Daughter (Second Stage Uptown)
Chisa Hutchinson's new drama could have been called Three Asian American Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown -- and the thing that drives them all crazy is the culture in which they were born. Kate Wu, a high school ...
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Theatre in Review: The Artificial Jungle (Theater Breaking Through Barriers at Theatre Row)
Charles Ludlam's final work is all about lust and homicide in a Lower East Side pet shop. The owner, Chester Nurdiger, is an empty-headed motormouth who is babied by his dotty mother. Chester's wife, Roxanne, whose main activity is ...
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Theatre in Review: Woody Sez (Irish Repertory Theatre)
Environmental disaster, the demonization of immigrants, authoritarian political figures, the yawning gulf between rich and poor: I am, of course, talking about America in the 1930s, not 2017, although you weren't sure about that, were you? ...
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Theatre in Review: A Hunger Artist (The Tank/Flint & Tinder)
The Tank's Flint & Tinder series has given us all sorts of good things -- it has been a hive of Drama Desk Award-nominated work -- but, in my experience, it has never presented anything as hilarious and macabre as A Hunger Artist< ...
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Theatre in Review: Animal (Atlantic Theater Stage II)
Rebecca Hall is an actress of such coruscating intelligence that she can even make madness seem lucid. As Rachel, who is under the care of a psychiatrist for reasons that only gradually become apparent, she manages to make clear ...
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Theatre in Review: The End of Longing (MCC Theater at Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Matthew Perry has labored so long, and so successfully, in the world of television sitcoms that, apparently, he is having trouble getting out of that particular creative mindset. As the author and star of The End of Longing ...
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Theatre in Review: Master (Foundry Theatre at Irondale Center)
Master is a museum exhibit, a memorial service, and a family drama -- and thoroughly haunting on all three counts. You arrive at the Irondale Center to find a sign saying, "Welcome to Uncle Jimmy's Celebration of Life. ...
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Theatre in Review: The Government Inspector (Red Bull Theater at The Duke on 42nd Street)
The first thing we see in Jesse Berger's production of Nikolai Gogol's classic farce is a collection of town officials -- a distinctly shabby lot, it should be noted -- moving in a circle, their collective mood one of high ...
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Theatre in Review: Sweetee (Pershing Square Signature Theatre Center)
Seeing Sweetee the other night, I had the oddest sensation -- of attending a musical that has yet to be written. Don't get me wrong: Sweetee is a full-length show, running two and a quarter hours. It has a cast of ...
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Theatre in Review: Rotterdam (59E59)
Rotterdam begins with Alice, a young woman in her early thirties, seated at her laptop, worrying over the message she has written (and rewritten and re-rewritten) to her parents, announcing that she is (a) a lesbian and (b) ...
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Theatre in Review: The Boy Who Danced on Air (Abingdon Theatre Company)
The best thing about the new attraction at the Abingdon is the chance to catch up with composer Tim Rosser and librettist Charlie Sohne, artists with distinctive voices and the nerve to take on difficult, challenging material ...
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Theatre in Review: Can You Forgive Her? (Vineyard Theatre)/Building the Wall (New World Stages)
Two of our better playwrights have come a cropper in the last week or so in plays that attempt to make sense of this unhinged American moment. In works like After Ashley, Becky Shaw, and Rapture Blister, Burn, Gina ...
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Theatre in Review: The Whirligig (The New Group at Pershing Square Signature Center)
The first thing we see in The Whirligig -- even before the play begins, as we enter the theatre -- is a young woman lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV drip. Her name is Julie, she is 21, and she is dying from a ...
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Theatre in Review: Venus (Signature Theatre)
The title character of Suzan-Lori Parks' play is Saartjie Baartman, a member of the Khoikhoi tribe, from what is now South Africa. In 1810, the twenty-year-old Baartman was taken to England, where she was put on display as The Venus ...
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Theatre in Review: Sojourners/Her Portmanteau (New York Theatre Workshop)
These paired offerings are part of a projected nine-play cycle about the history of one Nigerian American family. Certainly, the playwright, Mfoniso Udofia, doesn't lack for ambition. I am reliably informed that Udofia doesn't ...
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Theatre in Review: The Lucky One (Mint Theater Company at Theatre Row)
"Let's all talk about Gerald." So says Tabitha Farringdon, the in-house grande dame in A. A. Milne's drama, written in 1917 and first produced, on Broadway, in 1922. Tabitha's irony is lost on her relatives, all of whom live ...
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Theatre in Review: Seven Spots on the Sun/Derren Brown: Secret
In MartÃn Zimmerman's new drama -- presented by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in association with The Sol Project -- the cankered legacy of civil war in a South American country breeds fresh horrors in peacetime. The locale is ...
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