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  Theatre in Review: The Play That Goes Wrong (Lyceum Theatre)
The Play That Goes Wrong is the play that asks the question, Why isn't Michael Frayn calling his lawyer? This new slapstick stage farce, imported from London, is such a blatant rip-off of Frayn's now-classic Noises Off ...
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Theatre in Review: Vanity Fair (Pearl Theatre Company)
It may be that Kate Hamill and Eric Tucker have finally met their dream author in William Makepeace Thackeray. As you may recall, Hamill adapted Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, under Tucker's direction, for ...
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Theatre in Review: The Glass Menagerie (Belasco Theatre)
The director Sam Gold has developed a subtractive approach to classic plays. His 2012 staging of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger unfolded on a narrow strip at the edge of the stage, with nothing much in the way of set ...
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Theatre in Review: Miss Saigon (Broadway Theatre)
When Miss Saigon opened on Broadway in 1992, it seemed too soon for a big, bombastic, romantic musical about the American misadventure in Vietnam. In 2017, it still seems too soon. Shall we try again in 2042? ...
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Theatre in Review: Church & State (New World Stages)
We're starting to see a trend of playwrights who are determined to play serious issues for laughs, papering over painful material with sunny, good-time theatrical devices -- with results that are almost always awkward. Angry Young Man
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Theatre in Review: How to Transcend a Happy Marriage (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)
Extramarital affairs can be very messy things -- you don't need me for nuggets of wisdom -- but must plays about them be so messy, too? Consider the case of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, in which two couples suddenly ...
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Theatre in Review: 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips (St. Ann's Warehouse)
For this exercise in what might be called children's theatre for all, Emma Rice and her crew at the theatre company Kneehigh have teamed up with the author Michael Morpurgo, who also wrote the novel War Horse, the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Emperor Jones (Irish Repertory Theatre)
It's curious how when a play is presented can alter one's perceptions of it; when the Irish Repertory first produced The Emperor Jones in 2009, one's attention was focused on the its savage, if dated, depiction of ...
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Theatre in Review: Latin History for Morons (The Public Theater)
Class is now in session at the Public's Anspacher Theater, with John Leguizamo as our unlikely professor. It's certainly a surprise to see the star of Freak, Sexaholix, and Ghetto Klown adopting an academic ...
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Theatre in Review: Angry Young Man (Urban Stages)
The impact of a work can be drastically affected, for good or for ill, by the narrative method chosen -- a fact illustrated with remarkable clarity at Urban Stages these nights. Angry Young Man, produced in London in 2008, ...
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Theatre in Review: The Price (Roundabout Theatre Company)
There's a clearance sale going on at the American Airlines Theatre these days; the goods include an enormous job lot of vintage furniture plus an extensive consignment of shattered dreams and burning resentments. Once again we are visiting ...
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Theatre in Review: Cry Havoc! (Bedlam at New Ohio Theatre)
Cry Havoc! is billed as a two-act, one-man show, but really it's a one-act show with the world's longest talkback. This is not a small distinction, and how you react to it will almost certainly determine your reaction to ...
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Theatre in Review: The Light Years (Playwrights Horizons)
Steele MacKaye, a prominent theatre figure of the nineteenth century, was what Variety likes to call a "multi-hyphenate," in his case, a writer, director, producer, theatre manager, and inventor. If he is remembered at all ...
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Theatre in Review: Chess Match No. 5 (SITI Company/Abingdon Theatre Company)
If you're a fan of the composer and music theorist John Cage, or if you're curious about him and don't want to think too hard, Chess Match No. 5 may be just the thing for you. The latest in a series of pieces devised ...
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Theatre in Review: Beneath the Gavel (Bated Breath Theatre Company)
In Beneath the Gavel, the members of Connecticut-based Bated Breath Theatre Company want to take you inside the glamorous, intrigue-filled, cutthroat world of art auctions. To do so, they have put a full inventory of ...
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Theatre in Review: Sam and Dede, or My Dinner with André the Giant (Custom Made Theatre Co./59E59)
It may be the oddest couple in twentieth-century culture: Samuel Beckett and André René Roussimoff, aka André the Giant -- the writer who stared into the mystery of human existence and found an uninhabited terrain, and the ...
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Theatre in Review: When It's You (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
Each theatre season has its own identity, its own concerns and questions; as When It's You began, I wondered, could it really be that, in the same month, I was seeing the second solo play about a woman who is connected to a ...
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Theatre in Review: Come From Away (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)
It's a cultural cliché -- an especially tiresome one -- that Broadway musicals are associated with spectacle, often for its own sake; whether expressed in spangled kick lines, hovering helicopters, or intimate Russian cabarets that seat 1 ...
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Theatre in Review: The Gravedigger's Lullaby (The Actor's Company Theatre/Theatre Row)
Few playwrights, in my experience, have made such a head-swiveling change in approach between their debut and sophomore works as Jeff Talbott. He first turned up in 2011 with The Submission, an acid, wisecracking comedy about ...
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Theatre in Review: Spill (Ensemble Studio Theatre)/Sundown, Yellow Moon (WP/Ars Nova)
Two very different new plays illustrate the challenges of dramatizing material that might work better in other formats.
Spill is a piece of documentary theatre about the Deepwater Horizon incident, in which an offshore oil rig ...
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