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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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Theatre in Review: Joan of Arc: Into the Fire (The Public Theater)
Promises, promises: Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, a new musical by David Byrne, promised to be as exciting as Here Lies Love, his disco pop opera about the rise and fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. (This isn't ...
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Theatre in Review: Villa (The Play Company at The Wild Project)
There are dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of plays about history's worst episodes; plays about the Holocaust alone would fill several bookshelves. There are significantly fewer plays, I think, about the challenge of surviving such events: When ...
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Theatre in Review: White Guy on the Bus (Delaware Theatre Company/59E59)
Bruce Graham's new play is about the terrible effects of racism -- on white people. That's certainly a fresh slant. The white guy of the title is Ray, an investment counselor of a certain age, who has grown tired and ashamed of his ...
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Theatre in Review: The Outer Space (The Public Theater/Joe's Pub)
Do you ever dream of fleeing the pains of city life for something more salubrious -- say, to orbit around the planet Mercury? That's the fantastically fey premise of The Outer Space, the latest song cycle to emerge from the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Moors (The Playwrights Realm/The Duke on 42nd Street)
The characters in Jen Silverman's new play, inhabitants of a mansion in a bleak corner of England, often wander off onto the surrounding moors, all but vanishing into the fog that appears to be a permanent fixture of life there. ...
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Theatre in Review: 9 Circles (Sheen Center)
With that title, you won't be surprised to hear that Bill Cain's play draws its structure from the Inferno section of Dante's Divine Comedy, and it's difficult to imagine a better guide through its descending horrors than the ...
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Theatre in Review: Linda (Manhattan Theatre Club)
There are rumors of a hurricane in Penelope Skinner's new play, but, when it arrives it proves to be little more than a downpour; even at full force, how could it compete with the play's torrential title character, especially as ...
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Theatre in Review: Omega Kids (New Light Theater Project/Access Theater)
In Omega Kids, Noah Mease hasn't just written a play, he has invented an entire superhero universe; Omega Kids is the title of a fictional franchise about supernaturally gifted teens -- sort of a junior division of the ...
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Theatre in Review: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Barrow Street Theatre)
In this new production of the classic musical, you come for the pies and stay for the horror. Rachel Edwards, of the London theatre company Tooting Arts Club, had the notion of producing Sweeney Todd -- the grisliest ...
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Theatre in Review: On the Exhale (Roundabout Underground)
In On the Exhale, a play about gun violence in America, Marin Ireland takes aim at the audience and fires; she is armed only with Martín Zimmerman's text and her own formidable talent, but it's enough to leave ...
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Theatre in Review: Wakey, Wakey/C. S. Lewis On Stage: The Most Reluctant Convert
Suddenly, the theatre seems vitally interested -- almost obsessed, really -- with the Last Things. A few days ago, I saw Everybody, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' reworking of the Tudor-era classic Everyman, in which a human ...
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