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  Theatre in Review: Shuffle Along (Music Box Theatre)
The other night at the Music Box, the sound of tapping feet could be heard even before the curtain rose. Whether it was a last-minute run-through or a calculated effect, it conveyed a palpable excitement, a feeling that everyone involved ...
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Theatre in Review: A Streetcar Named Desire (Young Vic/St. Ann's Warehouse)
Apparently, there is now a school of Ivo Van Hove. It consists of European directors taking classic American plays of the mid-20th century, stripping away anything specific to their period or location, and mounting them on antiseptically ...
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Theatre in Review: Long Day's Journey Into Night (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
In Jonathan Kent's production of Eugene O'Neill's tragedy, the light of an August day fades and the fog rolls in until the four members of the Tyrone family feel cut off from the rest of the world; before the final curtain, ...
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Theatre in Review: Tuck Everlasting (Broadhurst Theatre)
In shows like The Drowsy Chaperone, The Book of Mormon, Aladdin, and Something Rotten!, Casey Nicholaw has a made a fair bid at being his generation's Gower Champion, staging big, breezy production numbers with sly ...
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Theatre in Review: Fully Committed (Lyceum Theatre)
The most delicious case of multiple personality disorder you've ever seen is on display at the Lyceum, where Jesse Tyler Ferguson is impersonating Sam, the harried reservationist at a red-hot Manhattan restaurant, and everyone else ...
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Theatre in Review: The School for Scandal (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
The near-scandalous thing about Marc Vietor's staging of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy of malice is that it contains a fair amount of the latter but not nearly enough of the former. It's a mystery: Vietor has put ...
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Theatre in Review: Waitress (Brooks Atkinson Theatre)
Among musical theatre stars, Jessie Mueller is a most intriguing odd woman out. Most of her colleagues are extroverts class clowns, take-charge types who own the stage the minute they step onto it. Mueller is the quiet girl in the ...
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Theatre in Review: American Psycho (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)
If the people at American Psycho really want to get into the spirit of the entertainment they have created, they should rename it Anhedonia! The Musical. Rarely has a team of top talents so thoroughly conspired to deprive the ...
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Theatre in Review: In the Secret Sea (Theatre Row)
It's typical of Cate Ryan's overemphatic sense of irony that she sets In the Secret Sea, a long-winded debate about abortion, on Easter Sunday. Gil and Joyce, a well-off couple living in suburban Connecticut -- he's in real ...
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Theatre in Review: Vincent (Starry Night Theatre Company/Theatre at St. Clement's)
If you are weary of the standard solo-show format in which an actor, impersonating a Great Historical Personage, faces the fourth wall and tells the story of his or her life, for no apparent reason, you have to appreciate the tack taken by ...
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Theatre in Review: Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Soho Rep)
Alice Birch is a new kind of playwright: She hates words. Well, maybe that's putting it too strongly: Let's say she distrusts words, regarding them with poisonous suspicion. In her view, they are like wicked, unruly children who ...
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Theatre in Review: When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (Fallen Angel Theatre/Theatre Row)
About halfway through Sharman Macdonald's drama, a dispute erupts between Fiona, an adolescent girl, and Morag, her mother; the argument is ostensibly about running to the store for sanitary napkins -- Fiona is in serious need of ...
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Theatre in Review: The Dingdong (Pearl Theatre Company)
In a way, the title of the new attraction at the Pearl (playing in repertory with Stupid F---ing Bird) tells you all you need to know. Mark Shanahan has adapted this farce from Georges Feydeau's Le Dindon, which ...
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Theatre in Review: One Funny Mother (New World Stages)
Dena Blizzard enters onto a stage that looks as if it has hit by a hurricane, with toys and items of clothing scattered everywhere, and starts picking things up, like a dutiful housewife and mother. However, she worries that maybe ...
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Theatre in Review: The Father (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J Friedman Theatre)
Frank Langella said in a recent interview that playing King Lear was "a walk in the park" compared to the challenge of the title role in The Father; this may be the understatement of the year. At least the actor ...
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Theatre in Review: Nathan the Wise (Classic Stage Company)
In 1767, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was assigned to be an in-house critic at the Hamburg National Theatre, thus making him the first dramaturg. One wishes he had subjected his drama Nathan the Wise to some of that ...
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Theatre in Review: Exit Strategy (Primary Stages/Cherry Lane Theatre)
It's appropriate that Exit Strategy is set in a public school because the script suffers from ADD and is in need of remedial help. It leaps from stark confrontations to full-on rants to shocker revelations, with only the bare ...
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Theatre in Review: Death for Five Voices (Prospect Theater Company/Sheen Center)
It was the theatre writer Ethan Mordden who coined the term "floperetta" to refer to musicals, mostly from the early- to mid-20th century, that combined rivers of melody with stilted, florid dialogue and characters right out of the wax ...
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Theatre in Review: White Rabbit Red Rabbit (Westside Theatre)
White Rabbit Red Rabbit has the most bizarre premise of the season. At the top of the show, the producers, Devlin Elliott and Tom Kirdahy, enter and introduce the evening's star -- in the case of the performance ...
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Theatre in Review: Antlia Pneumatica (Playwrights Horizons)
One doesn't watch the plays of Anne Washburn; one eavesdrops on them. Normal, straight-up exposition is not her forte; in her view, the characters' backstories are revealed on a strictly need-to-know basis. Instead, she puts the ...
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