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  Theatre in Review: What Did You Expect? (The Public Theater)
The newspapers, airwaves, and Internet are so full of reports trying to explain how this country got into its current predicament that, really, you could spend all day trying to take them in. But more and more, I'm relying on Richard ...
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Theatre in Review: All the Ways to Say I Love You (MCC Theater at Lucille Lortel Theatre)
It's like the title card in a boxing match -- Judith Light vs. Neil LaBute -- in which one of the most honest, probing actresses currently working in New York is pitted against a playwright known for his hopeless addiction to ...
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Theatre in Review: Nat Turner in Jerusalem (New York Theatre Workshop)
Nat Turner in Jerusalem introduces us to Nathan Alan Davis, a very interesting young writer who, a play or two down the road, is going to give us something really interesting. But not just yet: His current effort ...
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Theatre in Review: Marie and Rosetta (Atlantic Theater Company/Linda Gross Theater)
Marie and Rosetta begins with an arrestingly strange image: A middle-aged woman, seated in a room filled with coffins, having her makeup attended to by a young lady. You could sense the puzzled silence in the audience when ...
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Theatre in Review: The Encounter (Complicite/Golden Theatre)
In The Encounter, Simon McBurney gets inside one's head, but he never penetrates one's heart or mind; the result is a fascinating, if arguably wrong-headed, technical exercise that one can admire for its achievement ...
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Theatre in Review: Where Did We Sit On the Bus? (Ensemble Studio Theatre)
At first, Brian Quijada comes across in his solo show as the odd love child of Lin-Manuel Miranda and John Leguizamo -- the former for the lengthy passages of freestyle rap that carry the narrative and the latter for Quijada's ...
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Theatre in Review: A Taste of Honey (The Pearl Theatre Co.)
Nothing ages faster than another season's act of provocation; the plays remembered most for their unusual frankness, their eagerness to shatter taboos, often have surprisingly little to say for themselves a few decades on. All too often, ...
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Theatre in Review: Fiorello! (Berkshire Theatre Group at East 13th Street Theater)
What with acclaimed Broadway revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and She Loves Me, along with an Off Broadway run of Rothschild and Sons, a revised version of The Rothschilds, it's safe to say that this is the best ...
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Theatre in Review: Bliss (Black Moon Theatre Company/The Flea Theater)
This one separates the men from the boys, or maybe the Buddhists from everyone else. Bliss is so devoted to its own particular notion of the sublime, is so in love with its distinctly mandarin style, that entertainment is ...
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Theatre in Review: Dead Shot Mary (Bridge Theatre at Shetler Studios)
Robert K. Benson unearths a fascinating slice of New York City history in Dead Shot Mary, and it's a pity that he doesn't do something more interesting with it. The protagonist of this solo show is Mary Shanley, ...
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Theatre in Review: Maestro (59E59)
One of the twentieth century's most fascinating, and polarizing, personalities comes to life in all his maddening contradictions in Maestro. That would be Leonard Bernstein, conductor, composer, and all-around celebrity -- ...
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Theatre in Review: Aubergine (Playwrights Horizons)
For a play about the salubrious effects of good food, Aubergine could use a little spicing up. Julia Cho has cooked up a comic drama about the members of a fractured family taking part in a death watch -- subject ...
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Theatre in Review: Bears in Space (Collapsing Horse/59E59)
Bears in Space starts out with a solid laugh as the show's narrator, known as the Story Keeper -- and a bit of a Jane Austen freak -- introduces his three sons, Bertram, Darcy, and Lady Susan Vernon. For a brief, flickering ...
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Theatre in Review: The Trojan Women (The Flea Theater)
Ellen McLaughlin treats Euripides' tragedy, about the aftermath of the siege of Troy, with a very free hand in her adaptation, but she never loses contact with the original text's stark portrait of women in wartime, subject ...
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Theatre in Review: The Wolves (The Playwrights Realm/The Duke on 42nd Street)
The Wolves is the name of a girls' high school soccer team, and Sarah DeLappe has assigned herself quite a test in portraying its members: The action of the play unfolds entirely during a series of warmup sessions on ...
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Theatre in Review: Spamilton (The Triad)
Has Gerard Alessandrini, Broadway's court jester since (seemingly) the dawn of time, changed his ways? In every edition of Forbidden Broadway since 1982, our reigning stage satirist has laid waste to an entire season's worth ...
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Theatre in Review: Toruk -- The First Flight (Cirque du Soleil/Barclays Center)
Toruk, one of two Cirque du Soleil productions to pass through New York this fall -- the other is Kurios, which opens on Randall's Island later this month -- is undeniably spectacular. When it comes to deploying ...
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Theatre in Review: Crackskull Row (The Cell/Workshop Theatre)
One look at Daniel Geggatt's set for Crackskull Row and you know that you are in for an evening of unrelieved squalor. The script for Honor Molloy's drama calls for "a shitheap" somewhere in Dublin, and the ...
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Theatre in Review: Caught (The Play Company/La MaMa)
This is one of the more confounding reviews I've ever had to write, because there's practically nothing I can tell you about the series of schemes, fakeouts, and reversals that is Christopher Chen's Caught: Really, the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Good Earth (Motherlode/The Flea Theater)
A Welsh town's struggle for survival is filtered through the lives of five characters in The Good Earth, a play/performance piece devised by the members of the Wales-based theatre company Motherlode. Bewildered Americans ...
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