|
  Theatre in Review: Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre)
Dominique Morisseau's new play is set in a Louisiana high school that, at first glance, appears to be a harmonious place, if only because the different cliques and races keep to themselves. With enviable economy, she sketches in a ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Evening 1910 (Axis Theatre)
The mood is profoundly elegiac these nights at the Axis, where Randy Sharp and Paul Carbonara's new musical presents the experiences of some turn-of-the-last-century immigrants as if preserved in amber. With its view of a ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Place We Built (The Flea Theater)
A showdown with the Budapest police opens a window on the degradation of Hungary's democracy in Sarah Gancher's ambitious and gripping new play. The place referred to in the title is The Seagull, a bar/nightclub/theatre run collectively by ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Crude (Black Lab Theatre/Ars Nova)
According to the program for Crude, it is one in an "energy series" of plays by Jordan Jaffe, each of which is designed to highlight a particular energy source. (He has also written plays about natural gas and wind.) I ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Idiot (HERE)
In their old nightclub act, The Revuers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green did a number called "Reader's Digest," in which they applied the condensed-books method to classic literature, summing them up in a four-line chorus. For example, Gon ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Toast (Jagged Fence Theatre/59E59)
From Eugene O'Neill's plays of the sea to Assistance, Leslye Headland's all-too-believable account of working for a movie mogul, playwrights love to draw for inspiration on the jobs they held when they were starting out. Such plays ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Kentucky (Page 73 Productions/Ensemble Studio Theatre)
Hiro, the heroine of Leah Nanako Winkler's new play, is a woman with a mission. A New Yorker in her late twenties, she is determined to return home to Kentucky for the marriage of her sister, Sophie. Although ostensibly there to ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Butterfly (59E59)
According to the press release, Butterfly is based on Madame Butterfly, but you have to squint awfully hard to see the resemblance. What this brief, wordless piece has in common with Puccini's opera is a supremely put ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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, ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
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 ...
|
