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  Theatre in Review: A Dream of Red Pavilions (Pan Asian Repertory Theatre/Theatre Row)
Talk about ambition: A display outside the theatre housing Pan Asian Rep's current production notes that the novel from which it is drawn is twice the length of War and Peace -- which goes a long way toward explaining the loose ...
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Theatre in Review: I and You (Merrimack Repertory Theatre/59E59)
I and You starts out on a relatively mundane note, only to get more perplexing by the minute. Caroline, a teenager, is alone in her bedroom when she receives an unwelcome surprise visit from Anthony, a young man from her ...
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Theatre in Review: The Burial at Thebes (Irish Repertory Theatre/DR2 Theatre)
I've never been so happy to see Tiresias in my life. As usual, whenever the blind poet shows up, it signals bad news for the members of the House of Oedipus -- The Burial at Thebes is a new version of Antigone by the ...
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Theatre in Review: Wide Awake Hearts (Birdland Theatre/59E59)
The film director at the center of Brendan Gall's new play is an uncompromising artist: In pursuit of his muse, he doesn't spare himself, his wife, his leading man -- and certainly not the audience at 59E59. He's making a film that ...
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Theatre in Review: Our Mother's Brief Affair (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
In the early stretches of Our Mother's Brief Affair, I thought, Linda Lavin should be grateful for playwright Richard Greenberg. A little later, I realized I had it backwards. As Anna, an aging and rather frail ...
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Theatre in Review: Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Stage 2)
Remember the old adage, "As GM goes, so goes the nation?" In Dominique Morisseau's tense, involving new drama, GM is going off a cliff, along with the rest of the auto industry. It's 2008, the year of the Wall Street meltdown and, ...
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Theatre in Review: Key Change (Open Clasp/4th Street Theatre)
It's been quite a season for plays about prison. Whorl Inside a Loop took us inside a writing workshop for male inmates whose prospects for parole were shaky at best. Phyllida Lloyd's production of Henry IV presented ...
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Theatre in Review: LaBute New Theater Festival (St. Louis Actors' Studio/59E59)
Since this is the LaBute New Theater Festival, it's fitting that the most striking offering is the most LaButian: G. D. Kimble's Two Irishmen are Digging a Ditch, which has the audacity and twisty plotting that ...
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Theatre in Review: Noises Off (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
There are so many delightful people doing so many hilarious things in Noises Off that one hardly knows where to begin. Then again, how can one not start with Andrea Martin? As Dotty Otley, erstwhile television star ...
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Theatre in Review: Escuela (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
Escuela is a sometimes gripping, sometimes perplexing exercise in what might be called the banality of armed revolution. Guillermo Calderón's script looks at a group of left-wing activitists in Chile, circa 1987, who ...
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Theatre in Review: The Screwtape Letters (Fellowship for Performing Arts/Pearl Theatre)
Never let it be said that the people at Fellowship for Performing Arts fail to give the devil his due. As "His Abysmal Sublimity Screwtape," an emissary of Satan who provides advice to junior demons assigned to drive human souls to ...
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Theatre in Review: The Institute of Memory (Under the Radar/Public Theater)
Do any of us ever really know our parents? Possibly not; to some extent we are doomed never to fully understand the experiences that shaped them long before we existed. If you agree with this notion, just imagine how Lars Jan feels ...
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Theatre in Review: The Offending Gesture (The Tank/3-Legged Dog/Connelly Theater)
Here's the stranger-than-fiction premise of The Offending Gesture: In 1941, a Finnish businessman named Tor Borg owned a dog named Jackie, who, upon hearing the words "Hitler" or "Heil Hitler" -- accounts vary -- raised a paw ...
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Theatre in Review: Tappin' Thru Life (New World Stages)
In Midtown, it's hot these nights, thanks to this swinging little revue starring Maurice Hines. We'll get to him in a moment, but let's first note that one reason Tappin' Thru Life is such a slick and enjoyable ...
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Theatre in Review: The Changeling (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Believe me, you've never met anyone quite like Beatrice-Joanna, the leading lady -- heroine is far too kind a word -- of The Changeling. Unhappy with her fiancé, she has him murdered, enlisting the grotesquely ugly servant, ...
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Theatre in Review: Sanctuary (Theatre Row)
Susanne Sulby feels bad about the state of the world -- I mean really, really bad. It apparently started when she turned on the TV, sometime in the '90s, and saw news reports about the torture of Albanians in Kosovo. Since ...
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Theatre in Review: Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway Theatre)
Even as auteur directors like Ivo van Hove earn acclaim for radically reconfiguring classic texts, let's consider Bartlett Sher, who, with a few small tweaks, has given us a new production of that oft-revived classic, Fiddler ...
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Theatre in Review: American Dance Machine (Joyce Theater)
Welcome back to American Dance Machine, the company created to explore our almost impossibly rich heritage of musical theatre choreography. Originally founded in the late '70s by Lee Becker Theodore, a Jerome Robbins dancer (in the ...
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Theatre in Review: Phalaris' Bull: Solving the Riddle of the Great Big World (Theatre Row)
A better title for Steven Friedman's solo show might have been The Consolations of Philosophy, if it hadn't already been taken by both Boethius and Alain de Botton. Like them, Friedman wants you to know that the pursuit of ...
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Theatre in Review: These Paper Bullets! (Atlantic Theater Company)
If playwrights can't stop themselves from raiding Shakespeare's larder, they should be more careful about what they steal. (Don't pretend that this doesn't go on all the time: I've lost track of how many musicals have been made out of Tw ...
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