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  Theatre in Review: Cuckooed (59E59)
A strange tale of personal betrayal is brought to light in Cuckooed. Mark Thomas, the piece's writer and star, is a British standup comic, documentarian, prankster, and social activist -- a kind of UK version of ...
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Theatre in Review: Dear Elizabeth (The Women's Project)
In her notes for Dear Elizabeth, her distillation of the correspondence between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, the playwright, Sarah Ruhl, says, "Reading these eight hundred pages -- these ...
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Theatre in Review: Dead and Breathing (National Black Theatre)
Dead and Breathing begins with Carolyn, who is in her late sixties and ailing, being given a bath by Veronika, her home nurse. Veronika is chatting up a storm, to little response. But, when Veronika goes to answer the door, ...
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Theatre in Review: Ripcord (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)
Is it elder abuse when the elders are doing the abusing? That's the question that occurred to me while watching Ripcord. David Lindsay-Abaire's new play has been designed as a challenge match for a pair of leading ...
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Theatre in Review: Sylvia (Cort Theatre)
In Sylvia, A.R. Gurney explores the eternal triangle: man, woman, and dog. A domestic farce about a Manhattanite who solves his midlife crisis by bonding with the rambunctious stray pooch he finds wandering in Central ...
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Theatre in Review: The Humans (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)
The playwright Stephen Karam is gifted with remarkable depth of vision; nothing his characters do is lost on him. Even the tiniest interactions among the family members convened for his drama The Humans reveal the vast ...
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Theatre in Review: Songbird (59E59)
Songbird kicks off on the highest of notes, as Kate Baldwin, as aspiring singer Tammy Trip, delivers a powerfully rueful ballad titled "Small Town Heart." ("Gonna keep on driving put the pedal to the floor / Gonna keep ...
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Theatre in Review: The Hummingbird's Tour (Theatre at St. Clement's)
If someone could accurately predict the exact date of your death, would you to want to know it? This extremely silly question is considered in lackadaisical fashion in The Hummingbird's Tour. Playwright Margaret Dulaney ...
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Theatre in Review: Travels With My Aunt (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
For an exotic excursion laced with humor and menace, you could do far, far worse than Travels With My Aunt. Giles Havergal's adaptation of Graham Greene's best-selling novel, published in 1969. It's the story of Henry ...
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Theatre in Review: Dames at Sea (Helen Hayes Theatre)
How times have changed: Wasn't it only a little while ago that Broadway musicals were being dismissed as hopelessly retro? (The currently running Something Rotten! continues to spread this canard, presenting musical theatre as a ...
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Theatre in Review: Empanada Loca (Labyrinth Theater Company/Bank Street Theater)
It's the season for ghoulish fun, and if you're looking for a bedtime story guaranteed to keep you up, shuddering, far into the night, Empanada Loca is the show for you. Aaron Mark's one-person drama is, according to ...
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Theatre in Review: First Daughter Suite (The Public Theater)
Barbara Bush as a tragic heroine? You didn't see that one coming, did you? It's only one of many surprises to be found in First Daughter Suite, a wildly uneven, but often striking and surprisingly moving, quartet of ...
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Theatre in Review: Futurity (Soho Rep and Ars Nova/Connelly Theater)
Progress is a slippery, slippery thing: We want to believe in it, no matter how many times we've been disappointed. No matter how terrible things may be, we always want to believe that the next thinker, philosophy, or technological ...
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Theatre in Review: Last Call (terraNOVA Collective and IRT Theater)
Last Call begins on a disconcerting, almost frightening note. We are at the IRT to see Terri Girvin's one-person show about the life of a New York City bartender. Imagine the horror, then, when a woman roller skates on ...
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Theatre in Review: Eclipsed (The Public Theater)
Considering that it stuffed full of horrors, Eclipsed doesn't rub our faces in gratuitous violence or brutality. That's because the playwright, Danai Gurira, understands that a simple, unsensational statement of the ...
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Theatre in Review: Hard Love (The Actors Company Theatre/Theatre Row)
The Actors Company Theatre, which typically specializes in revivals of notable works of the past, introduces us to a fresh face in the contemporary Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, who in turn focuses on a subject rarely seen on the ...
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Theatre in Review: Ugly Lies the Bone (Roundabout Underground)
We've known for years that Mamie Gummer is a good actress; now we know that she is a fearless one. She's the first thing we see in Ugly Lies the Bone, her face obscured by a virtual reality device. Then she takes it ...
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Theatre in Review: Rothschild & Sons (York Theatre Company)
Over the years, The 1970 Broadway musical The Rothschilds has been probed, poked, edited, amended, pulled apart, and put back together. A not-quite-hit in its time, it was tried in a smaller, Off Broadway production and subsequently ...
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Theatre in Review: Perfect Arrangement (Primary Stages/The Duke on 42nd Street)
The arrangement alluded to in the title of Topher Payne's new play may or may not be perfect, but it certainly is more than a little seamy. When the lights come up on aggressively stylish Populuxe living room designed by Neil ...
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Theatre in Review: Clever Little Lies (Westside Theatre/Upstairs)
Can't somebody put together a committee to find a good vehicle for Marlo Thomas? I'd volunteer to take part. Even in Clever Little Lies, which resembles something hidden far back in one of Neil Simon's desk drawers, she is ...
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