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  Theatre in Review: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Paper Mill Playhouse)
Two red-hot lead performances and a roof-rattling score are the marquee items of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a thundering musical melodrama drawn from Victor Hugo's novel. Michael Arden, usually cast in more ...
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Theatre in Review: Placebo (Playwrights Horizons)
The title of Melissa James Gibson's play refers to a trial for Resurgo, a new pill designed to promote female sexual desire. It is not, we are told, a distaff version of Viagra, which is only about "penile mechanics;" Resurgo "aims ...
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Theatre in Review: The Liquid Plain (Signature Theatre Company)
In The Liquid Plain, Naomi Wallace has constructed a tale of in which the repercussions of crimes caused by slavery are felt across several decades. The narrative includes incidents of rape, escape on the high seas, ...
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Theatre in Review: C.O.A.L. (Confessions of a Liar) (59E59)
Today's math problem involves fractions: C.O.A.L. is a one-person show for four actors: Explain.
It's pretty simple, even to those who, like me, are numbers-challenged: C.O.A.L. has one narrator, but the text is ...
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Theatre in Review: Josephine and I (The Public Theater/Joe's Pub)
Cush Jumbo, we hardly knew you. The British actress made a perfectly solid Broadway debut a couple of months ago in Jez Butterworth's puzzle play The River. But clearly that studiedly enigmatic work didn't make use of even ...
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Theatre in Review: Long Story Short (Prospect Theater Company)
A short piece about a long marriage, Long Story Short offers one set, two people, and 50 years of events. As Charles, the hero, sings, "Don't you wish we could skip the in-between stuff/All the boring everyday routine ...
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Theatre in Review: Fish in the Dark (Cort Theatre)
I feel the need to make a clarification. A couple of reviewers have expressed, with some disappointment, that, with Fish in the Dark, Larry David, a revered comedy pioneer thanks to Seinfeld and Curb Your ...
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Theatre in Review: The Mystery of Love and Sex (Lincoln Center Theater)
At any given moment, you may think you know the people who populate The Mystery of Love and Sex, but I assure you, you don't. The secrets in Bathsheba Doran's play drop as frequently as overripe fruit from a tree in ...
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Theatre in Review: The Audience (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)
It's fascinating to contemplate how many great actresses have enjoyed career highlights playing the queens of England. Helen Hayes made a signature role out of Victoria. Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, and Cate Blanchett offered distinctly ...
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Theatre in Review: The Man of the Hour (Metropolitan Playhouse)
The people at the Metropolitan Playhouse -- a group that really knows how to dig them up -- has disinterred a 1906 work by the writer-producer George H. Broadhurst. A forgotten figure today, his name nevertheless adorns the ...
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Theatre in Review: The World of Extreme Happiness (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)
Few plays this season begin in such blunt, slam-bang fashion as The World of Extreme Happiness. The lights come up on a tiny farmhouse in rural China where a woman is giving birth; she stands, clutching a window sill, crying ...
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Theatre in Review: The Nomad (Flea Theater)
Isabelle Eberhardt is the kind of character no fiction writer would dream up. The Swiss-born daughter of a Russian aristocrat and an Armenian anarchist, she began dressing as a boy at an early age; she also conceived a fascination ...
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Theatre in Review: Big Love (Signature Theatre)
It is a great pity that Tennessee Williams sewed up the title Slapstick Tragedy 50 years ago, because it would be absolutely perfect for the conniption fit currently unfolding at the Signature. Playwright Charles Mee has ...
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Theatre in Review: Fashions for Men (Mint Theater Company)
Fashions for Men is set in a Budapest haberdashery where the principal product is comic irony, impeccably silken, and available by the yard. Ferenc Molnár's comedy pits an almost absurdly virtuous protagonist against ...
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Theatre in Review: Abundance (The Actors Company Theatre/Theatre Row)
Beth Henley wastes no time in disillusioning the two heroines of Abundance, her feel-bad epic about pioneer women. Bess and Macon are introduced sitting at a stagecoach stop somewhere in the Wyoming Territory in the ...
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Theatre in Review: Bright Half Life (Women's Project)
How do you sum up a lifelong love affair in 90 minutes? A tall order, no? As it happens, Tanya Barfield has the trick down cold. In Bright Half Life, we see the decades-spanning relationship of Erica and Vicky -- as ...
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Theatre in Review: John and Jen (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
The mistakes of one generation play out in the next in John and Jen, the 1995 musical two-hander that introduced a young composer named Andrew Lippa. The book, co-written by Lippa and Tom Greenwald, employs a ...
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Theatre in Review: The Winter's Tale (Pearl Theatre Company)
The Winter's Tale in a dining room? Well, why not? Even if it is one of the more stageworthy of Shakespeare's so-called problem plays, it is nevertheless an anthology of fantastic stage devices, wildly improbable plot twists, ...
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Theatre in Review: Five Times in One Night (Youngblood EST/Ensemble Studio Theatre)
You don't need me to tell you that dating is hell, but you certainly may need Chiara Atik to explain how amusing that hell can be. In Five Times in One Night, Atik explores what happens when boy meets girl down through ...
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Theatre in Review: Lives of the Saints (Primary Stages/Duke on 42nd Street)
In "Life Signs," the funniest entry in David Ives' latest collection of theatrical curiosities, Helen, a stately Park Avenue widow, has died -- but she won't shut up. First, little "hellos" pop out of her mouth at random intervals, ...
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