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  Theatre in Review: Spare Parts (Theatre Row)
Spare Parts is best described as science fiction: The topic is science run amok, and the characters behave in ways that only a not-too-fastidious playwright could make up. Welcome to the lair of Zeit Smith, the Elon Musk ...
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Theatre in Review: Zack (Mint Theater Company/Theatre Row)
Zack is a romantic comedy with an accountant's heart; it's a strategy that worked for playwright Harold Brighouse when he penned the early twentieth-century classic Hobson's Choice, about the rebellious daughter ...
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Theatre in Review: Marcel on the Train (Classic Stage Company)
Marcel on the Train features some impressive feats of juggling, but they're nothing compared to that practiced by playwrights Marshall Pailet and Ethan Slater. Drawing on a not especially well-known incident ...
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Theatre in Review: Blood/Love (Theatre 555)
The vampire musical is back, a genre that seemingly ran its course about twenty years ago but apparently is, you know, undead. The early 2000s saw a rash of them, but Dance of the Vampires, Dracula: The Musical, and Lestat< ...
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Theatre in Review: Bigfoot! (City Center Stage I)
Bigfoot! may set a record for the highest number of comparison jokes in a single night's entertainment. How much you enjoy them will determine your tolerance of this new musical. Commenting on their pollution-riddled hometown ...
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Theatre in Review: The Reservoir (Atlantic Theater Company)
Noah Galvin is the nominal star of The Reservoir, but, really, he is the emcee of it. To be sure, his character, Josh, has plenty of problems, which are aired in some detail in this nervous, tentatively serious comedy, ...
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Theatre in Review: Spread (INTAR Theatre)
Some things never change: The quartet of adolescent boys portrayed in Spread is instantly recognizable, no matter how old you are. As high school freshmen in East Texas, they share the bravado, anxieties, rivalries, goofy in ...
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Theatre in Review: Chinese Republicans (Roundabout/Laura Pels Theatre)
In the Chinese community, this is the Year of the Horse. In the theatre community, it might arguably be the Year of Alex Lin. Delivering a one-two punch of provocative new plays in less than three months, she has immediately ...
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Theatre in Review: Meat Suit or The Shitshow of Motherhood (Second Stage)
Given the declining birth rate in this country, I'm not sure we need Meat Suit or The Shitshow of Motherhood (currently playing at Second Stage/Pershing Square Signature Center), but anyway, here it is, to make of what you ...
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Theatre in Review: Mother Russia (Signature Theatre Company)
When an actor, especially one as gifted as David Turner, is cast as an entire country, you can expect that scenes will be stolen. As, yes, the title character in Mother Russia, who represents the spirit of a ...
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Theatre in Review: You Got Older (Cherry Lane Theatre)
I don't know why we're getting Clare Barron's 2014 family tragicomedy once again, but it's good to have it back, especially in Anne Kauffman's sharply observed production. It constitutes Exhibit A in the argument that the ...
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Theatre in Review: The Tragedy of Coriolanus (Theatre for a New Audience)
Attending The Tragedy of Coriolanus the other night, I couldn't stop thinking about George Washington. I know this seems odd; let me explain. A few days ago, the political commentator Josh Marshall published an essay, "The ...
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Theatre in Review: The Waterfall (Women's Project Theater)
Two-handers are tricky things; unless the playwright finds the right balance of power between both characters, the entire enterprise will be seriously out of whack. That's the problem with The Waterfall, a mother-and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Dinosaurs (Playwrights Horizons)
The Dinosaurs is a stealth piece of writing, a brief (yet surprisingly detailed) play that begins on a confounding note yet quietly exerts a grip that won't be denied. The playwright Jacob Perkins, focusing on the all ...
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Theatre in Review: Hate Radio (St. Ann's Warehouse)
Hate Radio is so far off the map of normal New York theatre that it is almost impossible to describe. So many of the allegedly political works that we get these days involve first-person accounts of personal struggles ...
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Theatre in Review: The Other Place (National Theatre/The Shed)
The Other Place unfolds in an unfinished room, an appropriate setting for a play that remains oddly hesitant in realizing its dark conclusions. We're in the longtime family home of Chris, the unbending protagonist, and it is ...
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Theatre in Review: The Unknown (Studio Seaview)
Among creators of solo shows, David Cale is the greatest yarn-spinner, hooking us with a knack for generating suspense and surprise. If he wrote books, they would be called page-turners. The Unknown may be his most ...
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Theatre in Review: Not Nobody (Twilight Theatre Company/59E59)
The preshow music for Not Nobody includes "This is Not America," by David Bowie and Pat Metheny; it's a smart choice by sound designer Ariana Cardoza for a play that wrestles with an American justice system that, in ...
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Theatre in Review: The Monsters (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage II)
The Monsters offers one of the great pleasures of the theatre, namely the opportunity to see a character transformed in full audience view. At one point in Ngozi Anyanwu's time-jumping new play, about siblings ...
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Theatre in Review: Blackout Songs (The Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater/Robert W. Wilson MCC Theatre)
In Blackout Songs, love and addiction are so inextricably linked that they come to seem like the same thing. The play, by Joe White -- well-known in the UK, less so here -- throws together a young couple at an AA ...
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