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  Theatre in Review: The Net Will Appear/Bitter Greens (59E59)
While The Hello Girls continues to connect audiences with a vital piece of American history, the other two venues at 59E59 are presenting distinctly odd takes on human behavior. The characters in The Net Will Appearand ...
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Theatre in Review: Clueless, the Musical (The New Group/Pershing Square Signature Center)
I'll say this for Amy Heckerling: She has gone where no one in the jukebox-musical world has gone before. Most such shows -- not the star bios, like Beautiful or The Cher Show, but those with fictional plots, like ...
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Theatre in Review: Noura (Playwrights Horizons)/The Prisoner (Theatre for a New Audience)
Two new productions illustrate the value of simplicity and the trouble that can come from overcomplication. Noura has a timely and fascinating subject in the psychological and spiritual challenges of Iraqi refugees making ...
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Theatre in Review: The Jungle (St. Ann's Warehouse)
The infinitely malleable space at St. Ann's Warehouse has been turned into something wildly unfamiliar, yet thoroughly pertinent to this troubled moment: One enters through a ramshackle wooden hut, past a tiny kitchen where a cook is ...
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Theatre in Review: The Cher Show (Neil Simon Theatre)
A good portion of The Cher Show is devoted to pointing out that, throughout her long career, nobody -- writers, directors, even her first husband, Sonny Bono -- listened to her, even when it came to issues that deeply ...
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Theatre in Review: The Hello Girls (Prospect Theater Company/59E59)
The musical theatre makers Peter Mills and Cara Reichel have the most eclectic tastes, having dealt with subject matter ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the sixteenth-century composer Carlo Gesualdo to life on the other ...
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Theatre in Review: The Hard Problem (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)
Tom Stoppard is a very, very clever man -- amusingly, in the most recent edition of Lincoln Center Theater Review, André Bishop and Jack O'Brien admit that they often embark on productions of his plays without ...
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Theatre in Review: The Tricky Part (The Barrow Group)
I had a visitation from William Wordsworth at The Barrow Group the other night. Seeing, for the second time, The Tricky Part -- I first encountered it in its 2004 premiere -- I kept thinking of the English poet's admonition ...
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Theatre in Review: Downstairs (Cherry Lane Theatre)
Primary Stages gets into the star-vehicle business with Downstairs, which Theresa Rebeck wrote for siblings Tim and Tyne Daly. In addition to being a star showcase, it's an old-school exercise in psychological ...
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Theatre in Review: Thom Pain (based on nothing) (Signature Theatre)
A great many members of the press -- and, based on the Show-Score numbers, a fair number of regular theatregoers -- have found much to love in Thom Pain (based on nothing). I am baffled by this phenomenon. Indeed, I'm ...
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Theatre in Review: All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 (Theater Latté Da/Sheen Center)
An extraordinary moment in twentieth-century history is the subject of this carefully wrought, deeply moving piece: the Christmas Eve when, all along the Western Front, World War One briefly halted and soldiers on both sides emerged from ...
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Theatre in Review: Two by Friel (Irish Repertory Theatre)
The Irish Rep is a hive of activity these days: In addition to presenting merry and melancholy takes on the upcoming holidays in A Child's Christmas in Wales and The Dead: 1904, the company is offering in its studio space a ...
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Theatre in Review: Vivian's Music, 1969 (59E59)/Hype Man (The Flea Theater)
Two new plays tackle the always-thorny issue of race in America, in markedly different ways; each is well worth your attention. Vivian's Music, 1969 introduces two characters living in Omaha in the year of the title. Vivian is a ...
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Theatre in Review: The Prom (Longacre Theatre)
You may feel that Broadway is oversupplied with high school musicals -- I've certainly had my moments on this topic -- but The Prom is something different. Less earnest and lachrymose than Dear Evan Hansen, less ...
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Theatre in Review: King Kong (Broadway Theatre)
The newest, biggest star on Broadway needs an entourage of at least a dozen to prop him up and keep him going. I don't mean this in a bad way; it's merely to acknowledge the extraordinary achievement that is the title character of the new ...
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Theatre in Review: Shadow of Heroes (Metropolitan Playhouse)
An ugly, but gripping, slice of twentieth-century European history is recalled in Shadow of Heroes, which details how Hungary's post-World War II Communist dawn was darkened by the shadow of the Soviet Union and ultimately wiped ...
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Theatre in Review: Bernie and Mikey's Trip to the Moon (Strangemen Theatre Company/59E59)
The emotional price of caring for a disabled loved one is the subject of Scott Aiello's new play; in its best passages, Bernie and Mikey's Trip to the Moon dispatches the idea that there is anything inspirational or ...
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Theatre in Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Classic Stage Company)
If Raúl Esparza ever decides to become a demagogue, we're all in trouble. As the title character in Bertolt Brecht's allegory about the rise of a Hitler-like figure, the actor starts out unassumingly, coming across like a ...
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Theatre in Review: Wild Goose Dreams (Public Theater)
Wild Goose Dreams has such a touching and up-to-the-moment story to tell, it's a pity that Hansol Jung, the playwright, and Leigh Silverman, the director, didn't trust it more. You sometimes have to stare very ...
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Theatre in Review: Lewiston/Clarkston (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater)
Lewiston and Clarkston may be twin cities in Idaho and Washington State, but, as rendered by playwright Samuel D. Hunter, they make for unequally compelling dramas. Together, they form an unusually ambitious project: two plays in a ...
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