  Theatre in Review: Trophy Boys (MCC Theater)
"What are we pretending to be experts on today?" That's the question before the title characters of Emmanuelle Mattana's often delightfully barbed new play. Members of the debate team from a private school for overprivileged boys, ...
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Theatre in Review: Lowcountry (Atlantic Theater Company)
Bad decisions are at the heart of Abby Rosebrock's new play, which depends entirely on its characters reliably acting on their worst impulses. Fortunately for the playwright, they rarely disappoint; less so for audiences who may ...
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Theatre in Review: Duke & Roya (Lucille Lortel Theatre)
We have so many playwrights whose idea of politics extends only to personal identity issues that one is instinctively grateful to Charles Randolph-Wright for tackling the thorny subject of the American misadventure in Afghanistan. ...
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Theatre in Review: Beau, the Musical (Out of the Box Theatrics/Theatre 154)
It's not every day that an actor, playing a singer in a Nashville honky-tonk, sassily characterizes four audience members as "former twinks." Queer-coded wisecracks are the province of New York City's Broadway, not the one in Tennessee. ...
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Theatre in Review: Prince F-----T (Playwrights Horizons/Soho Rep)
You may think you hear enough about the Windsors already without having to attend a play about them. After all, they constitute a longer-running and more convoluted soap opera than Coronation Street or EastEnders. But Jorda ...
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Theatre in Review: Call Me Izzy (Studio 54)
The composition of Jean Smart's face includes an element missing from the rest of us mortals. Whatever it is -- Quicksilver? Mercury? -- it allows her to shift moods so imperceptibly, yet profoundly, that it often takes a second to ...
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Theatre in Review: Prosperous Fools (Theatre for a New Audience)
Taylor Mac's new farce features the members of a theatre company staging a fundraising gala at a major performing arts center, who find themselves entirely at the mercy of a loutish billionaire, a self-aggrandizing movie star, and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Imaginary Invalid (Red Bull Theater/New World Stages)
If everyone involved in this revival (if that's the word I want) of The Imaginary Invalid weren't so deeply convinced that they're in a hilarious comedy, it might be a lot funnier. As it is, Jesse Berger's cast is ...
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Theatre in Review: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company/The Public Theater)
You find me at a disadvantage; the above entertainment is so borderline indescribable that I'm not sure I can convey its singular nature. Worse, if you attend a future performance, it may be quite unlike what I saw the other night. But if ...
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Theatre in Review: Lunar Eclipse (Second Stage)
Lunar Eclipse begins with a shocking sight: Reed Birney sobbing.
If it were virtually any other actor, the moment might pass with little notice. Birney, however, is something different. The New York theatre's most ...
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Theatre in Review: Eurydice (Signature Theatre)
Eurydice, which put Sarah Ruhl on the map some twenty years ago, is a bold stab at a new kind of poetic theatre, reframing one of Western civilization's most enduring and poignant myths with a battery of expressionist ...
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Theatre in Review: Leni's Last Lament (Paradise Factory)
Even history's villains deserve a certain respect, and when it comes to twentieth-century history, there are few more riveting troublemakers than Leni Riefenstahl. One of the original multi-hyphenates -- actress, director, producer, and ...
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Theatre in Review: Goddess (The Public Theater)
Goddess has cycled through many writers' hands, and I fear it shows. When the musical was first announced at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the summer of 2022, it had a book by Jocelyn Bioh, with additional material by ...
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Theatre in Review: O.K.! (INTAR)
O.K.! is a backstage comedy about abortion; that's not a combination I ever expected. The characters in Christin Eve Cato's play are appearing in a "bilingual parody of Oklahoma!" fashioned around the Mexican ...
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Theatre in Review: Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening (59E59)
It is, sadly, appropriate that this entertainment has been booked into Theatre C, 59E59's tiniest venue. Gertrude Lawrence, one of the greatest stage stars of the twentieth century, is more than a little forgotten. The reasons are obvious: ...
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Theatre in Review: The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse (The New Group)
Our playwrights have fallen, collectively, into a retrospective mood lately, examining past historical moments marked by a hope that somehow evaporated. In Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins wonders about the long aftermath of the ...
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Theatre in Review: Real Women Have Curves (James Earl Jones Theatre)
The revelation of Real Women Have Curves: All you need for a captivating musical is a tightly constructed book and score, a talented and ingratiating cast, and slick, fast-paced direction. Who knew? ...
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Theatre in Review: Just in Time (Circle in the Square Theatre)
Here's a spring surprise: Just when the bio musical genre appears all but exhausted, we get the disarming story of Bobby Darin. I mean, Bobby Darin?
There's a kind of gambler's recklessness behind this project. Most successful ...
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Theatre in Review: The United States vs. Ulysses (Once Off Productions/Irish Arts Center)
Our national pastime -- I'm talking about book-banning, of course -- is revisited in this lively, sometimes scattered slice of literary history. It's hilarious that a work as willfully obscure as James Joyce's Ulysses was ever ...
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Theatre in Review: Dead Outlaw (Longacre Theatre)
This has turned out to be the season of immobile leading men: Uptown, at Lincoln Center, Jeremy Jordan, playing the title character of Floyd Collins, spends most of the evening trapped in a mine, pinned down by a rock. In Midtown,
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