|
  Theatre in Review: Smart (Ensemble Studio Theatre)
Smart was commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of its program to encourage plays with scientific subjects. In this case, the investment yields a dubious plot device designed to link a pair of wandering plot ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Life of Pi (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)
Whatever you may think of Life of Pi, you cannot deny that Max Webster's production is wildly eventful, thanks to a battery of transporting visual and audio effects. The narrative unfolds with cinematic fluidity, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Bob Fosse's Dancin' (Music Box Theatre)
Dancin', a blockbuster hit in 1978, was the chef d'oeuvre of Bob Fosse, choreographer, director, and control freak extraordinaire; one wonders what he might make of the current revival, which adds his name to the title ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Bad Cinderella (Imperial Theatre)
The title of the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is a misnomer; its heroine hardly rises to the status of "bad." Annoying? Sure. Mixed-up? You betcha. Then again, the show in which she dwells is like a hormonally confused teenager, ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Drinking in America (Audible Theater at Minetta Lane Theatre)
Drinking in America is less a play than a male bestiary, an acute study of the species known as homo horribilis in its reckless mid-1980s heyday. Written by Eric Bogosian as a vehicle for himself before he ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Lunch Bunch (The Play Company/Clubbed Thumb at 122CC)
Lunch Bunch is a workplace comedy with a twist, a culinary entertainment served with piquant hints of frustration and sadness. Playwright Sarah Einspanier posits a quintet of cubicle dwellers who make up the collective ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: A Doll's House (Hudson Theatre)
I worry about the director Jamie Lloyd. A gifted artist, he seems to have slipped into some sort of decline. How else to explain how his productions have become drained of color and vitality? It all started out so well, too: His ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Parade (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
Parade begins with a gesture so sweeping it takes one's breath away. The opening number, "The Old Red Hills of Home," begins in 1863 with a young Confederate soldier bidding farewell his girl. Pledging himself to "a way of ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Sancocho (WP Theatre/The Sol Project)
The title dish in Christin Eve Cato's new play is a stew brimming with meat and vegetables, in this case spiced up with a rackful of family secrets. Cato brings together sisters Renata and Caridad in an East Harlem kitchen for an ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Hang Time (The Flea Theater)
The first thing one sees in Hang Time is an image of such unmitigated horror that one fears director Zora Howard has set an impossible hurdle for Zora Howard, the playwright. It features three Black men, the play's ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Misty (The Shed)
How much self-consciousness can a play handle before it tumbles over? That's the stress test playwright/star Arinzé Kene applies in Misty, a play about a play, or maybe a monologue about a monologue, with a side order ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Black Odyssey (Classic Stage Company)
Playwright Marcus Gardley is no stranger to ambition, having previously dramatized a fictional lawsuit over the killing of Malcom X in X: Or, Betty Shabazz v. The Nation and transferred Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Arden of Faversham (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)
Who wants to kill the title character of Arden of Faversham? Actually, who doesn't? The list of those plotting the murder of this prosperous bourgeois man of affairs begins with his wife, Alice, and her lover, Mosby a (horrors ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Harder They Come (Public Theater)
Ask any show fan and you'll get the same answer: A musical has a score (recorded on an original cast album) and a film has a soundtrack. (In certain theatre chat rooms, if you confuse the two, they will flay you alive.) The distinction is ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Coast Starlight (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse)
The Coast Starlight may be the first play written in the conditional tense. Playwright Keith Bunin assembles a half a dozen strangers on a train headed from Los Angeles to Seattle, focusing on, of all things, an ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: How to Defend Yourself (New York Theatre Workshop)
How to Defend Yourself left me deeply grateful not to be twenty-one. Liliana Padilla's new play, which announces them as a talent to watch, looks at college students exploring the treacherous terrain of dating and sex ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Dark Disabled Stories (Bushwick Starr/Public Theater)
"If you came here to pity me, you can leave." So says Ryan J. Haddad, fearlessly eyeballing the audience at the Public's Susan Stein Shiva Theatre. Indeed, you can check any sentimental notions at the door of this eye-opening, often ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: The Rewards of Being Frank (New York Classical Theatre/ART NY Theatres)
How many actresses can slay when playing Liza Minnelli and/or Lady Bracknell? Christine Pedi long ago emerged from several editions of Forbidden Broadway as a celebrity spoofer nonpareil, especially her peerless Liza, a side ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen Company/Theatre Row)
If, following the 1995 premiere of Crumbs from the Table of Joy, someone had predicted to me that Lynn Nottage would one day become a top American playwright, I would have nicely suggested they pull the other one. A ...
|
|
|
|
|
Theatre in Review: Elyria (Atlantic Theater Company)
Ambition is a great thing in a playwright but, in the case of Elyria, Deepa Purohit's reach exceeds her grasp; this tangled, multi-generational tale might test the skills of her more accomplished colleagues, and ...
|
