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  Theatre in Review: Hamlet (New York Shakespeare Festival/Delacorte Theatre)
The current Hamlet at the Delacorte features the spectacle of a designer destroying a set created for a previous production. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.
In 2019, Beowulf Boritt designed a revival ...
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Theatre in Review: Rock & Roll Man (New World Stages)
Give credit where it is due: The creators of Rock & Roll Man want to reinvent the pop bio-musical formula. But, oh baby, what they've come up with. Of course, such creative initiative is admirable; this musical genre is so ...
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Theatre in Review: The Doctor (Park Avenue Armory)
The Doctor is based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1912 drama Professor Bernhardi, but it takes a direct and deadly aim at the identity crisis currently plaguing the West. The title character, Ruth Wolff, is an astonishingly ...
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Theatre in Review: The Gospel According to Heather (Theatre 555)
Ah, adolescence: The social awkwardness. The hormones. The ability to work miracles. Wait -- what?
These are the dilemmas facing the heroine of The Gospel According to Heather, who cannot be termed your typical teen. For one ...
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Theatre in Review: Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground (Theatre at St. Clement's)
Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground is both a new play and a revival of sorts: It brings back the Dead Celebrity Playhouse format in which a famous person, sitting in his or her living room, relives the past in detail. In this ...
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Theatre in Review: Good Vibrations (Lyric Theatre, Belfast/Irish Arts Center)
The pop bio-musical appears to be headed backstage and maybe that's a good thing. We've had dozens of shows, from Jersey Boys to A Beautiful Noise, about the sheer hell of being rich, famous, and the possessor of multiple ...
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Theatre in Review: Days of Wine and Roses (Atlantic Theater Company)
They've watered down the wine in this well-intentioned but strangely stilted musical about the ravages of boozing. Blake Edwards' 1962 film, written by JP Miller (based on his Playhouse 90 teleplay), remains an astonishingly frank ...
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Theatre in Review: Love + Science (City Center Stage II)
"It's the 80s. It's the best time in the history of humanity to be gay." That line, which gets a bitter, knowing laugh at City Center Stage II, is spoken by Jeff, a young doctor, to Matt, his colleague and boyfriend. Well, sort-of ...
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Theatre in Review: Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons/MCC Theater)
"Wet brain" is the vulgar term for Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, caused by an acute deficiency of Vitamin B1. It's a condition associated with alcoholism, and it afflicts Joe, who staggers around his Scottsdale home, unable to speak but ...
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Theatre in Review: The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre Company)
The Comeuppance will do little advance the popularity of high school reunions, but it offers audiences a fresh and compelling take on the way we live now. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins assembles five high school friends, now ...
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Theatre in Review: This Land Was Made (Vineyard Theatre)
"Back home in Louisiana, we like things just the way they are. Predictable. We got our side of town. They got theirs. Long as we stay outta white folks way, things seem to go smoothly. And it works." So says Miss Trish, the plain-spoken ...
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Theatre in Review: Grey House (Lyceum Theatre)
A cabin in the woods. An impassable blizzard. A cut telephone cord. A car accident that leaves a young couple stranded. And a houseful of bizarre characters: In Grey House, playwright Levi Holloway attempts nothing less ...
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Theatre in Review: Bees & Honey (MCC Theater/The Sol Project)
Bees & Honey begins charmingly and ends in well-earned sorrow; in the middle, however, this collection of scenes from a Dominican-American marriage dawdles rather noticeably. Playwright Guadalís Del Carmen has a fine ...
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Theatre in Review: Primary Trust (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)
Is there anything sadder than William Jackson Harper's smile in Primary Trust? To be sure, its wattage is considerable; every time it appears, the stage becomes a brighter place. But it is a piece of defensive armor, a ...
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Theatre in Review: King James (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)
Sports fandom as a vehicle for friendship -- or, maybe, a substitute for it -- is the subject of Rajiv Joseph's new comedy; it's an especially pressing question when the characters hail from Cleveland, a town where the fans' hopes ...
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Theatre in Review: Bernarda's Daughters (The New Group/National Black Theatre)
For whatever reason, The House of Bernarda Alba has become attractive to contemporary playwrights. What do they see in Federico García Lorca's 1936 drama about an all-female household oppressed by rural traditions and Roman ...
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Theatre in Review: Monsoon Wedding (St. Ann's Warehouse)
Near the end of its first act, Monsoon Wedding -- which has been working hard for nearly an hour and a half to establish a raison d'être -- starts to find its musical theatre footing. As it happens, there are two weddings in ...
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Theatre in Review: Evelyn Brown (A Diary) (La MaMa)
Is it possible to be bored and gripped at the same time? The question came to mind when seeing Evelyn Brown (A Diary), a strange footnote to the career of María Irene Fornés. Produced exactly once, in 1980, and not ...
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Theatre in Review: The Fears (Pershing Square Signature Center)
As it happens, Buddhism is easy to spoof; maybe too easy. That's the takeaway from The Fears, which assembles a support group of adults, all of them traumatized in childhood, for weekly sessions at an Eastern religion center ...
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Theatre in Review: shadow/land (Public Theater)
Erika Dickerson-Despenza is, to my mind, the most interesting new playwright to come out of the Public Theater since Suzan-Lori Parks. An artist of real ambition, she has a kind of double vision, placing intimate stories inside ...
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