108 stories by "Harvey Perr"
TOOT-TOOT-TOOTSIE, HELLO! I'm here to sing the praises of all those musical comedy freaks who have been jonesing for a contemporary musical that will bring back, in some new form, the golden…
SO WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE? As Shakespeare said, "Good wine needs no bush." Thus, there is no need to add to what New Yorkers have already discovered, that no matter how many productions of Fiddl…
SEND IN THE CLOWNS A bloody war is ended. The bodies pile up. Who will clean up the mess? What to do? What to do? Oh, yes. Send in the clowns. On this note, Taylor Mac, the certified genius …
TEMPUS FUGIT There are great performance artists and, rarer still, there are great artists who perform. John Kelly is both. His Time No Line is a quietly breathtaking meditation on his life …
A SMALL STEP There is a stillness in B.D. Wong that is the embodiment of grace. In his exquisitely calibrated portrayal of Wen Chang, a Chinese party loyalist, Wong walks a delicate line bet…
MAYOR DREAMS COME TRUE SOME OTHER TIME The 42nd Street Moon production of Fiorello is just fine, if you allow for the looseness of staging, the clumsy choreography, and the overall sensation…
THE BOYS IN THE BLAND "Every day a little death/In the parlor, in the bed." Thus spake Stephen Sondheim in his waltz time operetta A Little Night Music. And it is not totally frivolous to st…
CARRYING BAGGAGE Although it is written with an almost childlike simplicity, Mfoniso Udofia's Her Portmanteau tells a wrenching tale of the profound effect that separation creates when a wom…
YOU MOSCOW, YOU MOSCOW The avant-garde seems more interested in re-invention these days than in invention, but from the point of view of someone who had thought that there was nothing new un…
B-SIDE MYSELF Breathes there a soul who hasn’t sung along with a favorite album? And, ah, if the songs we sing were rare and challenging and related to one’s life, we might have …
MAKE A CALL ON THIS INSPECTOR In Stephen Daldry’s architectually inspired revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an astute mixture of comedy of manners/tragedy of class/…
A TRIUMPHANT TRAINWRECK If you've never applauded a trainwreck, be prepared to do so when you see Peter Quilter's End of the Rainbow. I am not talking about the gossip-driven, hardly revelat…
FORGET YOUR TROUBLES. COME ON, GET HAPPY. When the lights go up on Wild With Happy, we see Colman Domingo, in cool shades and wearing his best Paris-Is-Burning attitude, speak his openin…
MAXWELL COUNTRY: WHERE HEROES ROAM There is only one Richard Maxwell and, in his extraordinarily textured Neutral Hero, he has gone back to his roots. For those of us who have longed for…
WHERE IS DR. STRANGELOVE WHEN YOU NEED HIM? The best thing about Joe Kern's Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them is its title. And if it bears a cl…
SOLD: ONE HOUSE. AT A DISAPPOINTING RATE. Since Daniel Fish has been certified a new genius by New York's avant-garde elite, I am loath to label him a hoax on the basis of having seen ju…
SMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING Andrea Marcovicci, who reinvented the torch song for a new generation, has looked our depression/recession straight in the face and decided that what she…
THE JOURNEY HOMEWARD The title character in Simon Stephens's freshly observed new play, Harper Regan, is at a crossroads in her life, in the midst of what we used to call a midlife crisis.Â…
WOE AND BEHOLD When John Kelly descends into the regions of darkness, he does so with a soaring intensity that is intoxicating and never depressing. In his new cabaret act at Joe's Pub, Kell…
"Satire," as George S. Kaufman once famously said, "is what closes Saturday night."Â Though written in jest, it has served as an admonition for playwrights in pursuit of satire. In this a…
WHO’LL SAVE THE PLOW HORSE? War Horse is almost critic-proof. It has been garnering all sorts of Best Play awards, but, in truth, there are all sorts of new, unrecognized categories fo…
THE SIZZLE’S A FIZZLE It is an uncontestable fact that every play August Wilson wrote justifies being looked at again and again. It has been fascinating to see how the moral, political…
FOLLIES IN HOLLYWOOD Follies has always been a fabulous musical. It may not be Stephen Sondheim‘s greatest musical, but it is the Stephen Sondheim musical that his admirers most desper…
THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TOO WELL-MANNERED David Auburn‘s The Columnist gets the good part over with in the first scene and then proceeds to become exactly the sort of play we might have…
Stage and Cinema sent Harvey Perr back to the east coast to catch up on this very busy time of the season in New York City theater, when new shows open one right after the other and Tony fev…
