The woman sitting next to me at the Daryl Roth Theatre leaned toward her daughter and pointed surreptitiously. "Look over there, there, with the red hair. Do you see her? That's her. That's …
"There is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." "Werner Herzog"Look, Americans a…
Joan of Arc and I have an "it's complicated" relationship. I get the magnetism that keeps theater folk coming back to her, but I think she belongs in the same box, strangely, as Macbeth " th…
Imagine you go to the theater with some friends and then, after the show, adjourn to a bar to talk about the play. Now, there are One-Beer Plays " fine, all right, yes, it was a play, people…
Donja R. Love's Fireflies, now at the Atlantic under the assured direction of Saheem Ali, is a play about the landscape of internalized trauma. Its language and design create a fearful panor…
The Boys in the Band have left the building, and Arnold Beckoff's Broadway transfer is still in previews, but if you're looking for torch songs in the meantime, Midnight at the Never Get has…
Who is Jomama Jones, the rooted and radiant soul diva whose show Black Light, which premiered at Joe's Pub in the spring, has reemerged downtown for a run at the Greenwich House Theater? Acc…
Stephen Sondheim, comparing two big hits by Rodgers and Hammerstein, memorably quipped, "Oklahoma! is about a picnic, Carousel is about life and death." I'm not sure if the director Daniel F…
It always seems a touch sentimental to call a show a "gift" (not to mention dubious " most theater is far from free), but in the case of On Beckett, the oversize shoe simply fits. The b…
Using Bob Dylan's song catalog, the Irish playwright Conor McPherson has written a play with music set in America. And to hear him tell it, and his characters sing it, we the people of the U…
"Thank you all so much for being here!" Heidi Schreck beamed, effervescent in a sunny yellow blazer, as she made her entrance at the start of What the Constitution Means to Me. Then she kept…
Until someone adapts The Great British Baking Show into a musical using re-lyricized Beatles songs (seriously, the possibilities are limitless: "While My Soufflé Gently Sinks," "Hey C…
Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet begins casually and ends by breaking your heart. The latest from the adventurously lo-fi theater troupe Bedlam " which has earned a reputation for joyfully reinvigor…
There's a special kind of cringing reserved for plays that seem like they'll be up your alley and instead get aggressively on your nerves. Watching Moritz von Stuelpnagel's overwrought produ…
Craig Lucas's I Was Most Alive With You, now at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Tyne Rafaeli, is a complex and far-reaching project. It's a family saga, a riff on a biblical tale…
The title of Sharr White's drama The True"about real-life Democratic party insider Dorothea "Polly" Noonan and her relationship with Albany "mayor-for-life" Erastus Corning II"reportedly rai…
It's an easy leap to call Richard Nelson "Chekhovian." The prolific playwright and director, known for his trilogies about American families at political turning points (The Gabriels and The…
Over the course of its self-consciously frolicsome 90 minutes, Jen Silverman's Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties grew on me. Then, after I left the theater, it shrunk on me again. I fo…
As you approach the Nederlander Theatre, the marquee flashes a series of bold all-caps phrases: "BOLD WOMAN"FIERCE WOMAN"FUNNY WOMAN"SMART WOMAN," and finally, inevitably, the title: Pretty …
Before Gettin' the Band Back Together kicked off, the show's producer bounded down the aisle and up the steps to the stage to do a little hyping. He wanted to know how we were all doing that…
There are over 130 bios in the Playbill for Kwame Kwei-Armah and Shaina Taub's musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, now receiving a revival at the Public's Central Park home, t…
At the end of the first act of Marcus Gardley's The House That Will Not Stand, an angry mother stands center stage, a mounting storm whipping at the windows of her home as she rails against …
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the elevator where Jeff Whitty, best known for a musical about the neuroses of New York Muppets, originally pitched the idea for Head Over Heels: "It's …
I bought a cookie at the intermission of This Ain't No Disco. Weirdly, I needed the sugar. For all the insistent, glitter-ball-bedecked, in-your-face-sleazy-sexy exuberance of the new rock o…
A few days ago, the Times published an extensive profile of Young Jean Lee in anticipation of Second Stage's revival of her 2014 play Straight White Men, which marks"in that equally exciting…