Surviving the Bad News. Week in New York Theater
The bad news hits relentlessly, from the horrific — on Halloween, New York endures the worst terrorist attack since 9/11 Â — to the ugly — accusations of sexual harassmen…
The bad news hits relentlessly, from the horrific — on Halloween, New York endures the worst terrorist attack since 9/11 Â — to the ugly — accusations of sexual harassmen…
That Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother is fated and " 2,500 years after Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex " familiar. But Luis Alfaro's modern adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy, set…
“M Butterfly” has returned to Broadway after 30 years, not so much revived as revised. It was risky for playwright David Henry Hwang to tweak his career-making, Tony-winning play…
In the five Broadway shows opening in November, Amy Schumer and Uma Thurman are making their Broadway debuts; playwrights Ayad Akhtar and Steve Martin are delivering new plays; and two shows…
At one moment in "Stuffed," a scattershot play about our disordered relationship with food, Lisa Lampanelli talks with disdain about a skinny friend of hers who turned down dessert, saying '…
Before Hamilton, A Chorus Line, Hair; before Joseph Papp built the Public Theater into an institution, he was faced with a fight for survival of his newfound free Shakespeare in Central Park…
Jason Alexander plays a Mama's boy who recently married a "Puerto Rican firecracker" half his age; Sherie Rene Scott, a twice-widowed Greek bombshell, is shacking up with a dumb, moon-struck…
This is a tennis match? There's no net, no ball, no racquet, and no final score, although the set at Roundabout's Off-Broadway theater does include a scoreboard. There is only the whoosh or …
Diller Island is back! Plans for Pier 55, Barry Diller's arts complex on the pier off 14th Street — with theatrical productions organized by such experienced hands as playwright George…
"Drugs and alcohol have never let me down. They have always loved me," Emma (Denise Gough) tells the doctor at the rehab clinic, not quite halfway through Duncan Macmillan's play. Her commen…
Two killers in adjoining prison cages face off about God in this killer revival of one of the earliest plays by Stephen Adly Guirgis, the streetwise New York playwright of such acclaimed rec…
"Ferguson," a play by Phelim McAleer, presents verbatim testimony from the Grand Jury that declined to indict white Police Officer Darrell Wilson for the August 9, 2014 shooting death of bla…
In honor of the opening tonight of the revival of Jesus Hopped the A Train, and the launch of the 2017-2018 Signature residency of Stephen Adly Guirgis, below is my April, 2011 review of Gui…
It's crazy, says Michael Urie as Arnold, that "after all these years I'm still trying to justify my life." Arnold means his life as a gay man, and though he is talking specifically to his mo…
Fifty years ago, Hair was the very first show to play in the old Astor mansion, which was transformed into Joseph Papp’s first year-round Public Theater. (even though it feels like the…
Café Play is a site-specific work of theater that's being held at four different times of day in the back dining room at the Cornelia Street Café, with different food choices depending on …
In "Burning Doors," Belarus Free Theatre's latest arresting, arousing, athletic and anarchic play about state-sponsored injustice, one of the eight cast members strips naked as he tells the …
The Siege, a play dramatizing the 2002 siege by armed Palestinians of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, is in several ways the exact opposite of Oslo, the last drama about the Palesti…
It took five minutes into the revival of "Time and the Conways" starring Elizabeth McGovern to realize this was no "Downton Abbey," Â the TV series that for six seasons featured McGovern a…
Bruce Springsteen sings 15 songs, and reads from a teleprompter to tell stories that were also in his year-old memoir, "Born to Run," in a Broadway debut  that has the critics cheering; s…
Nearly everything about "Androboros" makes it sound like a must-see show. It was America's first published play, printed in 1714, yet there is no record it has ever been publicly performed u…
Playwright Annie Baker and multidimensional theater artist Taylor Mac are among the 24 winners of the 2017 Macarthur Foundation "Genius" Grants. Baker, 36, whose "The Flick" won the 2014 Pul…
There are moments in the "Measure for Measure" by experimental theater company Elevator Repair Service at the Public that offer the purest Shakespeare on any New York stage; this occurs when…
Even on Columbus Day, Christopher Columbus has largely gone out of favor " in America, and on stage. The closest recent nod to Columbus on a New York stage was a character named Before Colum…
Theaterlovers will recognize the sample from the song "Maria," from West Side Story," — “Say it soft and it's almost like praying." Puerto Ricans will recognize the names of all …