George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple is a melodrama. Or, wait, it's a comedy. No, it's an antiwar satire with political overtones. Anyway, you get my drift. It is difficult to pin down…
To misquote Norma Desmond, "Broadway is big. It's the musicals that got small." Though not in 1997-1998. That was a banner time for big musicals with big companies. The Lion King, Titanic, a…
Spike Manton and Harry Teinowitz's Another Shot, now running at New York's Signature Center (but is not a Signature production), is set in an addiction rehab facility. The title slyly hints …
There is an expression among Caribbean islanders that goes something like this: "Come see me is not the same as come live with me." That is a pretty good description of the situation that se…
As Anton Chekhov wrote, if the title song of a musical is interrupted with a legal disclaimer regarding the use of copyrighted material, the first act had better end with a cease and desist …
Director Sam Gold and William Shakespeare. Always expect the unexpected when these two pair up. For instance, when Gold, in his most avant-garde mode, tackled Hamlet in 2017 and, five years …
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it does not necessarily make for a compelling theatrical experience. And when the truth that is being depicted is based on autobiography, the biggest …
Ach du lieber!!! Holy Moly!!! Or even WTF!!! Feel free to quote me once you exit (or stagger out of) the St. James Theatre, where director/mad scientist Jamie Lloyd has unleashed his latest …
A psychoanalyst would surely have a field day with Clarence McCrane, known to all the world as megastar country and western singer and movie actor Strings McCrane, the irresistibly appealing…
One of the pleasures of Vladimir, Erika Sheffer's sturdy new play at Manhattan Theatre Club, is how it allows us Americans to listen in on ordinary Russians' conversations. We've had plenty …
Sump'n Like Wings, now on stage at Theatre Row, is the latest entry from the always intriguing Mint Theater Company, whose aim it is to uncover, dust off, and produce lost or forgotten plays…
Thornton Wilder's Our Town is one American play that feels as though it belongs to everyone. It is regularly read and performed in high schools and mounted by amateur theatre groups across t…
"Content warning for like, everything. Really sorry. This play's really gross," advises playwright Riley Elton McCarthy in the press script provided to reviewers of their psychological Grand…
"It's the end of the world as we know it." You may recall these lyrics to a jaunty song by the rock band R.E.M. from back in 1987. And while Deep History, opening tonight at the Public Theat…
Reviews of new theatre and cabaret recordings.
This won't be a long one, because The Counter is one of those plays where divulging almost any detail might constitute a spoiler. Meghan Kennedy's short, straightforward exploration of frien…
"We are falling off the shoulders of our ancestors." These demoralizing words declaimed by an elder of the Blackfeet tribe comes late in the new musical Distant Thunder, opening tonight for …
One of the many pleasures to be experienced in David Henry Hwang's highly pleasurable Yellow Face, opening tonight at the Todd Haimes Theatre, lies in the splendid way he has of twisting fac…
To be sure, there are many individual moments in which Robert Downey Jr. (making his Broadway debut) and the rest of the game and talented cast manage to grab our attention for entire disjoi…
Playwright Jez Butterworth has set a high bar for himself as a writer, with vastly varied works that include the bombastic Jerusalem, the fanciful The River, and the great crowd-pleaser The …
Your first thought on entering the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons is, hey, this doesn't look like the set for a song cycle. That's what Magnificent Bird and Book of Traveler…
"Fatherland." Has a vaguely Teutonic ring to it, no? But plays don't come more American than Fatherland, Stephen Sachs's distillation of disturbing recent U.S. events and their cataclysmic e…
The political and the personal merge most keenly in Arlene Hutton's one-act Blood of the Lamb, opening today at 59E59 Theaters. It is a humdinger of a play, effectively and scathingly satiri…
It's Irish Rep, and there's a squabbling mother and her adult son onstage, so we know this isn't going to end well. My first thought of The Beacon, Nancy Harris's new play, was, this reminds…
So let me take you back to the original Forbidden Broadway. It's 1982 and we're at Palsson's, an inelegant upstairs boîte on West 72nd Street (it's still there, as the Triad). The stage i…