Video has a starring role in the dazzling new revival of West Side Story.
UNIRONIC ‘JAGGED LITTLE PILL’ AIMS TO SAVE THE PLANET: REVIEW
The world is in crisis. Jagged Little Pill is on it.
Gun violence? “Fear has no place in our schools,” an onstage placard reads. Climate change? Name-checked in another sign. Rape? The musical dramatizes an attack via metaphorical modern dance. Opioid addiction? The show’s matriarch buys and pops down black market Oxycodone, a scene played out forward and in reverse.Continue Reading
DIVORCED. BEHEADED. BOFFO: ‘SIX’ REVIEW
CAMBRIDGE, MASS — Six, the pop-concert musical featuring the wives of Henry VIII cracking wise and woeful about their tragic destinies, is an inventive and exuberant take on 16th-century history for the Snapchat generation and beyond.Continue Reading
SARNA LAPINE REINVENTS ‘ANNIE GET YOUR GUN’: REVIEW
Sparkling lead performances help make Bay Street Theater’s new Annie Get Your Gun a warm, nostalgic visit to an earlier era.Continue Reading
BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: ‘MOULIN ROUGE’ REVIEW
Three decades after The Phantom first dropped his chandelier in New York and Jean Valjean took up pursuit here, along comes another Paris-based musical spectacle and prospective blockbuster.Continue Reading
MERCEDES RUEHL IN SAG HARBOR CAMPUS POWER PLAY: REVIEW
Alan Fox’s Safe Space at Bay Street Theater is a provocative exploration of academic freedom in our call-out culture — and a three-character cage match to control the narrative during a campus crisis.Continue Reading
‘A STRANGE LOOP’ EXPANDS BOUNDARIES: REVIEW
Did he really just say that? And sing that?Continue Reading
DANIELLE BROOKS IN JOYOUS ‘MUCH ADO:’ REVIEW
Halfway through the first act of Shakespeare in the Park‘s Much Ado About Nothing, I found myself on Danielle Brooks’ lap.Continue Reading
SUSAN SARANDON, R&H MIX AWKWARDLY IN JESSE EISENBERG’S ‘HAPPY TALK’: REVIEW
“I always thought that my lot in life was to help people en masse,” pontificates Susan Sarandon as an unbearable community theater diva in Jesse Eisenberg’s half-baked new play, Happy Talk.
“Through my work. People see me on stage. They see the human condition — it filters through me — and maybe they learn a little something about themselves,” Sarandon’s character, Lorraine, says.Continue Reading
LONDON ‘MAN OF A LA MANCHA’ SCORES: REVIEW
LONDON — Man of La Mancha is being revived at the London Coliseum, starring Kelsey Grammer as a blustery Don Quixote. Directed by Lonny Price, with the English National Opera’s 30-piece orchestra, it’s a luscious delight.
For the show — the 1966 Tony Award winner for Best Musical — lyricist Joe Darion and composer Mitch Leigh crafted a perfect score, built on a base of Spanish guitars periodically punctured by explosions of brass.Continue Reading
