Halfway through the first act of Shakespeare in the Park‘s Much Ado About Nothing, I found myself on Danielle Brooks’ lap.Continue Reading
GENDER-BENDING ‘COMPANY’ IMPROVES ON PERFECTION: REVIEW
Editor’s note: There are talks to bring London’s ‘Company’ to Broadway, and last we heard nothing was set. For now, tickets appear to be plentiful for the run at the Gielgud Theatre through March 30.
LONDON — The show that changed everything may never be the same.Continue Reading
‘THE JUNGLE’ IS POWERFUL, HAUNTING & UNIFYING: REVIEW
St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, has been recast as a crowded and vibrant refugee camp called the Calais Jungle on the coast of France. The theater’s ticket booth is in a ramshackle hut, its bar relocated to a dome of canvas and metal. The audience doesn’t so much sit as huddle, as if around a campfire.Continue Reading
‘OKLAHOMA!’ IN DUMBO IS A BOLD TAKE ON A PERFECT MUSICAL: REVIEW
Some theatrical ideas are so ambitious it almost doesn’t matter whether they succeed or fail – the fun is in seeing them play out. In his audacious, stripped-down staging of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, which opened Sunday at St Ann’s Warehouse, director Daniel Fish exposes the repression, lust, and violence that always lay beneath the surface of this seminal musical.
POLITICAL IS PERSONAL IN HELLMAN’S COMPELLING DRAMA: REVIEW
Lillian Hellman’s second play, Days To Come, was a flop when it premiered on Broadway in 1936. Sources differ on why — but it certainly wasn’t the writing.
The well-acted production that opened Sunday, smoothly directed by J.R. Sullivan for the Mint Theater Company, at the Beckett Theatre at Theater Row, proves a fascinating family drama set in a time of economic hardship and labor unrest. This Days To Come, the first in New York in 40 years, makes a compelling case for the play’s continued relevance.Continue Reading
RELUCTANT DAD BIRBIGLIA EXCELS IN COMIC MONOLOGUE: REVIEW
Early in his funny and poignant off-Broadway show, The New One, the comedian Mike Birbiglia expresses a low tolerance for children. “We gotta get babies off planes,” he says. “We got rid of smoking in the eighties, so we could get rid of babies now. Or bring back smoking and get those babies some cigarettes, because they’re too stressed out and they’re too powerful.”
‘DELIGHTFULLY DAFFY’ TO ‘COCKAMAMIE MISH MASH’: GO-GO’S MUSICAL SPLITS CRITICS (WITH A PAN FROM OUR MAN)
REVIEW : The question at the heart of Head Over Heels is whether Elizabethan comedy and the music of the Go-Go’s go together. Sadly, the answer is no.
(See below for other opinions about the first musical of the season, which was capitalized for at least $11.6 million, according to investment papers.)
The jukebox musical that opened Thursday at the Hudson Theatre is (bizarrely) ostensibly based on Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century Greek-mythological prose poem, The Arcadia. Thus the not-quite-iambic pentameter of the shepherd Musidorus (Andrew Durand), when he finds the skeletons of actors in the woods accompanied by a note: “These sad remains are of our theatre troupe, / Starved for lack of Serious Message.” This could charitably be called meta-commentary.
