Bruce Norris has already won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Clybourne Park, his clever contemporary twist on race derived from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. He is in line for more accolades for his latest searing and insightful play, Downstate, now at Playwrights Horizons after runs at London’s National Theater …
Harmony, the long-gestating musical about the Comedian Harmonists, a real-life German singing group destroyed by the Nazis, isn’t exactly harmonious. There are several revelatory moments when Warren Carlyle’s inventive staging combines with the clever, moving score by pop icon Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman to create new reactions to the oft-told tale of genocidal horror. …
Barry Manilow’s Harmony Hits Enough of the Right Notes Read More »
The offstage war in On Sugarland, Aleshea Harris’ poetic and riveting new play at New York Theater Workshop, is unnamed. It could be the Persian Gulf War or the conflict in Afghanistan. It could even be the one in Vietnam, except apparently there is no draft to force young people into harm’s way since the …
Transposing classic plays into modern eras has been an accepted theatrical technique for quite a while now. Moving these timeless works into a contemporary setting can illuminate their universal themes and bring insight to current issues. But these time-warp productions have mostly been for Shakespearean texts. Few more recent classics have switched time frames, probably …
Though it takes place five years ago on the brink of the incoming Trump administration, few plays are as of the present moment as Erika Dickerson-Despenza’s Cullud Wattah, now at the Public Theater. The poetic and political play depicts the devastating impact of the Flint, Michigan water crisis on a three-generation family of African-American women. …
The new musical Trevor could easily have been an extended Afterschool Special, an overly preachy message tuner with more PSA vibes than entertainment value. Set in 1981, the show follows the travails of a show-biz-loving adolescent discovering his gay sexuality and attempting suicide after a humiliating incident in middle school. He meets a sympathetic volunteer …
Martyna Majok’s intense, well-meaning Sanctuary City has a split personality. The first hour of this tale of two young people struggling to deal with our inequitable immigration laws is told in short, fragmentary shards. Sometimes they are repeated to demonstrate the endless cycle of hope and betrayal encountered on the endless path to becoming legal. …
At first, Ngozi Anyanwu’s The Last of the Love Letters seems like a conventional breakup story. The audience enters the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater to find Anyanwu herself on stage as a character listed in the digital program as “You.” (The others are enigmatically called You No. 2 and Person.) This You is …
It’s appropriate that the first indoor production with live actors I’m reviewing since the COVID pandemic shut down all NYC stages over a year ago is a celebration of theater and how it can heal communities and create families. E. Dale Smith’s Fruma-Sarah (Waiting in the Wings) is such a celebration but this backstage comedy …
Jackie Hoffman Stars in Fruma-Sarah, a Return to Live Theater Read More »
If a live event has no live actors, stage, sets or costumes, is it really theater? That’s the conundrum posed by Blindness, the unique gathering at the Daryl Roth Theater and the first indoor New York performance presented on or Off-Broadway since all NYC stages were shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic over a year …
Blindness: The First Post-COVID Off-Broadway Show Read More »
COVID vaccinations are ramping up and restrictions are beginning to loosen, but variant strains threaten another pandemic surge. Thus the reopening of Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters is still months away, probably the fall of 2021 at the earliest. However, a group of New York theater artists have cleverly circumvented the virus with an innovative event …
Note: This production’s run ended abruptly on March 12 due to Broadway and Off-Broadway’s theaters closing because of the coronavirus crisis. Roundabout Theater Company has announced they will be making the show available digitally to ticket holders. The theaters were originally supposed to re-open April 12, but that date appears unlikely now with national restrictions …
72 Miles Chronicles the Cruelty of Immigration Laws Read More »
Soft Power, the gloriously messy but idea-packed new musical from two of our most vital and prolific theater artists, David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori, is anything but soft. The title refers to countries’ gaining world dominance through cultural influence rather than military hardware and muscle flexing. Hwang’s hilariously satiric and complex book also addresses …
“People suck. Only food is real,” rails Harry, the temperamental genius chef, in Theresa Rebeck’s riotous comedy Seared at MCC Theater. Harry is engaged in one of many contentious debates on the purity of his gastronomic art over commercial viability with the more practical Mike, his partner in a small restaurant in trendy Park Slope, …
“My life is unhappy. I want to change it and I don’t know how.” That’s the subtext of a lot of American drama and four productions currently on and Off-Broadway explore this trope of angst with insight and compassion. One is a neglected classic from Tennessee Williams, the poet of the frustrated and lonely, while …
Sad Quartet: Rose Tattoo, Linda Vista, New Englanders, Heroes Read More »
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