Dmitry Zvonkov

A TWIN/LOSE SITUATION Henry Krieger’s succulent score and the co-leads’ powerful, penetrating voices are among the few reasons to see Side Show, a dull bio-musical set in the first half of the 20th century, about a set of conjoined twins’”loosely based on the life of the British-born Hilton sisters’”who go from being exhibited in a…

MAJOR  TO MINOR The Pearl Theatre Company and Gingold Theatrical Group’s revival of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 comedy Major Barbara feels like theater for people who go to shows for the same reasons many of us watch television programs’”not because they’re great but because they’re good enough, occasionally entertaining, and it’s something to do. Not to…

SINKING SHIP SAILS IN UNCHARTERED WATERS My favorite element in Powerhouse, a delightful new devised play created by director Jon Levin, writer Josh Luxenberg and the Sinking Ship Ensemble, is the puppets: a cantankerous booby and a good-natured otter. The booby makes its first appearance when three 1940’s TV writers are brainstorming without success. Frustrated,…

BRAWL IN THE FAMILY Ozzie (Bill Pullman) and Harriet (Holly Hunter) are living out the American dream. They have a house, a car, a TV, and two sons: happy-go-lucky high-schooler Rick (Raviv Ullman), and his older brother David (an intense Ben Schnetzer), who is off in Vietnam fighting for his country. The New Group’s revival…

BETTER CROSS THIS OFF YOUR LIFT Nothing quite fits together in Walter Mosley’s flat, agenda-heavy and undisciplined Lift, about a young black man and woman who find themselves trapped in a skyscraper elevator after the building is hit by a terrorist attack; Marshall Jones III’s unfocussed direction doesn’t do the material or his actors any…

SEE THE MOVIE Imagine John Boorman’s film Deliverance staged, “panties” scene and all, as a piece of dinner theater, with all the performers looking very serious and projecting their voices, the way they believe real men should, as they mime handling things like paddles and bows, and describe scenes whose drama is supposed to be…

WARM TUB The lights come up on a couple, Helene (Hannah Bos) and Derek (Paul Thureen), reading in a Jacuzzi, inside a cozy Colorado skiing cabin one cold winter evening sometimes in the 1980s. They’ve made themselves at home, yet a certain unmoored quality about them suggests that they don’t quite belong. Suddenly a young…

TRUTH IN LIES “I exaggerate,” states Lauren (Jessica Ranville) at the beginning of Lying, which gets a delightful staging by Jessica Burr and her company Blessed Unrest at the Interart Theatre. Matt Opatrny’s exciting and intelligent adaptation of Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir follows Lauren from age ten into her twenties. She recounts her…

AN UNCANNY PERFORMANCE FROM ALEX PODULKE In Thomas Gibbons’ Uncanny Valley, directed by Tom Dugdale, Alex Podulke plays Julian, a sophisticated artificial human, who was created for the purpose of having his mind implanted with a dying billionaire’s consciousness in order that the billionaire may live on. Claire (Barbara Kingsley) is the neuroscientist tasked with…

SHOW ME THE MONEY Two couples are having aperitifs at a luxurious home in the Hollywood Hills (sexy stylish set by Derek McLane). They are Steve (Fred Weller), an aging action superstar; Missy (Gia Crovatin), his very young and ditsy wife of one year; Karen (Elizabeth Reaser), a movie star who’s quickly approaching middle-age and…

WHEN BEING A STARVING WRITER IS NO LONGER ROMANTIC Austin Pendleton’s breathtaking performance and Ira Lewis’s penetrating script make Chinese Coffee, with all its flaws, a most worthwhile outing. In fact, at $18 a ticket, this show, directed by Louise Lasser, is all but mandatory viewing for lovers of personal, intimate theater, as well as…

THE UNKNOWABLE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN Is it possible for true love to be unrequited? Or, to put it another way, is it possible for unrequited love to be true? These  questions, on the surface as deceptively simple as Ivan Viripaev’s story-telling framework, are at the core of his play Illusions, which uses the queries…

THE GOOD, THE LOST, AND THE VAIN Owen Gould Davis, Sr.’s thoughtful and masterfully crafted 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Icebound, which explores Puritan vanity and its many ironies, gets an admirable staging by Alex Roe and his all-around excellent cast at the Metropolitan Playhouse. Though not particularly startling or revolutionary, the show is good, solid…

ASPHYXIATING Neither the excellent quartet playing quality pieces that are at times rousing, nor Karl Ruckdeschel’s lovely period costumes, are enough to make Solitary Light, with music and lyrics by Randy Sharp and Paul Carbonara, a tolerable experience. With an artless libretto that is sentimental and always on-the-nose, the lack of a meaningful, or even…

A BIO-DRAMA THAT WORKS “Of course I care (what she thinks), I hate her,” says a character in Lauren Gunderson’s Bauer, a San Francisco Playhouse production about the German artist Rudolf Bauer, who painted during the first half of the 20th century. It is one of many lines that pop in a play which, though…

SMOKIN’ The premise of Kim Davies’ new play Smoke, that two strangers, a young man and woman, who independently come to the kitchen to have a cigarette while a friendly S&M sex party is taking place in the rest of the apartment, and who wind up having a meaningful interaction, is like a minefield with…

MISS JULIE’S OFFSPRING In 2012 the Scandinavian American Theater Company commissioned four playwrights to each write a sort of riff on Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The result is the four short plays that make up Bastards of Strindberg, a show so full of vitality and charisma that it often  overcomes its failings. Strindberg’s Miss Julie begins on…