New York

FRANKLY, IT’S A SLAM An outrageous Afro-Latin hip-hop reinvention of Anne Frank goes gleefully where you can’t believe it dares to go Wait, what? Slam Frank, which opened at the Orpheum Theatre on October 4, is an “Anne-Frank Afro-Latin Hip-Hop Musical”? Its logo is the silhouette of a young girl wearing the yellow Jewish star,…

BEAUTY IS ONLY SKIN DEEP Jocelyn Bioh gives the familiar mean-girl story a funny, painful twist in a terrific Broadway production The “mean girls” trope, that group of popular girls usually led by a demanding, beautiful, powerful yet damaged girl, is at the center of many a successful entertainment. From Heathers to Carrie to Hairspray…

CHERRY PICKING Simon Stone’s riveting Korean adaptation keeps Chekhov’s plot while stripping away much of what made it Chekhov “Chekhov, everywhere, all at once!” That’s what it has been like these past two seasons. Today’s theatre artists are reimagining Chekhov’s plays in new and surprising ways. Thomas Ostermeier’s The Seagull in London featured an acrobatic…

NO COUPLE IS AN ISLAND Joshua Owen’s warm and funny tragicomedy finds two marriages weathering storms of very different kinds A marriage can be its own world, with inside jokes, shared memories, and shared rapport. In Joshua Owen’s Human Things, making its world premiere at the West End Theatre, a couple’s world is their own…

WHEN DREAMS GET A SECOND ACT Nearly two decades later, Joey Arias and Basil Twist’s downtown fantasia returns with its imagination, naughtiness, and joyful strangeness intact Back in 2008, when iPhones were a year old and Instagram might’ve been a cookie mix, Arias With A Twist burst onto the downtown New York theater scene. Part…

AN AMERICAN STORY GETS A NEW LIFE Lynn Nottage, John Legend, Whitney White, and Adrienne Warren take on a story that has been provoking America for nearly a century Some source material arrives onstage carrying more baggage than most shows acquire in a lifetime. Imitation of Life has had nearly a century to accumulate its…

THE TROUBLE WITH PLAYING IT SAFE Fine performances keep an overloaded family drama on solid ground It is ironic how some wealthy folks convince themselves that they can trust luxurious bunkers with thick walls and armed guards to survive the collapse of society, without thinking that hired helpers are human. Even a modest, hidden bunker…

THE PICTURES WE CANNOT LOOK AWAY FROM Moisés Kaufman investigates what an album of Nazi photographs can tell us about the people smiling inside them I’ll see anything Moisés Kaufman puts onstage. From The Laramie Project onward, he has been one of our most adventurous theater makers, particularly when working with documentary material. He knows…

BROADWAY GETS FANTASTICK The world’s longest-running musical takes its first Broadway bow in a beautifully reconsidered form It took The Fantasticks 66 years to get to Broadway. Then again, a musical that ran Off-Broadway for 42 years and 17,162 performances has never exactly needed Broadway’s stamp of approval. But this fall, Tom Jones and Harvey…

ABE AMONG THE GRAVES Death of Classical takes “Lincoln in the Bardo” where it was practically begging to go: the cemetery Talk about knowing your venue. Before the Metropolitan Opera unveils Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Lincoln in the Bardo on October 19, Death of Classical is taking this ghost-filled new opera out for a…

IVANOV GETS THE SHORT END Chekhov’s despair survives the cuts, but the production struggles to connect the pieces It is difficult to make depression theatrically vivid when its essential symptoms are misery, inertia, and the absence of purpose rather than anything visually dramatic. That is the particular challenge of Chekhov’s Ivanov, and I have already…

THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW, WHETHER YOU NEED ONE OR NOT Bill Irwin makes a house call on Molière There are hypochondriacs, and then there is Argan, the gloriously self-absorbed “professional patient” at the center of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid. This fall, Tony winner Bill Irwin returns to Broadway, and to a playwright particularly…

KNOCK, KNOCK. WHO’S THERE? TOC TOC. Six strangers, one missing psychiatrist, and a waiting room full of compulsions Six patients walk into a psychiatrist’s waiting room. No, that’s not the setup for a joke—although in Laurent Baffie’s international hit comedy TOC TOC, it certainly becomes one. Repertorio Español brings the play to New York in…

A THRILLER THAT TAKES A WHILE TO FLUSH OUT A perfectly matched cast and Andrew Block’s resourceful staging eventually ignite Tom Kelly’s pitch-black thriller, but the promised comedy rarely surfaces No, The Bathroom Attendant doesn’t take place in a public bathroom. The title refers to how far into indigence its protagonist has fallen—a condition made…

CAT COHEN HAS A STROKE! …OF COMIC GENIUS She turns a terrifying brush with mortality into a deliriously funny celebration of vanity, glamour and making absolutely everything about herself Only Cat Cohen can turn a sudden, life-threatening neurological event into an evening in which the audience laughs almost continuously and springs to its feet in…