New York

PUT YOUR LIFE AND TRUST INTO THE HANDS OF LIFE AND TRUST There is a daunting immersive theater experience in Manhattan’s Financial District that is also somehow prophetic. The location, 69 Beaver Street, is already scary at night, surrounded as it is by empty, dark urban canyons; the address is one of the side entrances…

A QUILT BLANKETED BY PREDICTABLE STITCHING Quilts always intrigued me; for millennia, women took scraps of fabric from discarded items and made quilts to be used for warmth or decorative purposes. Most of us had one made by a Grandma or a Great Aunt: they stored the patches of material until they had enough to…

GET READY TO CRACK SOME NUTS WIDE OPEN Christmas can be very sexy if you step into the sumptuous world of Théâtre XIV in trendy Bushwick, and catch Company XIV’s neo-Baroque classic Nutcracker Rouge. Naughty, sensual, lavish, this decadent extravaganza is the perfect welcome to the holiday season, and certainly not family oriented so leave…

THE BEST HOLIDAY GIFT ISN’T UNDER THE TREE, IT’S ELF AT THE MARQUIS Elf, the charming story of Buddy, the orphan who crawled into Santa’s sack one Christmas Eve and was raised at the North Pole, surrounded by Santa and his elves, has been delighting young and old since 2003, first as a film and…

PREPARE TO BE SWEPT AWAY What happens when we are faced with extreme necessity? The 1884 tragic wreck of the yacht Mignonette was a cause célèbre in late 19th-century Britain, but not because a crew of four were stranded off the Cape of Good Hope on the South African coast; it was the devastating outcome…

DEATH BECOMES HER IS NOT FOR PURITANS OR VICTORIAN GRANDMOTHERS. BUT HOW MANY OF THEM ARE AROUND TODAY? Death Becomes Her, the new musical based on the eponymous 1992 black comedy/fantasy and gay cult classic, starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, is boisterous, loud and crass. It’s filled with tasteless one-liners and bawdy slapstick. And…

A GENERATIONAL GAP AND A PLAYWRITING GAP As a result of the #MeToo movement, there has been much brought to light about women working in America. But here’s a note to the younger generations about life for women in the 80s: if you were homosexual, you were considered a pervert and treated as such; when…

JUST AS PROMISED, IT’S BIG! IT’S GAY! IT’S JAMBOREEING! Yes, there is a way to escape the post-election blues for 90 minutes: The Big Gay Jamboree at the Orpheum Theatre is the sublimely ridiculous remedy we need. Marla Mindelle — who co-wrote the book with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and the songs with Philip Drennen — definitely has a…

SOMETHING WICKED THAT WAY GOES No plague can kill a great show. It came back after COVID. In a rare clash of film noir, performance art, an awesome murder mystery party, and Shakespeare, Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More is the ultimate voyeuristic thrill. Audience members don Venetian masks and explore the depths of the 1930s-style McKittrick…

A NEOLITHIC AND LEAN LEAR Shakespeare’s works can be read in many ways and I have witnessed so many diverse stage interpretations that I never know what I am about to see when I venture towards one of his plays. This time it was King Lear, which opened tonight at The Shed, directed by Rob Ashford, Kenneth Branagh,…