New York

A SPARKLING, SPIRITED PIRATES The Pirates of Penzance is a spirited lampoon of Victorian morality, skewering its pretensions and hypocrisies while also poking fun at the lackluster operas and ballets that dominated English stages from 1871 to 1896. The legendary duo of William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, celebrated as the quintessential librettist-composer partnership of…

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way… When Tolstoy wrote that line in Anna Karenina, he hadn’t met the Dahls yet – that unforgettable family in Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love, exploding nightly at the Helen Hayes on Broadway. If only he could have observed them at their…

A letter is a blessing, a great and all-too-rare privilege that can turn a private moment into an exalted experience. – Alexandra Stoddard The holidays have faded into memory, and the bitter chill of winter days have settled in. But fear not — when the frost bites, the theatre offers warmth, and somewhere out there,…

WAKING US UP TO WOKENESS Playwright Jonathan Spector makes an impressive Broadway debut with Eureka Day, a strikingly relevant and well-crafted production that convincingly captures the complexities and contradictions of contemporary cultural debates. His ability to balance humor and drama to address divisive issues such as political correctness resonate strongly well after the 100-minutes are…

A MAGIQUE CARPET RIDE Do you need an escape from suffocating daily life? In Bushwick, across the street from Théâtre XIV, home to the best burlesque shows in the city, artistic director Austin McCormick has opened a smaller cozy party crib to stage Cocktail Magique, with the help of Zane Pihlström, an exceptionally talented costume…

THERE’S A NEW GYPSY IN TOWN AND SHE’S STUNNING In the 1920s, Rose Thompson Hovick steamrolled her way through vaudeville and lived vicariously through her reluctant young daughters, Louise and June, forcing them to act, sing, and dance to feed the family and her narcissism. Rose was one of the original “momagers,” a full-blown dictator…

AUDRA MCDONALD GIVES US A POWERFUL MAMA ROSE BUT IS IT A SUITABLE INTERPRETATION? Gypsy is a great show. Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim wrote a justly iconic score, and Arthur Laurents’ book is one of his best. Ever since Ethel Merman opened the show with “I Have a Dream” back in 1959, various divas…

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…