New York

TERRIFIC TURTURRO, MARVELOUS MARVEL, CUNNING KRAVITS AND RIOTOUS ROTH: DON’T MISS SABBATH’S THEATER The New Group‘s production of Sabbath’s Theater is a perfect adaptation of Philip Roth’s eponymous 1995 novel. This picaresque, transgressive tale of love and loss, life and death, takes place on Arnulfo Maldonado‘s black almost-bare stage with Jeff Croiter‘s very subtle lighting…

WE LIVE FOREVER When people think of Jews during the Holocaust (if they think of the Holocaust at all) they picture old and young passively assembling for deportation to concentration camps or lining up submissively to be sent to the gas chambers. But National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s newest offering Amid Falling Walls (Tvishn Falndike Vent)…

HARMONY IS A MUST-SEE I absolutely recommend Harmony, which made a transfer from Off-Broadway to Broadway after being tinkered with for years. Composer Barry Manilow  and librettist/lyricist  Bruce Sussman’s entertaining, surprisingly melancholic new musical depicts the real-life story of the all-male singing ensemble, the Comedian Harmonists. With buttery, close harmonies, an excellent cast, and Warren Carlyle‘s fluid…

NOT DEAD YET, BUT CLOSE Another revival of the sometimes sassily sophomoric Spamalot, or rather Monty Python’s Spamalot, slammed onto Broadway with a hot-to-trot, eager-beaver and carnivorously comic production filled with Python’s “take no prisoners” spoofery, where every gag, sight or sound is grist for a very silly mill, especially that flying cow. Michael Urie,…

St. Ann’s Warehouse will present the American premiere of  Life & Times of Michael K, the Baxter Theatre Centre / Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus  puppet theater production adapted from J.M. Coetzee’s 1983 award-winning novel. The show will run November 29-December 23. South African director Lara Foot adapted the novel in collaboration with  the Tony Award-winning  Handspring Puppet Company (War Horse). Life…

A GORGEOUS SHOW! Make Me Gorgeous! is the reworking of Mr. Madam by Donald Horn (aka Donnie) that premiered in Portand, Oregon, at triangle — one the oldest queer-identified theaters in the US — starring triple-threat Wade McCollum as Kenneth/Kate Marlowe. It now has a new name, but the same playwright and actor have brought…

THIS COMPANY KNOWS HOW TO QUARK IT One of Tom Stoppard’s most accessible plays gets a fine Off-Broadway revival by Bedlam Theatre Company. Like a very cerebral whodunit, the plot of Arcadia follows Thomasina Coverly, who in 1809 is a gifted teenager with very advanced ideas about physics and math. She studies with Septimus Hodge,…

GREAT STUFF IS COOKING IN THIS KITCHEN The world premiere of new coming-of-age musical, HELL’S KITCHEN, with music and lyrics by New York’s own 15-time Grammy Award winner Alicia Keys and playwright Kristoffer Diaz (The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety), now in previews at The Public Theater with the official opening on November 19, 2023….

TAKING REFUGE IN THEATER Where does one find refuge? Is it somewhere in this physical world or on the spiritual plane? Or is there some intersectional vortex where the two meet and handily co-exist? Possibly in a hand-hewn house with no address, maybe off the grid and deep in the Illinois woods? In Nathan Alan…