New York

I AND THEM The performers’ abundant charm can’t overcome the script’s shortcomings in I and You, Lauren Gunderson’s tedious comedic drama about two high schoolers attempting a class project in which they analyze Walt Whitman’s use of pronouns in Leaves of Grass. The premise of this Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award winner is ripe for failure:…

A  MAIL-ORDER BRIDE I guess it’s my own fault, but when I read about The Golden Bride, a Yiddish operetta from 1923 that was lost in the 40s, found in the 80s, and is now enjoying its first off-Broadway run at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, I envisioned something covered with the thick patina of history…

NO ONE ELSE IS  THAT GIRL Marlo Thomas may not have the iconic stature of one of those luminous performers like, say, Meryl Streep or Cher or Judy Garland, but akin to  these illustrious ladies of culture, you can do a pretty good job of placing your generation chronologically by which version of Ms. Thomas  you know best….

HARD TO CARE First of all, I think it’s important to state that I adore The Flea, the fiercely creative performance and theater collective down in Soho. More often than not, they do amazing, compelling work. For instance, their two-night, epic presentation of The Mysteries  last year, in which the Biblical story of creation through Armageddon…

OUR CHRISTMAS TOWN Under Dan Wackerman’s superb direction, Peccadillo Theater Company’s A Wilder Christmas, comprised of two Thornton Wilder one-acts’”The Long Christmas Dinner and Pullman Car Hiawatha’”is a gem. Mr. Wackerman’s unobtrusive style compliments the material; with unsentimental precision and a light touch he illuminates all the subtle little details of Wilder’s works until they…

OUR ANIMAL FELLOWS The always energized and entertaining Bedlam theater company opens their current season with New York Animals, Steven Sater’s musical play about New York City life in the 1990s. Excellent lead vocalist Jo Lampert fills the room with lovely songs by Mr. Slater and Burt Bacharach, the musical interludes separating comic vignettes designed…

NEITHER NORA Nora, Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, centers on its titular character, a beautiful young wife and mother, whose cozy life at her husband’s bosom is threatened when she is blackmailed over an indiscretion she committed years earlier to save his life. The play, performed in New York City for…

LOVIN’ LA VIDA LOCA Daphne Rubin-Vega delivers a riveting performance in Empanada Loca, a sinewy one-woman show written and directed by Aaron Mark. Inspired by the legend of Sweeney Todd, this dark, often comic tale of murder and cannibalism, set in gentrified Washington Heights, is told to us by its protagonist, Dolores, and begins below…

A  CERTAIN FUTURITY César  Alvarez’s fascinating musical Futurity begins with Mr. Alvarez and Sammy Tunis taking the stage as themselves, greeting the audience, engaging in improvised banter, then performing a song about Sylvester Magee. A real person who claimed to have been born a slave in 1841 and to have fought in the Union army, Magee lived…

ANTIGONE AND JULIETTE In Anne Carson’s crisp new translation of Sophkles’ Antigone, the great Juliette Binoche embodies the title character, a young woman who breaks the law under penalty of death to do what she knows to be morally right. Staged in the present, the answer to why director Ivo van Hove’s revival is relevant…

HAM IN  BED At the beginning of Hamlet in Bed, when its author and co-star Michael Laurence comes up to the standup microphone at the front of the stage, I can’t help wanting him to succeed; his manner’”shy and awkward, earnest, sincere’”make him a sympathetic, if only moderately engaging, presence. And even though in playing Michael’”a…

ON GOLDEN PONDLING In her perfect little one-woman show Pondling, Genevieve Hulme-Beaman is captivating as Madeleine, a little girl who lives with her older brother on her grandfather’s farm. Too young to be a useful farmhand, Madeleine is largely left to her own devices, and spends her time crushing empty cans; riding to the pond…

LOOP  DREAMS I’m not partial to dramas set in prisons; these tend to be ugly, depressing, violent and hopeless, or worse’”sentimental, and I find myself reluctant to be transported to such worlds. Dick Scanlan and Sherie Rene Scott’s Whorl Inside a Loop, set in a maximum security correctional facility, is not one of these. Heartfelt and…

ALTRUISM OR ARTISTRY? Margaret’s Safe Place, “a boarding facility that houses the most vulnerable students of The Kibera School for Girls” in Kenya, sheltering girls from domestic sexual violence, will receive 35% of all proceeds’”ticket and beverage sales’”generated by Brooke M. Haney’s Kiss Me or Cut Off My Head. This isn’t a drop in the…

MÉNAGE í€ TWADDLE At the conclusion of Yussef El Guindi’s new play Threesome it isn’t unreasonable to ask oneself the following question: What does the semi-comic attempt of three young arty types to engage in group sex in an unnamed American metropolis have to do with the politically motivated, state sanctioned gang-rape of a female…

TOOTHLESS  RUTHLESS Though useful as a showcase for the capable performers and boasting some excellent singing, Joel Paley’s revival of his gray farce Ruthless!, a self-referential spoof of Broadway musicals, offers few laughs, little suspense and no surprises; at least one audience member found himself stifling yawns as he fought the urge to nod off. Played…

SHADOW (OF A) PLAY Visually striking and radiating love and sincerity, Manual Cinema’s shadow-puppet show Ada/Ava, which attempts to explore septuagenarian Ada’s inner turmoil   after the death of her twin sister Ava, leaves one emotionally unsatisfied; for all of the production’s lovely elements the story is dull, the show boring. Ada (Julia Miller) and Ava…

THEIR PERFECT MINDS Written by director Kathryn Hunter and performers Paul Hunter and Edward Petherbridge, My Perfect Mind begins with Dr. Witznagel (Mr. Hunter) coming out onto Michel Vale’s slanted-floor set in white lab coat, an absurd curly wig, and speaking with a cartoony German accent, and telling us about “EPS:Edward Petherbridge Syndrome.” He informs…

GREAT DEPICTION OF WAR, BUT WHAT FOR? Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait, written and directed by Daniel Talbott, begins in near darkness with a Serbian Woman (Jelena Stupljanin) in a desert delivering a monologue in Serbian that we can guess has to do with her having been gang-raped and tortured; later we learn this was at…

HOW SWEET THIS SOUND The standout theater company Elevator Repair Service (ERS), much acclaimed for their six-hour-plus show Gatz, among others, brings the first part of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury to the Public Theater, performing it in its entirety, with spectacular results. The section of the novel in question consists wholly…