New York

LIVING ROOM THEATER Not long ago a frequent theater companion commented to me about a production we had just seen: “So many of these shows, if (the performers) had put them on at home for just their friends and relatives, would be so amazing…!” That statement and its subsequent ellipsis came to mind more than…

JUDGMENT ON A GRAY BEACH PROCESS Elia K. Schneider stages an engaging spectacle with her Judgment on a Gray Beach, Your Process Has Begun, a dialogue-free experimental piece that imagines the “dream that might have preceded Joseph K’s awakening at the beginning of (Franz Kafka’s) The Trial.” The show is difficult to describe: There is…

KEEP WANDERING Always charming and energized, The Bats (the resident company of The Flea Theater) put forth yet another valiant effort, this time with the world premiere of The Nomad, with book and lyrics by Elizabeth Swados and Erin Courtney. Had Swados (Runaways) and Courtney (A Map of Virtue) managed to write something worthwhile perhaps…

ON SOLID GROUNDLING Writer/director Marc Palmieri puts together an entertaining piece of theater with his comedy The Groundling, about Bob, the middle-aged owner of a successful landscaping business, who, inspired by Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, writes his own play in sing-song verse and attempts to stage it in his garage. One wouldn’t expect this blue-collar…

THE MANE EVENT Watching writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer’s one-man show The Lion, directed by Sean Daniels, the element I am most taken with is Mr. Scheuer’s radiant charisma. His earnestness, his sincerity, his spiritual and emotional investment, are penetrating as he tells his story, mostly through songs, accompanying himself on different guitars’”six in all’”which await on…

UNWIELDY BUT SOULFUL Tom Diggs’s allegorical fable Kind Souls attempts to examine how two loving individuals behave when forced to choose between losing their lives and losing their souls. With their country engaged in armed conflict, Tara (Lindsey Kyler) and Oliver (John Clarence Stewart) are unemployed and nearly starving, living in a shack in the…

NO ONE BUT US CHICKENS At intermission, following the first act of Ross Howard’s black comedy satire No One Loves Us Here, my companion expressed to me, in a whirlwind of expletives, her belief that Mr. Howard is the leader of a conspiracy whose sole purpose is to lure unsuspecting theatergoers to Urban Stages in…

A BUMPY ROAD TO A STRAIGHTFORWARD POLITICAL THRILLER A deadly explosion goes off in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The U.S. blames a terrorist group they say is funded by the post-Assad Syrian government, and prepares to retaliate against Syria with conventional and probably nuclear weapons. In response, the first black African-born Pope…

EAGERLY I WISHED THE MARROW For all its surface eccentricity, Nevermore, The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, written, composed, and directed by Jonathan Christenson, suffers from a profound lack of dramatic imagination and theatricality. This stylized bio-musical about the great American poet, which boasts many rousing’”at times bombastic’”musical compositions, and attention-grabbing…

WIZARDLY THEATER THAT COMES WITH A HEART The Woodsman, James Ortiz’s delightful and dark invention, which he stars in and co-directs with Claire Karpen, dramatizes the story of how the Tin Man of the Oz books, who started out human, came to be made of metal. It is a sad and wonderful tale of love…

THE WORLD ON A SWING The year is 1948 and a hack reporter (the entertaining Evan Pappas), ordered by his editor to do a hatchet job on Barney Josephson and his revolutionary Greenwich Village nightclub Café Society, struggles over his typewriter trying to find an angle. Should it be Josephson’s Commie sympathies? His club’s unheard-of…

DELIGHTFUL IN SPITE OF ITSELF Ordinarily, a musical with a book as superficial, obvious and corny as Daniel S. Wise’s Soul Doctor would make me cringe. Add to this David Schechter’s on-the-nose lyrics being juxtaposed against complex subjects like the Holocaust, institutionalized racial subjugation, and the person of Nina Simone, and I’d expect myself to…

FOREST ENTRY After her car breaks down during a storm, Josie (a sympathetic Rachael Hip-Flores), a young woman searching for her father years after he mysteriously vanished, happens upon a creepy old house in Kristen Palmer’s Once Upon A Bride There Was A Forest. In order to gain admittance to the dwelling, so that she…

BEHALF AND HALF Personal works of art, in which the artist must invent a new language all her own to communicate her unique dreams, are, for me, the most valuable kinds. But one consistent characteristic of such creations is that this language, being new, is often partly or wholly inaccessible to the public. At 72,…

A TWIN/LOSE SITUATION Henry Krieger’s succulent score and the co-leads’ powerful, penetrating voices are among the few reasons to see Side Show, a dull bio-musical set in the first half of the 20th century, about a set of conjoined twins’”loosely based on the life of the British-born Hilton sisters’”who go from being exhibited in a…

MAJOR  TO MINOR The Pearl Theatre Company and Gingold Theatrical Group’s revival of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 comedy Major Barbara feels like theater for people who go to shows for the same reasons many of us watch television programs’”not because they’re great but because they’re good enough, occasionally entertaining, and it’s something to do. Not to…

SINKING SHIP SAILS IN UNCHARTERED WATERS My favorite element in Powerhouse, a delightful new devised play created by director Jon Levin, writer Josh Luxenberg and the Sinking Ship Ensemble, is the puppets: a cantankerous booby and a good-natured otter. The booby makes its first appearance when three 1940’s TV writers are brainstorming without success. Frustrated,…

BRAWL IN THE FAMILY Ozzie (Bill Pullman) and Harriet (Holly Hunter) are living out the American dream. They have a house, a car, a TV, and two sons: happy-go-lucky high-schooler Rick (Raviv Ullman), and his older brother David (an intense Ben Schnetzer), who is off in Vietnam fighting for his country. The New Group’s revival…

BETTER CROSS THIS OFF YOUR LIFT Nothing quite fits together in Walter Mosley’s flat, agenda-heavy and undisciplined Lift, about a young black man and woman who find themselves trapped in a skyscraper elevator after the building is hit by a terrorist attack; Marshall Jones III’s unfocussed direction doesn’t do the material or his actors any…