New York

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…

SEE THE MOVIE Imagine John Boorman’s film Deliverance staged, “panties” scene and all, as a piece of dinner theater, with all the performers looking very serious and projecting their voices, the way they believe real men should, as they mime handling things like paddles and bows, and describe scenes whose drama is supposed to be…

WARM TUB The lights come up on a couple, Helene (Hannah Bos) and Derek (Paul Thureen), reading in a Jacuzzi, inside a cozy Colorado skiing cabin one cold winter evening sometimes in the 1980s. They’ve made themselves at home, yet a certain unmoored quality about them suggests that they don’t quite belong. Suddenly a young…

SHAKING UP SHAKESPEARE Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, only 25 of which are included in Berliner Ensemble’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets. But that is more than enough to make for an exciting theatrical event. What’s more, the sonnets are accompanied by Robert Wilson’s surreal staging and a score by singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright. All this should make for a…

TRUTH IN LIES “I exaggerate,” states Lauren (Jessica Ranville) at the beginning of Lying, which gets a delightful staging by Jessica Burr and her company Blessed Unrest at the Interart Theatre. Matt Opatrny’s exciting and intelligent adaptation of Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir follows Lauren from age ten into her twenties. She recounts her…

TEMPESTUOUS AND TAME The Tempest offers a kaleidoscope of intrigue, betrayals, political shenanigans, murderous intent, monsters, masques, mayhem, magic, and romance. Julie Taymor’s disappointing 2010 big-screen, big-budget version proved that head-spinning CGI-candy is not enough to make all of these ingredients satisfying. Working with a stripped-down stage at La MaMa, director Karin Coonrod puts her…

AN UNCANNY PERFORMANCE FROM ALEX PODULKE In Thomas Gibbons’ Uncanny Valley, directed by Tom Dugdale, Alex Podulke plays Julian, a sophisticated artificial human, who was created for the purpose of having his mind implanted with a dying billionaire’s consciousness in order that the billionaire may live on. Claire (Barbara Kingsley) is the neuroscientist tasked with…

SHOW ME THE MONEY Two couples are having aperitifs at a luxurious home in the Hollywood Hills (sexy stylish set by Derek McLane). They are Steve (Fred Weller), an aging action superstar; Missy (Gia Crovatin), his very young and ditsy wife of one year; Karen (Elizabeth Reaser), a movie star who’s quickly approaching middle-age and…

WHEN BEING A STARVING WRITER IS NO LONGER ROMANTIC Austin Pendleton’s breathtaking performance and Ira Lewis’s penetrating script make Chinese Coffee, with all its flaws, a most worthwhile outing. In fact, at $18 a ticket, this show, directed by Louise Lasser, is all but mandatory viewing for lovers of personal, intimate theater, as well as…

THE UNKNOWABLE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN Is it possible for true love to be unrequited? Or, to put it another way, is it possible for unrequited love to be true? These  questions, on the surface as deceptively simple as Ivan Viripaev’s story-telling framework, are at the core of his play Illusions, which uses the queries…

THE GOOD, THE LOST, AND THE VAIN Owen Gould Davis, Sr.’s thoughtful and masterfully crafted 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Icebound, which explores Puritan vanity and its many ironies, gets an admirable staging by Alex Roe and his all-around excellent cast at the Metropolitan Playhouse. Though not particularly startling or revolutionary, the show is good, solid…