New York

YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL, TALENTED AND NAKED Directed by Russell Dobular and written by him and the Naked Holiday Ensemble, with additional material by Stacy Lane, Endtimes Productions’ annual Christmastime spectacle Naked Holidays, now in its 7th incarnation, subverts the holy days theme with a delightful burlesque variety show full of dancing, singing, comedy, music, and lots…

THE GOOD WASPS There’s nothing especially remarkable about A.R. Gurney’s latest offering Family Furniture, a play that investigates a family of 1950s WASPs spending the summer at their Lake Erie vacation home. There are no terrible conflicts or unsolvable problems, no new ideas or exciting subtext, it isn’t suspenseful or particularly dramatic, and its relevance…

WHAT’S FUNNIER THAN MURDER? As a critic I’m embarrassed to gush but I must confess I gave my first standing ovation last night to honor Jefferson Mays who plays all eight unfortunate members of the D’Ysquith family in Steven Lutvak and Robert L. Freedman’s musical comedy A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. Mr. Mays…

NOTHING IF NOT INTENSE The night their shelter burns down, two homeless Iraqi war veterans, Horace and Alicia, both suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, are given vouchers to stay the night in a seedy motel, where they are menaced by past horrors and villains from the present. Such is the premise of Charles Fuller’s…

TWO PLAYS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE Many plays begin comically and end in tragedy. Rarely though does the trajectory go in the other direction, as it does with Fredrik Brattberg’s fascinating, multi-layered work The Returning, one half of a double bill, Norway Plays: Drama Beyond Ibsen. It begins with a mother (Ingrid Kullberg-Bendz) and…

THE SHACKLES OF RADIO ARE LOOSENED A BIT FOR THE STAGE Michael Gambon is tremendous in Trevor Nunn’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall. The drama, first performed on BBC radio in 1957, follows septuagenarian Mrs. Rooney (Eileen Atkins) as she walks from her home to the train station to pick up…

SOUTHERN NOIR The narrative of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian orbits a murder in 1964 Jackson, Mississippi. Susan Perch (Amy Madigan) kicks her husband Bill (Ed Harris), a respected dentist, out of their house. He checks into the Jacksonian, a seedy motel which employs a creepy bartender, Fred (Bill Pullman), and a doltish avaricious waitress named…

MUCH BETTER THAN GOOD The last thing that Brecht would have wanted is the audience to identify with his characters. But that’s where the Foundry Theatre’s production of Good Person of Szechwan so brilliantly succeeds. Rather than distancing the audience with didactic Marxism and dubious Orientalia, the play dives headlong into the despair of a…

OOFTA, INDEED The premise of C. Denby Swanson’s black comedy The Norwegians is that two Minnesotan women, Texas transplant Olive (Veronica Cruz) and Kentucky transplant Betty (Karla Hendrick) hire two very nice gangsters of Norwegian descent – Tor (Hamilton Clancy) and Gus (Dan Teachout) – to murder their ex-boyfriends. The bulk of the play is…

DEPRESSING DEPRESSION ERA DRAMA What a time!   Folks standing on line for charity handouts, companies closing down, destitution and despair all around.   Surprise, though, we’re not talking about nowadays – we’re talking about the Great Depression of the 1930s, the subject of playwright Danielle M. Velkoff’s well-intentioned but clumsy period drama.   It’s an interesting idea…

MOZART’S SISTER: POSSIBLY MORE TALENTED, DEFINITELY BETTER LEGS In many one person shows that are biographies of historical personages, there’s the risk of Wikipedia syndrome, in which the performer essentially just narrates the events of her character’s life, as though they’ve just been dictated straight from some website chronology. Fortunately, writer-performer Sylvia Milo’s luscious depiction…

EAGER FOR MORE A farcical, semi-interactive burlesque fairytale – complete with girls in g-strings and tassels, a pun-spewing, corny joke-telling MC, a Jazz combo, and a working bar inside the house – Eager to Lose is a delight from beginning to end. And did I mention that most of the dialogue is in Shakespearian-esque verse?…

VERDICT: WEAK ADAPTATION There’s something innately suspenseful about a courtroom drama.   Perhaps it’s the fact that real life courtrooms are themselves theaters and a criminal trial is essentially one long play – either a tragedy or a melodrama, depending on the result.   The prosecutor puffs, the defense attorney huffs, and the defendant squirms and tries…

NOT ONLY THE PLAY, BUT THE PLAY-WITHIN-THE-PLAY’S THE THING The Storm Theater presents the first offering of its Ferenc Molnár festival with this gem, adapted by P.G. Wodehouse from Molnár’s original The Play at the Castle.   Molnár was a Hungarian playwright of the Golden Age of Fluffy Theater, and in his latter years he was…

FRANCE:   WHERE THE WOMEN ARE WOMEN (AND THE MEN ARE WOMEN, TOO) Director Paul Urcioli’s delightful production of Moliere’s classic skewering of female emancipation is given an additional dimension of gender politics by the intriguing notion of having all the roles, both men and women, played by female performers who portray the men in drag.  …

THE FOOD HERE IS MIXED…AND SUCH SMALL PORTIONS One thing you’ve got to love about this festival of ten minute plays:   When they’re done correctly, these vignettes are like plates of tapas, each fully formed and complete, but in miniature.   The only question is whether they’re tapas plates from that wonderful Spanish restaurant in the…

BACK TO THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS Definitely thoughtful, at times charming, occasionally compelling, but mostly tedious, Adriano Shaplin’s new play Sarah Flood in Salem Mass, tells of two girls from the future – Sara (Kate Thulin) and Juyoung (Jamie Bock) – who illegally use mom’s time machine and go back to 17th century Salem, Massachusetts,…

SOMETIMES LONGER WOULD BE BETTER Anxious to have a child with the best possible genes and distrustful of sperm from anonymous donors, Gretchen (Halley Feiffer) convinces her “gold-star” lesbian partner Laura (Susan Pourfar) to seduce and get surreptitiously impregnated by Chuck (Robert Beitzel), a lawyer at Gretchen’s firm, whose wonderful daughter, Gretchen argues, is proof…

A DRAGON IN BROOKLYN A true auteur and renaissance man of the theater, Robert Lepage returns with his troupe Ex Machina to The Brooklyn Academy of Music for its 2013 Next Wave Festival, this time with his staging of The Blue Dragon, a not-to-be-missed show with a limited four-day run September 18-21. Mr. Lepage also…

STORY-LESS A rubber knife jiggles and bends during an ostensibly dramatic stabbing scene. Characters’ “trumpet playing” is out of sync with the actual trumpeter. Performers struggle to remember their lines. And the unremarkable dance numbers seem under-rehearsed and take place in a performance space that all too often feels overcrowded. These are some of the…