New York

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…

HELLO, GORGEOUS Jonathan Tolkin’s  keen and tremendously funny new show Buyer & Cellar, performed by Michael Urie, imagines what it would be like for Alex More, a young gay man struggling to make it as an actor in Hollywood, to find himself working in the artificial mall Barbara Streisand built in the basement of her “rustic”…

GOING POSTAL OVER NEW YORK Soaked to the skin and wrestling with a flimsy umbrella, I splashed across Eighth Avenue while reading the inscription on the James A. Farley Post Office, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Well, here was…

UNDER THE SPELL OF MATILDA Just as author Roald Dahl’s child-heroine “Matilda” is a magical mix of unexpected brilliance, youthful exuberance and solid common sense — so is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new musical adaptation, Matilda the Musical. Employing the familiar storyline of the discarded child on a quest to find a home and family…

LOVE, SEX AND POETRY Thoroughly delightful and hilarious throughout, Dirty Great Love Story, which is part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, is just what its admittedly clunky title implies. Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna, who together wrote, rhymed and perform the show under Pia Furtado’s direction, come out onto the stage,…

REASONS TO SEE THIS SHOW Neil LaBute’s explosive and wildly funny new comedy reasons to be happy, which Mr. LaBute also directs, starts off with a bang as Steph (Jenna Fischer), having stalked her ex-boyfriend Greg (Josh Hamilton) in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s, yells at him for starting up a romantic relationship with…

SOME PLAYS ARE “FORGOTTEN” FOR A REASON Part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Finborough Theatre’s classic staging of J.B. Priestley’s Cornelius, under Sam Yates’ expert direction, has rich performances and a textured period set by David Woodhead that makes one nostalgic for mechanical typewriters and landlines. Unfortunately, these elements are unable…

LOVE AS A MYTHICAL BEAST Compelling performances and Cat Parker’s surefooted direction overcome budgetary and other constraints associated with short-run, theater-festival productions, making Jenny Connell Davis’s Dragon, which is part of the Planet Connections Theater Festivity, a worthwhile and at times quite moving theatrical experience. Often intentionally ambiguous, and combining the allegorical with the literary,…

CHILD’S PLAY Adapted by Jeremy Bloom from J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy and A Little White Bird, Peter/Wendy, which Mr. Bloom also directs, is a charming, semi-interactive theatrical experiment in which a group of delightful young performers in pajamas play out a retelling of the story of Peter Pan (John Charles McLaughlin) and Wendy…

A CURE FOR INSOMNIA Dan Frost’s evocative performance as the artist Roger Hilton isn’t enough to save Botallack O’Clock, written and directed by Eddie Elks and currently being performed as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, from being an excruciatingly boring and drama-free 70 minutes. According to legend Hilton hardly left his bed during…

SOMETHING WICKED THAT WAY GOES In a rare clash of film noir, an awesome murder mystery party, and Shakespeare, Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More is the ultimate voyeuristic thrill. Audience members don Venetian masks and explore the depths of the 1930s-style McKittrick hotel in pursuit of the dubious characters of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who run amuck throughout….

SKETCHY BLUEPRINT The great John Turturro stars as the architect Halvard Solness in David Edgar’s translation of Ibsen’s enigmatic chef-d’oeuvre The Master Builder, which is currently being performed at BAM’s Harvey Theater under the direction of Andrei Belgrader. Mr. Belgrader chooses to take what might be called a more traditional approach to staging the work,…

A PLAY CANNOT LIVE ON CONCEPT ALONE Nicole Pearce’s lighting and Katie Down’s sound design and musical compositions, which are works of art in themselves, go a long way in helping make The Play Company’s production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon (translated by David Tushingham) a dynamic and exciting, if not completely satisfying, spectacle….

WHAT MAKES A FAMILY What makes a family? What keeps one together? And what do you do when you’re stuck in one that doesn’t fit in with how you want yourself or your life to be? These are the questions Bob Glaudini appears to be trying to answer with his slice-of-life drama A Family for…