New York

MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING YOU WANT TO SEE If one were only to see Shakespeare as produced by The Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that all of the Bard’s plays take place in bucolic settings. This is due to the brilliantly inventive way that The…

HALF AND HALF Kim Wall delivers a brilliant performance as Barry, an aging municipal employee, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Arrivals and Departures, part of the Brits Off-Broadway Festival at 59E59 Theaters. Mr. Wall carries the show, and although surrounded by a fine cast, without him there’s not much to see here. Still, the first act of…

A SHOW THAT DESERVES AN EXCLAMATION POINT! Broadway’s recent bumper crop of musicals has provided spoof-meister Gerard Alessandrini a mother load to mine in the latest installment of his well-established, venomous valentines to the Great White Way, Forbidden Broadway Comes Out Swinging! Performed by a four member cast of actor-chameleons (Carter Calvert, Mia Gentile, Marcus…

BORED TO DEATH In Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair’s ill-conceived two-hander musical comedy Murder for Two, lively performances and Scott Schwartz’s energetic direction are not enough to overcome a book that goes out of its way to avoid suspense and is so full of corn that I found myself squirming between yawns: After a novelist…

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE DANCED Move over Evita, there’s another Queen of Hearts in town. And she likes diamonds too. I’m talking about Imelda Marcos’”she of the thousand pairs of shoes’”who is the centerpiece of a dazzling new pop operetta by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. It’s called Here Lies Love, which is what Imelda…

NOW THIS IS HOW YOU ADAPT A PLAY In 1859 Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon opened in New York City to much acclaim. The plot of this suspenseful melodrama centers on George, a young man of Southern birth but liberal education and outlook, who returns from Paris to his uncle’s plantation upon learning of the old…

OUR HEARTS BELONG TO MARY, BUT THE REVUE ABOUT HER LIFE NEEDS REINVENTING The legendary actress and singer Mary Martin would have been 100 years old today, and to celebrate this centennial York Theatre Company is presenting the world premiere of Stephen Cole’s Inventing Mary Martin: The Revue of a Lifetime. The show, a tribute…

NOW SHOW ME HOW TO CHEW IT As a critic I have a confession to make: when reading a play for fun I usually skim over the stage directions. I generally don’t care how many chairs are in a room or what color the rug is or whether what’s in the corner is a dresser…

SOME OF THE GLITZ WORKS, BUT BULLETS BASICALLY SHOOTS BLANKS In keeping with the growing trend of turning films into Broadway musicals, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen’s 1994 comedy, Bullets Over Broadway, has arrived at the St. James Theatre. Director and choreographer Susan Stroman’s jukebox musical uses songs from the 20s and 30s with additional…

STRINDBERG ON PROZAC Throughout my tenure with Stage and Cinema I have criticized a number of productions for staging foreign plays too literally, insisting that it is misguided for directors who don’t have sufficient understanding of the world the playwright is working with to try and recreate it – better to reinvent it as something…

SOME ARE TKO’S, SOME SHOULD BE BRIEFER The first play featured in this annual showcase of ten-minute plays by emerging writers,  An Eclectic Evening of Shorts VII: Boxers and Briefs, is Margo Hammond’s humorous Mistress Marlene, directed by Alex Dmitriev. Bill, an electrician (a disarming Tim Barker), arrives at his elderly client Sandra’s (a naturalistic Susanne…

BOOZE AND BARD In ShakesBEER, NYC’s Original Shakespearean Pub Crawl, New York Shakespeare Exchange members perform ten-minute scenes from four Shakespeare plays in as many bars over the course of three hours. The locations change with every incarnation of the show; the most recent one was hosted by The Liberty, Peter Dillon’s Pub, Galway Pub,…

BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED In a way shows that are pure spectacle – acrobat, dance, magic – must achieve a higher level of virtuosity to be successful than, say, theatrical plays. Even a flawed play can be satisfying. An abundance of drama, for instance, can help take our attention away from the superficiality of the…

LOVE, FAMILY AND ALIENATION One of the questions at the center of Terrence McNally’s insightful and moving drama Mothers and Sons is, Why is it so difficult for a mother to love her son for who he is, and vice versa? McNally initially frames the problem in terms of a homophobic mother’s inability to accept…

A FAMOUS LITERARY FEUD MAKES GREAT DRAMA In 1980, in a television interview with Dick Cavett, novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy made an especially biting comment about her longtime adversary and fellow writer, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, saying that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Unfortunately, Hellman was…

THE HUMAN WHISPERER Most theatrical performances feel a little awkward at the beginning; even in good shows it usually takes the actors a few minutes to settle into their characters and to find the correct modulation for their voices. Which is why Milton Zoth’s staging of Daniel Damiano’s hilarious drama Day of the Dog is…

AN UNHAPPY COUPLE – UNHAPPY IN ITS OWN WAY Stockholm Syndrome is a form of traumatic bonding in which hostages develop an irrational sympathy for their captors. The term refers to a robbery in Stockholm in which bank employees who were held hostage in a vault for six days not only rejected government assistance, but…

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER THE THEATER As staged by Linda Ames Key, Paul Bowles’ adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a play that imagines three individuals’ hell as being trapped in a room together for all eternity, succeeds less as a conventional show and more as performance art: Ms. Key really lets…