New York

A PENNY’S WORTH In the mood for some light-hearted, endearing entertainment that will make your face and heart smile?   Then get yourself a ticket to Barry Kleinbort’s (direction, book, music and lyrics) 13 Things about Ed Carpolotti, a new one-act cabaret based on a monologue from Jeffrey Hatcher’s Three Viewings.   Although the plot introduction takes…

UNFULFILLED WANTS David Mamet’s latest dramatic work, The Anarchist, begins as abruptly as it ends, but despite the jarring effects, there is a good reason for the sharpness of these moments.   Jeff Croiter’s lighting cues punctuate the first and final scenes like black and white markers for what is otherwise grey, nebulous and “opaque” material,…

FRISK ME AGAIN The hubbub in the lobby of the Public Theater late last Friday night suggested we were in for a dynamic show. Frisk Me: The Songs of Max Vernon packed Joe’s Pub with one of the most energized audiences of friends and fans I have ever seen at this venue, and the few…

I THINK I HEARD BELLINI TURNING IN HIS GRAVE Imagine yourself sitting tied to a chair in a stuffy, dark room with a very dull senile old man who talks on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about nonsense, and you have imagined the experience…

HALF & HALF Australian Made Entertainment’s new production of Andrew Bovell’s well-crafted relationship thriller Speaking in Tongues really gets going in the second act. The play, directed by Bryn Boice, tells the stories of nine individuals (played by four actors) whose lives Mr. Bovell cleverly intertwines, giving us a cross-section of problems that arise in…

REIGNING SUPREME! Monay, Monay, Monay, Monay, MONAY! If the seemingly heartless Irish tycoon Michael R. Regan (a fantastic Dave Hanson) had a theme song in the beginning of Edward Sheldon’s 1911 melodrama The Boss, it would be the 70’s O’Jays’ classic, “For the Love of Money.” Despite a 60-year gap in storylines and period, the…

BEAUMARCHAIS MARCHES ON The Pearl Theater’s choice for its first production at its new home on 42nd Street is a new adaptation of Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais’ 1778 play The Marriage of Figaro.   In many ways it is an inspired one, and should please both the audiences who filled Pearl’s long time home in Greenwich…

DARK AND DELIGHTFUL A liberatingly surreal and exquisitely poetic masterwork, Fernando Arrabal’s Garden of Delights is a sinister fairytale that concerns itself with the inner struggles of Lais, a famous actress living in a secluded castle with only her sheep and a small, grotesque, ape-like halfwit she mostly keeps locked in a cage. Ildiko Nemeth,…

A BIG YARN AND A BIGGER YAWN In theory and concept, Francine Volpe’s The Good Mother has all the fixins’ for a juicy, if not compelling drama: diverse, colorful characters, goofy one-night stands, 12-step amends, off-stage crying, and pasts that can’t seem to be outrun.   Despite all of this and more, the lazy, anti-climactic, and…

HOT AUGUST STRINDBERG NIGHT St. Ann’s Warehouse inaugurates its new space with an often gripping production of Mies Julie, adapted to post-apartheid South Africa. A dense fog sweeps over the earthen, stone-tiled kitchen of an old estate in the Eastern Cape Karoo. These weathered quarters (designed by Patrick Curtis) provide the heated setting for a…

AFLOAT ON HIGH ASPIRATIONS Many positive things can and should be said about Sheila Callaghan’s Port Out, Starboard Home, a play about a three-day cruise at the end of which the passengers participate in a secret, transformative ritual. The play is an allegory, an indictment of thoughtless first-world consumerism, as well as materialism, superficiality, and…

FORGET YOUR TROUBLES.   COME ON, GET HAPPY. When the lights go up on Wild With Happy, we see Colman Domingo, in cool shades and wearing his best Paris-Is-Burning attitude, speak his opening line; and it is so hilarious one can’t help but wonder if he can ever top it.   But what follows assures us that…

MAXWELL COUNTRY: WHERE HEROES ROAM There is only one Richard Maxwell and, in his extraordinarily textured Neutral Hero, he has gone back to his roots.   For those of us who have longed for the early days of his short but tantalizing pieces – with their seemingly non-professional actors, whose affectless recitations, never driven by emotions,…

NOT SURE WHAT IT IS BUT I LIKE IT Staged in the basement of The Chocolate Factory, with exposed pipes, beams and support columns, the drawbacks of Sibyl Kempson’s wonderfully inventive new show Ich, Kí¼rbisgeist are, ironically, also its charms. Or is it vice versa? The invented language the characters speak – English with Scandinavian…

HOUSE  NOT AT  HOME IN THE THEATER My theatergoing companion left the Duke on 42nd Street last night with tears welling in her eyes. She spent much of the subway ride home taking deep breaths to recover from Transport Group’s House for Sale, adapted from Jonathan Franzen’s personal essay about selling his childhood house after his mother’s…

A BAD DAY FOR A GREAT PLAY It’s a problem when the most effective elements of a dramatic show are the sound and visual effects, but such is the case with Cherry Lane Theater’s production of Jon Fosse’s outstanding play A Summer Day, which had the misfortune of being admired and subsequently translated and helmed…