New York

COSPLAYING WITH THE BARD A delightful dash through Shakespearean tropes is now the two hours’ traffic of The Connelly Theater stage. Siblings separated in a tempest, long lost lovers, conjoined twins, a criminal mime, and even a conniving witch are all stirred into Kevin Brewer’s fantastical new play Island, or To Be or Not to…

SHOUTING FOR THE MAJORITY In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the rise of the 99%, Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 political drama An Enemy of the People crackles with contemporary relevance. Manhattan Theatre Club’s production is painted in bold and brash strokes, but it certainly strikes while the iron is hot – just before the…

CHILLING BUT  MADDENING We are bunkered down in a ratty East Village apartment: blood stains smeared across the walls and newspapers plastered over the windows so the sunlight seeps in with a sickly glow. Loose electric wires poke down from the punctured ceiling, and a woman lies face down, sprawled on the living room floor beside…

HOW LOVE DIES: TWO VERSIONS Brian Friel’s excellent 1968 play Lovers is actually two separate plays with similar themes and settings. Both take place in a small town in Ireland in the mid 1960’s and both deal with how the hard, petty realities of life trample love’”and the excitement, sentiment and hope that come with…

HAUNTING HOWLS Rose Afratian harbors a dark secret. This wiry old woman’s shoulders are hunched and her eyes are sunken from ninety-one years of hell on earth, living with a sin she dare not share. Still, this staunch Armenian woman endures. In Alexander Dinelaris’ Red Dog Howls, several chilling scenes and gripping performances make up…

NOTHING WILD, EXCEPT… Tess Frazer gives a stellar performance as Willie in Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned, a play about an orphaned girl living alone in her family’s dilapidated house, which is one of three Williams one-acts in Something Wild…, presented by Pook’s Hill, with Ken Schatz directing. Ms. Frazer’s piercing portrayal, so tender…

THEATRICAL ADVOCACY, THE GOOD KIND The Exonerated is theater as activism and proud of it, so it’s difficult to speak about it from a purely artistic perspective as mixing art and politics can be an unwieldy proposition. This show however, with its incontestable agenda and elegant, straightforward execution, is a brilliant exception. Twenty years ago…

FORBIDDEN BETTER THAN BROADWAY Musical theater fans, rejoice! Forbidden Broadway is back – Alive & Kicking! – with a raucous new romp through the current theatrical season. This off-Broadway institution makes a feisty return to the 47th Street Theater, where its caustic parodies will have you cracking up at the mainstream hits – and flops…

WHAT’CHA GONNA DO? In a poignant moment in Act II of the new musical Chaplin, cultural icon Charlie Chaplin realizes that life is not a movie. One has to take the tears with the laughter, and there is no guarantee of a happy ending. As it turns out, life is not really a musical either….

ONLY IN NEW YORK The next time you pass through Times Square, be sure to wave at the tricked out tour bus with windows that soar to the ceiling, flashing LED lights, and a pounding sound system. The Ride, an interactive tour of midtown Manhattan designed by 3D pop artist Charles Fazzino, is a spectacle…

GUILT OF HOPE AND DESIRE The idea that the amount of guilt one feels depends more on one’s character than one’s crime is the subtext of Marie Jones’s play Fly Me to the Moon, an entertaining and poignant black comedy which Ms. Jones also directs. When kind-hearted but financially strapped home attendants Loretta Mackey (Tara…

PLODDING ALONG THE TRAIN TRACKS What does it mean to persist in a world without hope? Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver tackles human mortality with grim poetic grace, but the New York premiere production at Signature Theatre lacks theatrical drive. A desolate graveyard lies beneath rusted train tracks in a South African squatter camp just…

IT AIN’T MOZART Louis Nowra’s Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find himself directing mental patients in a play adapted from Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto to Mozart’s opera, Cosi Fan Tutte, which deals with issues…

CLAP YOUR HANDS IF YOU BELIEVE A theatrical revolution is taking place at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where a high-tech Broadway spectacle has been swapped for the homespun magic of a talented troupe of players and the audience’s engaged imaginations. Peter and the Starcatcher, a captivating prequel to Peter Pan, inspires childlike wonder. Suspend belief…

TRAPPED IN VIRTUAL LIFE Tune into Findlay//Sandsmark’s fractured bones / let’s get lost for an immersive meditation on the mediatization of contemporary culture. This Norwegian performance art bombards its audience with technological trappings that thrill and terrify, both enhancing and reducing the human bodies on stage. What better location to explore virtual reality than a…

EXPLOSIVE AND EXQUISITE “I’d rather be unhappy in her world than happy in another,” says the Man about the Woman, in Philip Ridley’s outstanding new play Tender Napalm, about a couple’s love in an abyss of tragedy. While hardly a simple statement, this dynamite production at 59E59 is as minimalist as it gets. The theater…

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT Unless the overview of a story is grossly inadequate, people seldom ask for both the summary and details.   Presented as two monologues on a sparsely furnished stage, Mathew MacKenzie’s The Particulars provides both in sequence, beginning with the broad strokes of a harrowing situation, followed by a more deliberate…

FUN, FRIVOLOUS, FLAMBOYANT, AND  FULLY FORGETTABLE The remarkable thing about Bullet for Adolf, the new play written by Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman, is how entertaining it is despite its many shortcomings. Numerous jokes, believable dialogue, likeable characters, fun physical humor, and a soundtrack and popular video images from the 1980’s all make for an amusing…