New York

FRANKENSTEIN REVISITED Neal Bell’s play Monster dramatizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, keeping the basic story points of the novel intact: Victor Frankenstein (Joe Varca), a brilliant young scientist, assembles and brings to life what he hopes will be a beautiful creation, only to have it turn out a grotesque and hideous creature (John Zdrojeski in a…

DOG OF A MUSICAL The musical theatre canon is filled with bad ideas that made very good musicals. Stories of vengeful barbers, decadence in Nazi Germany, and even wife beaters have all gone on to become gold standards. Unlike Sweeney Todd, Cabaret, and Carousel, Dogfight, which is currently on the boards at the Second Stage,…

HELL WITH NO INTERMISSION Hell: Paradise Found. Genesis: And so did Seth Panitch rummage through the intellectual compost heap and picketh he out from it clumps of sour clichés and bits of rotted old jokes, and collecteth he from it pieces of spoilt ideas, which were so far past their expiration date that they no…

THE GOOD THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER Watching The Amoralists’ production of Derek Ahonen’s entertaining new play The Bad and The Better, an image comes to mind of a virtuoso juggling act, with Mr. Ahonen and director Daniel Aukin keeping 26 actors, over 30 characters, and an extraordinary number of plot lines in the air…

MUSICAL ERRANT Expectations should always be lowered a bit when seeing revivals of musicals written before Oklahoma!.   In pre-war musicals, songs weren’t intended to move plots forward or reveal new depths of characterization.   Laced with inappropriate racial epithets, the original musical version of Nymph Errant (1933) by Cole Porter and Romney Brent would have been…

HISS HISS BANG BANG Four writers stand onstage and in unison announce their thesis, “We thought that making a show strictly about our poverty and history of abuse would make us severely unpopular: so we decided to splice our story with a science fiction narrative about snakes.” So begins Flying Snakes in 3D!!, a campy…

DOWNTOWN DINOSAURS The Off-Broadway Musical is an endangered species.   The perfect storm of escalating real estate rents, union expectations, and production costs render producing commercial Off-Broadway musicals a dubious venture at best.   Enter Triassic Parq, The Musical, the 2010 Award-Winning FringeNYC show for Best Musical, eager to please and ready to challenge the conventional wisdom….

MORE IS LESS THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS When making a show consisting of several short plays about the disabled, one must be concerned, it seems, with the possibility of the whole thing becoming more about message than art. It’s unlikely under such circumstance that, for example, a disabled character, say a wheelchair-bound girl,…

THREE’S COMPANY ON SHROOMS The concept of David Adjmi’s flawed but entertaining new play 3C is an intriguing one: to take Three’s Company, an iconic, milquetoast ABC sitcom (which starred John Ritter and ran from 1977 to 1984), and subvert it, removing the innocuous, bourgeois-TV-show veil, and turning its characters and themes on their heads….

THEATER NOIR: STYLE VS. SUBTEXT Supreme command of stagecraft is evident in every aspect of Somerled Charitable Foundation’s production of Jim Henry’s initially riveting but ultimately unsatisfying new play, the noirish psychological thriller 7th Monarch. In general, the first act has so much style and focus that one becomes hopeful for the second act to…

THIS IS LIFETIME TV AS THEATER In Megan Hart’s first full-length play This is Fiction, Amy (Aubyn Philanbaum) is on the verge of signing the contract to publish her first book when she panics and runs out of her publisher’s office. After a brief encounter with likable young school teacher Ed (Bernardo Cubrí­a), she rushes…

THE VANYA EXPERIMENT The wunderkinds of American theater, Annie Baker and Sam Gold, ages 31 and 34 respectively, follow up their earlier collaborations, among them Ms. Baker’s remarkably successful Circle Mirror Transformation, with another innovative production, this time of Chekhov’s classic Uncle Vanya (adapted by Ms. Baker, with Mr. Gold directing). The goal of Ms….

DIME STORE PROPAGANDA One of the problems with watching a play that has an agenda, political or otherwise, is the difficulty of enjoying with a good conscience even those parts that work; knowing the playwright’s intentions to be dishonest (in that he’s serving up propaganda as art), one feels foolish being affected emotionally, as though…

MAGNIFICENT CHARACTER ACTOR ON THE BUMPY ROAD TO DAMASCUS When Andrew Weems enters the stage to perform Damascus, a solo play he also wrote, the 4th Street Theater immediately fills with his rich inner life.   Weems is one of the great unsung actors of the American stage, the one whom you took for granted in…

A HAPPENING OF THE HIGHEST THEATRICAL ORDER The Flea Theatre’s young resident acting ensemble, The Bats, is re-mounting their production of These Seven Sicknesses.   If you’re looking for an engaging summer theatrical event in New York City (and have already seen Sleep No More), These Seven Sicknesses might just be your ticket. Under Ed Sylvanus…

THEATER AS A COLLECTIVE DREAM The band is already playing, the show underway, as we enter The Kitchen Theatre by way of the stage, which is set up like the parlor of a mystic or a fortuneteller, full of old books and odd, antiquated objects. As we take our seats we are offered wine from…

CHILDREN OF HOPE AND SORROW We enter the theater, which has been configured thrust-style like an amphitheater, and take our seats. The tiny stage below has an unfinished cement floor, a small wooden desk with a chair behind it, and two more chairs, one plain and one with a tablet arm. Behind them is a…

THE HOUSE OF LOVE AND MUSIC Many artists, being generally unsuited for life in normal society, have often dreamed of a place where they could be with others of their ilk. Where they would be free to live and create without the sinewy hand of mediocrity shackling them with public morals and conventions. A place…

IN PURSUIT OF DRAMA Beneath the stairwell sign assuring guests that all cigarettes smoked on stage are herbal, the following sign might as well have been posted regarding The Roundabout’s new production of Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit: “Please rest assured that even the most profound dialogue in this play contains nothing that might cause…

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TOO WELL-MANNERED David Auburn‘s The Columnist gets the good part over with in the first scene and then proceeds to become exactly the sort of play we might have expected from the author of Proof: clean, articulate, measured, intelligent, carefully researched, and, finally, Saharan-dry and as dull as a persistently cloudy…