New York

MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE POND, DURING THE McCARTHY ERA When John Osborne and the lesser-known playwright/actor Anthony Creighton wrote Personal Enemy in 1953, it would have been courageous for someone living in the U.S. to caricature anti-communists as grotesque, proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual yahoos – it wouldn’t have been thoughtful or artistically interesting, but it would have…

STAGE MERGES WITH CINEMA Soul Leaves Her Body starts with the three principal actors walking toward us one by one, slowly, as if through a mist. As they do this, smooth white video plays behind them, populated by large figures that imitate like they are looming shadows, revealing the actors’ true selves. Our plain-clothed black,…

ANOTHER MOVIE FINDS ITS WAY TO BROADWAY In 2003, Elf, a delightful Christmas comedy with dark undertones – about the adventures of an overgrown elf that discovers that he’s actually a human – was released in movie theaters to critical acclaim. Â  Now on Broadway, the musical version of Elf is a sugared down version of…

THEATER OF DOSTOEVSKY Fyodor Dostoevsky is recognized as a psychologist, philosopher, and storyteller. His two masterpieces, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov, explore weighty philosophical questions: in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov believes himself to be an extraordinary man who is not limited by morality almost fifteen years before Nietzsche put the term übermensch (inadequately…

I’VE SEEN BUBBLY PERSONALITIES BEFORE, BUT THIS IS ’¦ FUN AS HELL! They float, they glisten, they inspire wonder, and their explosion on your nose leaves a fresh sheen of sweetness behind. Â  Yep, they’re bubbles, and in Deni Yang’s Gazillion Bubble Show: The Next Generation, he wields them to create the best anger management course…

THE SALVAGING OF TONGUES In her marvelously inventive play, The Language Archive, Julia Cho weaves together the story of two unhappy couples as a gateway to a whimsical exploration of the mysterious, anguished, tender, exquisite language of love. Â  Buoyantly absurdist, with a frothy meandering plotline, the play is ultimately a heartbreakingly eloquent discourse on love…

TO GIVE BIRTH OR NOT TO GIVE BIRTH? When it comes to family trees, there are those that we’d sooner shake out of there than pluck. Â  These days, you can make that statement with science! Presented by Red Fern Theatre Company, an organization that partners with a philanthropy with each new production, Dorothy Fortenberry’s Good…

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE PRESIDENT Do you want fearless? Â  Decadent? Devil-may-care? Â  Then look no further than the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a thrilling collaboration between book writer Alex Timbers and composer and lyricist Michael Friedman. Â  In it, Andrew Jackson’s rise to, and maintenance of, the presidency is as sexy and as raw as…

A CRITIC’S CRITIQUE OF CRITICISM A critic’s words can sting like a wasp or soothe like a balm. When it stings, a bad review can turn the tables on the critic and make him or her the target of hate mail, death wishes, and even physical harm. Â  Critic Joanne Sydney Lessner’s farcical Critical Mass takes…

VINTAGE MAMET LACKS ROBUST FLAVOR Last year, T.R. Knight left a lucrative TV role on the high profile Grey’s Anatomy because he wasn’t fulfilled as an actor. Â  The world has been waiting to see if he’ll fall flat on his face ever since. Â  David Mamet’s unsatisfying A Life in the Theatre may not be the…

A LEGENDARY PLAY’S SECOND CHANCE AT BROADWAY LIFE Were David Hirson’s La Bête not  Â burdened with history, this review would simply say that Matthew Warchus’s production includes Mark Rylance’s tour de force performance of an immensely entertaining half-hour-long monologue and solid comic performances by David Hyde Pierce and Stephen Ouimette, but is one-note and overlong,…

BE UNAFRAID … BE VERY UNAFRAID No, the spooky kid from Nightmare: Superstitions‘ print ad campaign isn’t part of the installation, but almost every out-of-respectable-work actor is. The latest creation from the demented mind of Timothy Haskell, the 7th in a series of haunted houses, may be AOL Cityguide’s No. 1 rated haunted attraction in…

HOW TO SEE A CLASSIC PLAY WITH FRESH EYES When I first heard that avant-garde director Ivo van Hove would be staging a production of The Little Foxes at New York Theatre Workshop, the pairing confused me. As a rather conservative person when it comes to theatrical likes and dislikes, I had a notion of…

A NON-CRISIS OF FAITH Coming into The Wild Project you will be kindly informed that there are drinks for sale and that you are allowed to bring them into the show. You might prefer to not have any distractions for such crisp, idiosyncratic performances, and you might not be thirsty enough to want to gulp…

SEPTUAGENARIAN COMEDIENNE, ADOLESCENT JOKES Joan Rivers’ energy is more entertaining than her material.   Never one for crisp, understated delivery, she gushes out her monologues, stepping on every punch line with “Oh my God :,” “Oh, oh, oh:,” half-laughs, and gagging sounds (“Can we talk, here” seems to have gone the way of the dodo).   While…

WHAT THIS PLAY IS ABOUT IS A SECRET With the ever-present possibility of public surveillance and the increasing integration of social network sites, it would seem that our rights to privacy are disappearing. Â  Keeping a secret can be a challenge in web 2.0 world. Â  In Rites of Privacy, however, writer and performer David Rhodes asks…