New York

A MACBETH WITH VERY MUCH TO RECOMMEND The interesting thing about seeing multiple productions by the same theater company and the same director is that a pattern begins to emerge. Theatre for a New Audience’s production of Macbeth, starring John Douglas Thompson, contains the same strengths and weaknesses as director Arin Arbus’s previous work with…

THEY MAKE OTHER DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES SEEM DOWNRIGHT SEMI-FUNCTIONAL The New Group’s Blood From a Stone is an unsatisfying portrait of an already fractured family in Connecticut that continues to crumble over a few days, much like the dilapidated house that they grew up in. Â  A writin g debut from playwright Tommy Nohilly, this production is…

ANCIENT TALES OF WORLD WAR II Pants on Fire’s Metamorphoses is a deliciously entertaining, award-winning import from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that the U.S. is lucky to have. Â  Set in Britain during World War II, Ovid’s already colorful tales about gods, love, and creation come alive in a vivid, vaudevillian presentation that exploit’s the cast’s…

THE ETHICS OF MURDER Steven Michael Walters’ (Glenn Reed on NBC’s Friday Night Lights) The Girl from Nashville, marketed as a Southern Gothic tragedy, is adequately southern and adequately tragic, but takes the gloomy part of Gothic to the extreme.   A deconstructed story about what appears at first to be a senseless murder, this production’s…

THE RETURN OF JOHN GUARE, WITH MIXED RESULTS High expectations lead inevitably to disappointment while low expectations often lead to pleasant surprises. Â  Having read Ben Brantley’s drubbing of A Free Man Of Color, John Guare’s historical comedy of the Louisiana Purchase, I expected to be bored to distraction by an unfocused gumbo of a play. Â …

CHRISTMAS LITE It’s Christmas Eve. John (Michael Micalizzi), an aspiring novelist who worships F. Scott Fitzgerald, has just been fired from a job wherein he wrote trade paperbacks based on comic strips. He can’t decide whether to go to his friend’s party and get drunk or just go home. Charmian (Allison Buck) is an aspiring…

AN ADAPTATION OF A FAMOUS FILM YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF GOES TO BROADWAY (SANS DISASTROUS RESULTS, THIS TIME AROUND) Kjell is a big, soft, gentle slob of a boy in a man’s body. Â  He’s unwashed, unshaven and, to put it nicely, slow. Â  He wears his over-sized heart on his unwashed sleeve. Â  A forty-year-old virgin, any…

THE TRUTH – IN BLACKFACE The sheer exuberant energy of one of the most formidably talented casts on Broadway rushing down aisles and onto the stage of The Lyceum is enough to knock any theatergoer out of his post-dinner lethargy and into head-bobbing, knee-pumping involvement. Once again the unconventional Kander and Ebb (Kiss of the…

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…