New York

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…

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…