Theater

BROADWAY GETS FANTASTICK The world’s longest-running musical takes its first Broadway bow in a beautifully reconsidered form It took The Fantasticks 66 years to get to Broadway. Then again, a musical that ran Off-Broadway for 42 years and 17,162 performances has never exactly needed Broadway’s stamp of approval. But this fall, Tom Jones and Harvey…

ABE AMONG THE GRAVES Death of Classical takes “Lincoln in the Bardo” where it was practically begging to go: the cemetery Talk about knowing your venue. Before the Metropolitan Opera unveils Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Lincoln in the Bardo on October 19, Death of Classical is taking this ghost-filled new opera out for a…

IVANOV GETS THE SHORT END Chekhov’s despair survives the cuts, but the production struggles to connect the pieces It is difficult to make depression theatrically vivid when its essential symptoms are misery, inertia, and the absence of purpose rather than anything visually dramatic. That is the particular challenge of Chekhov’s Ivanov, and I have already…

THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW, WHETHER YOU NEED ONE OR NOT Bill Irwin makes a house call on Molière There are hypochondriacs, and then there is Argan, the gloriously self-absorbed “professional patient” at the center of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid. This fall, Tony winner Bill Irwin returns to Broadway, and to a playwright particularly…

KNOCK, KNOCK. WHO’S THERE? TOC TOC. Six strangers, one missing psychiatrist, and a waiting room full of compulsions Six patients walk into a psychiatrist’s waiting room. No, that’s not the setup for a joke—although in Laurent Baffie’s international hit comedy TOC TOC, it certainly becomes one. Repertorio Español brings the play to New York in…

A THRILLER THAT TAKES A WHILE TO FLUSH OUT A perfectly matched cast and Andrew Block’s resourceful staging eventually ignite Tom Kelly’s pitch-black thriller, but the promised comedy rarely surfaces No, The Bathroom Attendant doesn’t take place in a public bathroom. The title refers to how far into indigence its protagonist has fallen—a condition made…