New York

OUR HEARTS BELONG TO MARY, BUT THE REVUE ABOUT HER LIFE NEEDS REINVENTING The legendary actress and singer Mary Martin would have been 100 years old today, and to celebrate this centennial York Theatre Company is presenting the world premiere of Stephen Cole’s Inventing Mary Martin: The Revue of a Lifetime. The show, a tribute…

NOW SHOW ME HOW TO CHEW IT As a critic I have a confession to make: when reading a play for fun I usually skim over the stage directions. I generally don’t care how many chairs are in a room or what color the rug is or whether what’s in the corner is a dresser…

SOME OF THE GLITZ WORKS, BUT BULLETS BASICALLY SHOOTS BLANKS In keeping with the growing trend of turning films into Broadway musicals, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen’s 1994 comedy, Bullets Over Broadway, has arrived at the St. James Theatre. Director and choreographer Susan Stroman’s jukebox musical uses songs from the 20s and 30s with additional…

STRINDBERG ON PROZAC Throughout my tenure with Stage and Cinema I have criticized a number of productions for staging foreign plays too literally, insisting that it is misguided for directors who don’t have sufficient understanding of the world the playwright is working with to try and recreate it – better to reinvent it as something…

SOME ARE TKO’S, SOME SHOULD BE BRIEFER The first play featured in this annual showcase of ten-minute plays by emerging writers,  An Eclectic Evening of Shorts VII: Boxers and Briefs, is Margo Hammond’s humorous Mistress Marlene, directed by Alex Dmitriev. Bill, an electrician (a disarming Tim Barker), arrives at his elderly client Sandra’s (a naturalistic Susanne…

BOOZE AND BARD In ShakesBEER, NYC’s Original Shakespearean Pub Crawl, New York Shakespeare Exchange members perform ten-minute scenes from four Shakespeare plays in as many bars over the course of three hours. The locations change with every incarnation of the show; the most recent one was hosted by The Liberty, Peter Dillon’s Pub, Galway Pub,…

BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED In a way shows that are pure spectacle – acrobat, dance, magic – must achieve a higher level of virtuosity to be successful than, say, theatrical plays. Even a flawed play can be satisfying. An abundance of drama, for instance, can help take our attention away from the superficiality of the…

LOVE, FAMILY AND ALIENATION One of the questions at the center of Terrence McNally’s insightful and moving drama Mothers and Sons is, Why is it so difficult for a mother to love her son for who he is, and vice versa? McNally initially frames the problem in terms of a homophobic mother’s inability to accept…

A FAMOUS LITERARY FEUD MAKES GREAT DRAMA In 1980, in a television interview with Dick Cavett, novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy made an especially biting comment about her longtime adversary and fellow writer, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, saying that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Unfortunately, Hellman was…

THE HUMAN WHISPERER Most theatrical performances feel a little awkward at the beginning; even in good shows it usually takes the actors a few minutes to settle into their characters and to find the correct modulation for their voices. Which is why Milton Zoth’s staging of Daniel Damiano’s hilarious drama Day of the Dog is…

AN UNHAPPY COUPLE – UNHAPPY IN ITS OWN WAY Stockholm Syndrome is a form of traumatic bonding in which hostages develop an irrational sympathy for their captors. The term refers to a robbery in Stockholm in which bank employees who were held hostage in a vault for six days not only rejected government assistance, but…

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER THE THEATER As staged by Linda Ames Key, Paul Bowles’ adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a play that imagines three individuals’ hell as being trapped in a room together for all eternity, succeeds less as a conventional show and more as performance art: Ms. Key really lets…

A FINE INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE It takes a few minutes to get going but once it does Ryan Lee’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale becomes dynamic entertainment; Mr. Lee and his fine group of actors succeed in making the experience of watching a 400-year-old play written in verse both intimate and immediate. King of…

SQUASHED HOPES MAKE FOR BRILLIANT THEATER What a relief it is, what a glorious pleasure for a viewer, after sitting through so much unnecessary theater, to find oneself finally in the hands of an artist and master. You let yourself fall into them knowing that they will catch you and hold you and carry you…

THE FRUSTRATED AND THE BORED Watching The Cake Shop Theater Company perform Martin Crimp’s brisk new translation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s sharp 1926 play Pains of Youth, about a group of medical students residing in a boarding house in 1923 Vienna, a thought occurred to me: If the same amount of effort as director Katie Lupica…

A STUMP Sitting through Erin Mallon’s 90-minute play Branched, A Comedy with Consequences, I found myself envying the gentleman who, silently and with the upmost discretion, managed to sneak out of the theater during one of the scene changes; 15 minutes in it is painfully clear that nothing worthwhile will happen on this stage. The…

LES MS. Conceived, written and choreographed by Ruthe Ponturo, Til Divorce Do Us Part is a collection of musical numbers, each illustrating different aspects of divorce from the point of view of Kate (Erin Maguire), an affluent, white, middle-aged former wife whose husband left her for his young Pilates instructor. Whether or not you enjoy…

MASTURBATING IN THE SUBURBS As directed by Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw’s ironically titled new comedy Intimacy is not for the squeamish. A male character literally masturbates to internet porn, stroking a formidable erection which the actor has trouble stuffing back into his boxer-briefs when the scene ends’”talk about a game performer. This is just a…

A DANCE OF LIGHT IN DARKNESS A delight for both kids and adults, the clever and inventive entertainment iLuminate brings to mind the image of dancing graffiti. Wearing black body suits equipped with different colored neon lights, the performers move in darkness; all one sees are illuminations. Populated by fantastic creatures that dance, fly, fall…