New York

A PLAYWRIGHT REBORN Sometimes you walk into a theater and, for some uncanny reason, begin to anticipate that something very fine is about to happen. And when those expectations are met, it’s like falling in love for the first time — and indeed, you remember why you fell in love with live theatre in the…

KOREAN BROADWAY (SORT OF) Hero: The Musical starts off with a bang.   Literally. Several loud gunshots tear holes into the front curtain, which cinematically transforms into a stellar Big Dipper that emblazons a rich blue sky. The constellation rises and the astonishingly exquisite beauty of a forest in 1909 appears. A soaring, powerful male ensemble…

THE BITTERER, THE BETTER There are two brands of Charles Busch plays: the ones he stars in, which are filled with campy homoeroticism and often performed in downtown theatre dives, and the ones he does not star in, which are safe, commercial and mainstream, and usually performed uptown.   As a performer, Mr. Busch is a…

THEATER OF GOOD INTENTIONS No matter how worthy Civilian is, with its interviews of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, one cannot call this play effective theatre. There have been several moving documentaries of real soldiers being interviewed on HBO and fine war plays written by imaginative writers, but this “documentary drama” by playwright and…

A CLASH OF THE MINDS Mark St. Germain based his play Freud’s Last Session on a book by Armand M. Nicholi, Jr. entitled The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and The Meaning of Life. All of the weighty issues in the book’s title are skillfully investigated and cleverly…

SPIDER-MAN 2.NO By now, you’ve probably read at least a portion if not all of the hoopla that surrounds Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark, originally helmed by book writer and director Julie Taymor.   Its reputation for being rife with technical and structural problems and being one of the most ambitious productions ever to take place…

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…