Tuesday, November 13, 2012
AFLOAT ON HIGH ASPIRATIONS Many positive things can and should be said about Sheila Callaghan’s Port Out, Starboard Home, a play about a three-day cruise at the end of which the passengers…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21PMTuesday, October 30, 2012
NOT SURE WHAT IT IS BUT I LIKE IT Staged in the basement of The Chocolate Factory, with exposed pipes, beams and support columns, the drawbacks of Sibyl Kempson’s wonderfully inventive new…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58AMThursday, October 25, 2012
A BAD DAY FOR A GREAT PLAY It’s a problem when the most effective elements of a dramatic show are the sound and visual effects, but such is the case with Cherry Lane Theater’s production…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMFriday, October 19, 2012
WELL INTENTIONED, ILL-CONCEIVED Whispers of “pretentious” could be heard in the audience of Paul David Young’s new play In the Summer Pavilion, which doesn’t seem like a fair assessm…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:37PMMonday, October 15, 2012
PUT IN AN UNCOMFORTABLE POSITION Anticipating having to review Owen Dunne’s new play Positions, the feeling I had while watching it – knowing the production to have travelled 600 miles …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:38PMThursday, October 11, 2012
AN AMUSING TRIFLE A.R. Gurney’s entertaining, dynamic but trivial new play Heresy reinvents the story of Jesus Christ (in the play he’s called Chris), changing the setting from 33 A.D. J…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:00PMTuesday, September 25, 2012
HOW LOVE DIES: TWO VERSIONS Brian Friel’s excellent 1968 play Lovers is actually two separate plays with similar themes and settings. Both take place in a small town in Ireland in the mid …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:39PMSunday, September 23, 2012
NOTHING WILD, EXCEPT… Tess Frazer gives a stellar performance as Willie in Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned, a play about an orphaned girl living alone in her family’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:49PMThursday, September 20, 2012
THEATRICAL ADVOCACY, THE GOOD KIND The Exonerated is theater as activism and proud of it, so it’s difficult to speak about it from a purely artistic perspective as mixing art and politics …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:11PMTuesday, September 11, 2012
GUILT OF HOPE AND DESIRE The idea that the amount of guilt one feels depends more on one’s character than one’s crime is the subtext of Marie Jones’s play Fly Me to the Moon, an entert…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:26PMMonday, September 10, 2012
IT AIN’T MOZART Louis Nowra’s Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find hims…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:50PMWednesday, August 29, 2012
EXPLOSIVE AND EXQUISITE “I’d rather be unhappy in her world than happy in another,” says the Man about the Woman, in Philip Ridley’s outstanding new play Tender Napalm, about a coupl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:59PMThursday, August 9, 2012
FUN, FRIVOLOUS, FLAMBOYANT, AND FULLY FORGETTABLE The remarkable thing about Bullet for Adolf, the new play written by Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman, is how entertaining it is despite i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:56PMThursday, July 26, 2012
HISTORICAL FIGURES FOR DUMMIES As the audience settled in and Stephen Bradbury, who plays the waiter and also serves as a partial narrator in Otho Eskin’s new play Final Analysis, came out…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:25PMRICE MILK Vassily Sigarev’s powerful play Black Milk takes place in a remote train station in the hinterlands of Russia, where a couple of young con artists, having just swindled the local…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:40PMSunday, July 22, 2012
FUGEDDABOUDIT! To use a slightly modified quote from a certain NYU professor notorious for his directness (which was misinterpreted by many sensitive arts students as brutality), here is the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:01AMThursday, July 19, 2012
FRANKENSTEIN REVISITED Neal Bell’s play Monster dramatizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, keeping the basic story points of the novel intact: Victor Frankenstein (Joe Varca), a brilliant y…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21AMMonday, July 16, 2012
HELL WITH NO INTERMISSION Hell: Paradise Found. Genesis: And so did Seth Panitch rummage through the intellectual compost heap and picketh he out from it clumps of sour clichés and bits of …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:50PMSaturday, July 14, 2012
THE GOOD THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER Watching The Amoralists’ production of Derek Ahonen’s entertaining new play The Bad and The Better, an image comes to mind of a virtuoso juggling act…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:08AMFriday, June 29, 2012
MORE IS LESS THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS When making a show consisting of several short plays about the disabled, one must be concerned, it seems, with the possibility of the whole thing becom…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:02PMMonday, June 25, 2012
THEATER NOIR: STYLE VS. SUBTEXT Supreme command of stagecraft is evident in every aspect of Somerled Charitable Foundation’s production of Jim Henry’s initially riveting but ultimately u…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:46PMMonday, June 18, 2012
THIS IS LIFETIME TV AS THEATER In Megan Hart’s first full-length play This is Fiction, Amy (Aubyn Philanbaum) is on the verge of signing the contract to publish her first book when she pan…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:12PMTHE VANYA EXPERIMENT The wunderkinds of American theater, Annie Baker and Sam Gold, ages 31 and 34 respectively, follow up their earlier collaborations, among them Ms. Baker’s remarkably s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:38PMThursday, June 14, 2012
DIME STORE PROPAGANDA One of the problems with watching a play that has an agenda, political or otherwise, is the difficulty of enjoying with a good conscience even those parts that work; kn…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:11AMFriday, June 8, 2012
THEATER AS COLLECTIVE DREAM The band is already playing, the show underway, as we enter The Kitchen Theatre by way of the stage, which is set up like the parlor of a mystic or a fortunetelle…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19PMMonday, May 28, 2012
CHILDREN OF HOPE AND SORROW We enter the theater, which has been configured thrust-style like an amphitheater, and take our seats. The tiny stage below has an unfinished cement floor, a smal…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:23PMSaturday, May 26, 2012
THE HOUSE OF LOVE AND MUSIC Many artists, being generally unsuited for life in normal society, have often dreamed of a place where they could be with others of their ilk. Where they would be…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00AMThursday, May 24, 2012
IN PURSUIT OF DRAMA Beneath the stairwell sign assuring guests that all cigarettes smoked on stage are herbal, the following sign might as well have been posted regarding The Roundabout’s …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:01PMWednesday, May 9, 2012
PICKING THROUGH AMBIGUITIES In Harold Pinter’s purposefully ambiguous The Caretaker (1960), currently playing at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, Davies (Jonathan Pryce) is a …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:27PMFriday, April 27, 2012
LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP Americans love popular stories of miracles and redemption. And really, who doesn’t? Few things are more gratifying than God taking time out of His schedule to break al…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:54PM 
