Monday, September 28, 2015
HAM IN BED At the beginning of Hamlet in Bed, when its author and co-star Michael Laurence comes up to the standup microphone at the front of the stage, I can’t help wanting him to succee…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:52PMON GOLDEN PONDLING In her perfect little one-woman show Pondling, Genevieve Hulme-Beaman is captivating as Madeleine, a little girl who lives with her older brother on her grandfather’s fa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:52PMFriday, August 28, 2015
THROWN BY A LOOP I’m not partial to dramas set in prisons; these tend to be ugly, depressing, violent and hopeless, or worse—sentimental, and I find myself reluctant to be transported t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:01AMSunday, August 23, 2015
ALTRUISM OR ARTISTRY? Margaret’s Safe Place, “a boarding facility that houses the most vulnerable students of The Kibera School for Girls” in Kenya, sheltering girls from domestic sexu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:38PMFriday, July 24, 2015
MÉNAGE À TWADDLE At the conclusion of Yussef El Guindi’s new play Threesome it isn’t unreasonable to ask oneself the following question: What does the semi-comic attempt of three young…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:16AMMonday, July 13, 2015
TOOTHLESS RUTHLESS Though useful as a showcase for the capable performers and boasting some excellent singing, Joel Paley’s revival of his gray farce Ruthless!, a self-referential spoof o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:32PMMonday, June 22, 2015
SHADOW (OF A) PLAY Visually striking and radiating love and sincerity, Manual Cinema’s shadow-puppet show Ada/Ava, which attempts to explore septuagenarian Ada’s inner turmoil after th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:01PMTuesday, June 16, 2015
THEIR PERFECT MINDS Written by director Kathryn Hunter and performers Paul Hunter and Edward Petherbridge, My Perfect Mind begins with Dr. Witznagel (Mr. Hunter) coming out onto Michel Vale…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:50PMThursday, June 11, 2015
GREAT DEPICTION OF WAR, BUT WHAT FOR? Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait, written and directed by Daniel Talbott, begins in near darkness with a Serbian Woman (Jelena Stupljanin) in a de…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:10PMTuesday, May 26, 2015
HOW SWEET THIS SOUND The standout theater company Elevator Repair Service (ERS), much acclaimed for their six-hour-plus show Gatz, among others, brings the first part of William Faulkner’s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:20PMThursday, May 21, 2015
EVERYTHING OLD COUNTRY FEELS NEW AGAIN In Mark Roberts’ delightful and moving play New Country, skillfully directed by David Harwell, 25-year-old country music star Justin is up to his usu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:34AMSunday, May 10, 2015
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING In Lucia Cox’s play One Hand Clapping, which she adapts from the 1961 Anthony Burgess novel and brings as director to 59E59 Theaters as part of their Brits O…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:55PMFriday, May 1, 2015
ALBANIAN/AMERICAN STORYTELLING As my Albanian friend put it: “The legend of Doruntine is the very core around which the Albanians’ national code of morals is organized (say those who bel…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:24PMWednesday, April 15, 2015
FIRST CLASS Directed by Cosmin Chivu, the staged reading of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s play Our Class at the Skirball Center is everything one would expect from such an enterprise when put to…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:34AMPUTA TO THE TEST Inspired by the Ancient Greek drama surrounding Hippolytus, and set in a present-day South Bronx bodega, Desi Moreno-Penson’s new play Comida De Puta attempts to combine N…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:51AMTuesday, March 31, 2015
OK KILLS In Tom Diriwachter’s Great Kills, Tim, an overeducated 40-year-old loser who still lives in his father’s house on State Island, invites his successful childhood friend Robert ov…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:40AMSunday, March 29, 2015
LIVING ROOM THEATER Not long ago a frequent theater companion commented to me about a production we had just seen: “So many of these shows, if (the performers) had put them on at home for …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:31AMSaturday, March 14, 2015
JUDGMENT ON A GRAY BEACH PROCESS Elia K. Schneider stages an engaging spectacle with her Judgment on a Gray Beach, Your Process Has Begun, a dialogue-free experimental piece that imagines th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:37AMSunday, March 1, 2015
KEEP WANDERING Always charming and energized, The Bats (the resident company of The Flea Theater) put forth yet another valiant effort, this time with the world premiere of The Nomad, with b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:17PMWednesday, February 18, 2015
ON SOLID GROUNDLING Writer/director Marc Palmieri puts together an entertaining piece of theater with his comedy The Groundling, about Bob, the middle-aged owner of a successful landscaping …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:00PMSunday, February 8, 2015
THE MANE EVENT Watching writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer’s one-man show The Lion, directed by Sean Daniels, the element I am most taken with is Mr. Scheuer’s radiant charisma. His earne…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59PMMonday, February 2, 2015
UNWIELDY BUT SOULFUL Tom Diggs’s allegorical fable Kind Souls attempts to examine how two loving individuals behave when forced to choose between losing their lives and losing their souls.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:28PMSunday, February 1, 2015
PASSIVE APPROACH MAKES FOR SUPERFICIAL DOCUMENTARY We are a fly on the wall in Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary Ballet 422, which follows 25-year-old New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancer and emer…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:46PMNO ONE BUT US CHICKENS At intermission, following the first act of Ross Howard’s black comedy satire No One Loves Us Here, my companion expressed to me, in a whirlwind of expletives, her b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:05AMTuesday, January 27, 2015
A BUMPY ROAD TO A STRAIGHTFORWARD POLITICAL THRILLER A deadly explosion goes off in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The U.S. blames a terrorist group they say is funded by t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:45PMSunday, January 18, 2015
WIZARDLY THEATER THAT COMES WITH A HEART The Woodsman, James Ortiz’s delightful and dark invention, which he stars in and co-directs with Claire Karpen, dramatizes the story of how the Tin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00PMMonday, December 22, 2014
THE WORLD ON A SWING The year is 1948 and a hack reporter (the entertaining Evan Pappas), ordered by his editor to do a hatchet job on Barney Josephson and his revolutionary Greenwich Villag…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:26AMMonday, December 15, 2014
DELIGHTFUL IN SPITE OF ITSELF Ordinarily, a musical with a book as superficial, obvious and corny as Daniel S. Wise’s Soul Doctor would make me cringe. Add to this David Schechter’s on-t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:29AMTuesday, December 9, 2014
FOREST ENTRY After her car breaks down during a storm, Josie (a sympathetic Rachael Hip-Flores), a young woman searching for her father years after he mysteriously vanished, happens upon a c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:29PMMonday, December 8, 2014
BEHALF AND HALF Personal works of art, in which the artist must invent a new language all her own to communicate her unique dreams, are, for me, the most valuable kinds. But one consistent c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:40PMWednesday, November 19, 2014
A TWIN/LOSE SITUATION Henry Krieger’s succulent score and the co-leads’ powerful, penetrating voices are among the few reasons to see Side Show, a dull bio-musical set in the first half …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:31AM 
