Tuesday, April 15, 2014
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 c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:31PMMonday, April 7, 2014
MAC THE DULL KNIFE Under Charlie Polinger’s unremarkable direction, the often charming cast of Sean Patrick Monahan and James Presson’s vacuous tongue-in-cheek musical comedy Little Mac,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:37PMMonday, March 31, 2014
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 play…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMMonday, March 24, 2014
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 fo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMWednesday, March 19, 2014
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 f…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:32PMMonday, March 10, 2014
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 trap…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:10PMTuesday, March 4, 2014
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…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:05AMWednesday, February 26, 2014
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 …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:16PMMonday, February 24, 2014
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 …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:54PMThursday, February 20, 2014
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 sne…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMWednesday, February 19, 2014
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 vie…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:51AMWednesday, January 29, 2014
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 intern…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:20PMTuesday, January 28, 2014
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 equip…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:16PMMonday, January 20, 2014
BROTHERS’ BOND Josh Hecht does an outstanding job directing Jake Jeppson’s effective new play The Clearing, about two brothers who suffer from a dark secret they’ve shared for the past…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:06AMFriday, January 17, 2014
LEAR, BECAUSE IT’S THERE A friend commented to me once that as hard to take as Orthodox Jews might seem to us secular ones, it is largely thanks to them and their stubborn adherence to the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:01AMThursday, January 16, 2014
A WIND OF DISAPPOINTMENT Having seen some months ago Paul Takacs’s outstanding staging of a two-character play called Tender Napalm, I was very much looking forward to watching his imagini…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:13PMMonday, January 13, 2014
DIARY OF A PRETENTIOUS NITWIT The Woman in the one-woman show The Surrender, adapted for the stage by Isabelle Stoffel and Toni Bentley from Ms. Bentley’s book The Surrender, An Erotic Mem…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:15AMSunday, December 15, 2013
THEATRICALIZING AN ARTIST’S WORLD The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a biography or perhaps an imagined eulogy of performance artist Marina Abramović, the show’s still living coll…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:41PMSaturday, December 7, 2013
A LOVELY INNOVATIVE STAGING OF AN OLD FAVORITE Theater artistry overcomes budgetary constraints in Jessica Burr’s delightful, poignant and absorbing staging of A Christmas Carol, from an a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:53AMWednesday, December 4, 2013
A BEAUTIFUL SHELL WITHOUT A NUT A show can be forgiven many things when its characters are compelling and its dramatics are solid; if the audience is emotionally involved in the fate of the …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:00PMMonday, December 2, 2013
YOUNG, BEAUTIFUL, TALENTED AND NAKED Directed by Russell Dobular and written by him and the Naked Holiday Ensemble, with additional material by Stacy Lane, Endtimes Productions’ annual Chr…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:35PMMonday, November 25, 2013
THE GOOD WASPS There’s nothing especially remarkable about A.R. Gurney’s latest offering Family Furniture, a play that investigates a family of 1950s WASPs spending the summer at their L…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:49AMFriday, November 22, 2013
WHAT’S FUNNIER THAN MURDER? As a critic I’m embarrassed to gush but I must confess I gave my first standing ovation last night to honor Jefferson Mays who plays all nine unfortunate memb…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:42PMWednesday, November 20, 2013
NOTHING IF NOT INTENSE The night their shelter burns down, two homeless Iraqi war veterans, Horace and Alicia, both suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, are given vouchers to stay …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:26PMWednesday, November 13, 2013
TWO PLAYS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE Many plays begin comically and end in tragedy. Rarely though does the trajectory go in the other direction, as it does with Fredrik Brattberg’s fascinating, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:49PMTHE SHACKLES OF RADIO ARE LOOSENED A BIT FOR THE STAGE Michael Gambon is tremendous in Trevor Nunn’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall. The drama, first performed on B…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:25AMThursday, November 7, 2013
SOUTHERN NOIR The narrative of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian orbits a murder in 1964 Jackson, Mississippi. Susan Perch (Amy Madigan) kicks her husband Bill (Ed Harris), a respected dentist,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMMonday, October 28, 2013
OOFTA, INDEED The premise of C. Denby Swanson’s black comedy The Norwegians is that two women Minnesotan women, Texas transplant Olive (Veronica Cruz) and Kentucky transplant Betty (Karla …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:07PMTuesday, October 22, 2013
EAGER FOR MORE A farcical, semi-interactive burlesque fairytale – complete with girls in g-strings and tassels, a pun-spewing, corny joke-telling MC, a Jazz combo, and a working bar inside…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMMonday, October 7, 2013
BACK TO THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS Definitely thoughtful, at times charming, occasionally compelling, but mostly tedious, Adriano Shaplin’s new play Sarah Flood in Salem Mass, tells of two gir…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:22PMMonday, September 16, 2013
SOMETIMES LONGER WOULD BE BETTER Anxious to have a child with the best possible genes and distrustful of sperm from anonymous donors, Gretchen (Halley Feiffer) convinces her “gold-star” …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:23PM 
