Wednesday, September 24, 2014
THE GOOD, THE LOST, AND THE VAIN Owen Gould Davis, Sr.’s thoughtful and masterfully crafted 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Icebound, which explores Puritan vanity and its many ironies, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:29AMSunday, September 21, 2014
A CABARET SHOW THAT GOES FOR BAROQUE Mae West, the sage and sybarite from Brooklyn, used to say, “Let joy be unrefined,” a point of view that also suits Austin McCormick, artistic direct…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:00PMMonday, September 15, 2014
ASPHYXIATING Neither the excellent quartet playing quality pieces that are at times rousing, nor Karl Ruckdeschel’s lovely period costumes, are enough to make Solitary Light, with music an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMTuesday, September 9, 2014
A BIO-DRAMA THAT WORKS “Of course I care (what she thinks), I hate her,” says a character in Lauren Gunderson’s Bauer, a San Francisco Playhouse production about the German artist Rudo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:16PMMonday, September 8, 2014
SMOKIN’ The premise of Kim Davies’ new play Smoke, that two strangers, a young man and woman, who independently come to the kitchen to have a cigarette while a friendly S&M sex party…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:46AMSunday, September 7, 2014
BASTARDS OUT OF SWEDEN In 2012 the Scandinavian American Theater Company commissioned four playwrights to each write a sort of riff on Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The result is the four short…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:03PMMonday, August 18, 2014
A SWORD THAT’S HARD TO SWALLOW The best thing I can say about Kari Floren’s new play Voices of Swords is that it seems to be well-intentioned. Unfortunately, sitting through it feels lik…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:19PMMonday, August 4, 2014
A TASTY PUNCH NEEDS TO BE SPIKED Flowing dialogue, skillful performances, and Audrey Alford’s solid direction make Micheline Auger’s banal and predictable Donkey Punch, a play which atte…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:28AMTuesday, July 22, 2014
A DROP-DEAD DELIGHT Delightful in an over-the-top yet grounded and sympathetic portrayal of Idris Seabright, a well-off spinster obsessed with memories of her long-gone Latin lover, Everett …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:53PMMonday, June 23, 2014
RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE AS SURREAL BURLESQUE Delightful wouldn’t be a word I’d expect to use when describing a Robert Wilson show. But The Old Woman, adapted by Darryl Pinckney from an absur…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:15PMWednesday, June 11, 2014
THE PRODUCTION RUNS LIKE CLOCKWORK, BUT SOME MAY SEE IT AS A WASTE OF TIME Much mastery of theatrical craft is on display in Alan Ayckbourn’s staging of his play Time of My Life, which is …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:00PMWednesday, June 4, 2014
HALF AND HALF Kim Wall delivers a brilliant performance as Barry, an aging municipal employee, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Arrivals and Departures, part of the Brits Off-Broadway Festival at 59E59…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:30PMTuesday, May 13, 2014
BORED TO DEATH In Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair’s ill-conceived two-hander musical comedy Murder for Two, lively performances and Scott Schwartz’s energetic direction are not enough to o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:54PMMonday, May 5, 2014
NOW THIS IS HOW YOU ADAPT A PLAY In 1859 Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon opened in New York City to much acclaim. The plot of this suspenseful melodrama centers on George, a young man of So…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:07PMMonday, April 28, 2014
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 ro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:06PMMonday, April 21, 2014
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 director…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:43AMThursday, April 17, 2014
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, i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:14PMTuesday, 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 02:06AM 
