Friday, August 9, 2024
Max Wolf Friedlich's "Job" starts out with a bang or, more accurately, a near bang that elicits a couple of immediate worries: first, something awful will happen to a seemingly benign charac…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:47PMTuesday, June 18, 2024
No matter where you grew up, that place always elicits a tangled mix of memories, including sorrows that were often beyond one's control. That's certainly true for Cephus Miles (Tory Kittles…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:23PMThursday, May 2, 2024
As for previous theatrical takes on the classic Jazz Age novel--and a few cinematic ones, too--the understandable allure of Fitzgerald's breathtaking sentences has represented a deathly sire…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:46PMSunday, April 28, 2024
If there's a compelling reason to see "Patriots," it's Stuhlbarg, a Julliard-trained actor who can elevate flawed material with the best of them. In "Patriots," his talent bridges a director…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:20AMMonday, April 22, 2024
The cast of "The Outsiders: A New Musica"l bring their own substantial charisma to the stage, but it's been dramaturgically constrained by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine's book, which sacrifice…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 02:42PMMonday, April 8, 2024
But, as the book's co-writer with Townshend, McAnuff is self-aware enough to recognize that "The Who's Tommy" needs to blow one's mind through sensory overload. That way, thoughts can't inte…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:42PMMonday, April 1, 2024
Conceived by Yazbek, the show is structured as a folksy retelling of the haplessly heinous Elmer McCurdy's life and post-life story, with the unbelievably true and undeniably dead portion re…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:15PMMonday, February 26, 2024
Christopher Rhoton's Double Dare-inspired set belies these weightier autobiographical details, offering enough of a time-warping simulacrum to help middle-aged members of the audience shed a…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 02:59PMTuesday, February 20, 2024
"Ain't nothin' sentimental about a dead revolution." Wearing a too-short, too-tight dress, shiny thigh-high boots, and a long fuchsia wig, the twentysomething Nina (Moses Ingram) attempts to…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:33PMWednesday, February 7, 2024
Reteaming with O'Hara and book writer Craig Lucas for the first time since the 2005 Tony-award-winning "The Light in the Piazza," Guettel's hodgepodge of a score equates jazz with blithe ine…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:23AMTuesday, December 12, 2023
Based on an identically titled 2015 HBO documentary by Alexandra Shiva, "How to Dance in Ohio," in its musical form, works best whenever that magnificent seven is completely together onstage…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 04:28PMMonday, November 20, 2023
Still, whatever faint accommodations he grants it, for Idle, structure is the enemy of joy, which every aspect of "Spamalot" is relentlessly intent on delivering, not only from a few well-pe…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:39PMSunday, November 12, 2023
A repetitively thin outlook on grief, "I Need That" ostensibly concludes with an image of healing, but I'm not sure why, or if it actually does. It's possible the famously prolific Rebeck ha…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:03AMWednesday, October 25, 2023
How much you enjoy 'Gutenberg! The Musical!" likely depends on a combination of factors entirely unrelated to that German fellow: familiarity with the tropes it's skewering; your own level o…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 02:16PMMonday, October 16, 2023
Director Garry Hynes (a co-founder of the Druid) heightens the portent of this bellicose rhetoric, as well as O'Casey's mockery of it, by having a fractious collection of barroom denizens st…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:50PMThursday, October 5, 2023
In 1961, Ossie Davis channeled the hurt of growing up in segregated Georgia into "Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through The Cotton Patch," humorously attacking the cause of his s…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:43AMSunday, September 24, 2023
Gilman's triteness and predictability combine to poorly serve a talented acting quartet, all of whom originated their roles in a 2022 production of "Swing State" at the Goodman Theatre under…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 05:55PMThursday, August 17, 2023
As for what's in a name, yes, Ian Shaw is Robert's son, returning the life-giving favor not just through his words but also bodily, portraying his father in "The Shark Is Broken" with a cand…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:26PMTuesday, June 27, 2023
Alex Edelman in a scene from his one-man show “Just for Us” at the Hudson Theatre (Photo credit: Matthew Murphy) Early in his stand-up show Just for Us Alex Edelman pays tribute to Robin…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:43PMThursday, June 15, 2023
Picking the easiest possible creative path, a decision the effort-averse George would no doubt admire, the McSmiths forgo imaginative risk-taking in favor of simply copying their source mate…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:09PMWednesday, June 7, 2023
In its earliest scenes--as a Marvin Gaye record spins on the turntable, Adam Honoré's lighting design pairs naturalistically with Wilson Chin's meticulous set, and Dominique Fawn Hill and D…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:01PMMonday, May 1, 2023
The mesmerizing Jodie Comer, making her Broadway debut in the Olivier Award-winning best new play after starring in the genre-subverting BBC show Killing Eve, portrays Tessa (for which Comer…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 02:50PMWednesday, April 19, 2023
When it comes to modern adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many theatergoers tend to treat them like a test, mentally annotating plot and character correlations as if their high school Englis…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 07:48PMMonday, April 17, 2023
In addition to a surfeit of approximate rhymes, the score for Shucked includes a paean to corn and a reprise of the following ready-for-Hallmark advice: "maybe love is like a seed/a little s…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:15AMMonday, March 27, 2023
While Brown's tunefully varied score strives to historically situate the bigoted nightmare we're witnessing within the cultural context of the South's fabricated sense of nobility and victim…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:17PMMonday, March 20, 2023
When it comes to plot, characters, or often both, even the best theater tends to require a suspension of disbelief. Given that it's hardly a sucker's bet for indolent playwrights to pin thei…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:09PMTuesday, March 7, 2023
Absurdist to an increasingly ho-hum degree, Szadkowski and Knox let their imaginations run amok with silly speculations about pre-double-homicide life in the Borden household that are punctu…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 05:21PMTuesday, February 14, 2023
Writer/director Erica Schmidt's "Lucy" is a play struggling to find a point of view, or perhaps a point of view struggling to find a play. If the latter is true, then that narrative position…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:25AMWednesday, February 1, 2023
Living in his "palatial" rent-controlled apartment on one of Manhattan's most stunning architectural stretches, Walter "Pops'' Washington (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is an aging man of agin…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 04:07PMThursday, January 26, 2023
And that's the agonizing tension in "Without You;" in his lyrical responses to Larson, Rapp is well aware that it's not a back-and-forth, that Larson can't say anything more than he has alre…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:24AMThursday, December 15, 2022
All of the above occurs prior to the intermission and, if "The Far Country" has a shortcoming, it's that the second half feels like a sequel to what came before rather than a continuation of…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:18PM 
