One of the pleasures of Vladimir, Erika Sheffer's sturdy new play at Manhattan Theatre Club, is how it allows us Americans to listen in on ordinary Russians' conversations. We've had plenty …
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 04:13AMThis won't be a long one, because The Counter is one of those plays where divulging almost any detail might constitute a spoiler. Meghan Kennedy's short, straightforward exploration of frien…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:06PMYour first thought on entering the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons is, hey, this doesn't look like the set for a song cycle. That's what Magnificent Bird and Book of Traveler…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:57PM"Fatherland." Has a vaguely Teutonic ring to it, no? But plays don't come more American than Fatherland, Stephen Sachs's distillation of disturbing recent U.S. events and their cataclysmic e…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:11PMIt's Irish Rep, and there's a squabbling mother and her adult son onstage, so we know this isn't going to end well. My first thought of The Beacon, Nancy Harris's new play, was, this reminds…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:12PMSo let me take you back to the original Forbidden Broadway. It's 1982 and we're at Palsson's, an inelegant upstairs boîte on West 72nd Street (it's still there, as the Triad). The stage is …
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 07:46AMAs one who has often found the works of Samuel Beckett to be baffling, boring, or both, I wasn't looking forward to On Beckett. The lecture on and excerpts from the man's oeuvre, returning t…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 01:20PMEverybody, except me, loved Irish Repertory Theatre's previous effort in its Friel Project, Philadelphia, Here I Come! They saw a trenchant examination of stultifying small-town Irish life a…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:02PMHere There Are Blueberries is surely the right title for this one. It refers to a caption in a photo album, a very special photo album. The phrase evokes a carefree, whimsical quotidian exis…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 05:58AMEver seen a shaggy-dog play? That's a fair description of Staff Meal, Abe Koogler's shape-shifter of a comedy now at Playwrights Horizons. His purpose is hard to pin down, if not impossible.…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:00PMWith Brooklyn Laundry having recently ended its merry run at Manhattan Theatre Club, New York now has a new, not-dissimilar mini-romance to celebrate. Lia Romeo's Still, from Colt Coeur at D…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:38PMPhiladelphia, Here I Come! was Brian Friel's first major success, and the new revival at Irish Repertory Theatre, part of its Friel Project retrospective, offers ample evidence why. It's a s…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 05:42AMYou've probably heard about it as "the musical about the penis-eating vagina." Yes, but Teeth aims to be something more–a horror musical that also takes in repression, misogyny, violence, …
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 05:11PMRupert Murdoch is a scourge, a reckless power monger whose pursuit of material gain has irrevocably changed and devalued the journalistic universe. On that much many of us will probably agre…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:45PMThe New York Times beat me to it yesterday in saying so, but gosh, this is some season John Patrick Shanley is having. First a well-received revival of his early play, Danny and the Deep Blu…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:00PMIt's called A Sign of the Times, and zowie, is it ever. Start with a jukebox score, consisting of rock 'n' roll favorites old enough to be nostalgically remembered by people old enough to be…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 08:32PMAt the Brick, there's not a bad seat in the house. That's because the house is a long, narrow room framing a long, narrow table, plus a few barstool-height chairs against the wall to fill th…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:23PMStorytelling doesn't come much more basic than I Love You So Much I Could Die, Mona Pirnot's autobiographical one-woman show at New York Theatre Workshop. NYTW's mainstage theater usually fe…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 06:06PMThe first thing about Jonah: It's not much about Jonah. He's a character, to be sure, an endearing one, embodied by Hagan Oliveras with goofy Jesse Eisenberg charm. But Jonah is mostly about…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 08:40AMSaid my companion as we exited Aristocrats: "It's The Cherry Orchard meets Three Sisters." Not quite, but Brian Friel's 1979 drama, in revival at Irish Repertory Theatre, does have a heavy l…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 03:33AMThe Jerusalem Syndrome? The timing does not seem propitious for the York Theatre Company to trot out what's meant to be a fizzy, escapist musical comedy set in the present-day Middle East. B…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 07:36PMWith Stereophonic blaring happily away on its mainstage, Playwrights Horizons is attempting an intriguing experiment upstairs at the Peter Jay Sharp: three one-acts, all solo shows, each wri…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:18AMThe curious thing about Poor Yella Rednecks, Qui Nguyen's Manhattan Theatre Club follow-up to his well-received, autobiographical Vietgone of several seasons back, is that its title characte…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 12:40AMWhoo-whee! It's a good thing Hansol Jung's Merry Me, at New York Theatre Workshop, hired an intimacy coordinator (Rocío Mendez). A great deal of shagging permeates the action, of various ge…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 05:16AMHow much you like Stereophonic, David Adjmi's play with (quite a lot of) music at Playwrights Horizons, may well hinge on how much you like Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Aerosmith, and their ilk…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 10:04PMA word of advice: Before seeing Translations, the opening volley in Irish Repertory Theatre's season-long (Brian) Friel Project, show up early. To get maximum impact out of this beguiling li…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:09PMWinners! Losers! Sinners! Boozers! So goes a line in "24 Hours a Day," the opening number of Golden Rainbow, the 1968 musical being given a rare airing at York Theatre Company's Musicals in …
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 03:51PMIndulge us for a moment, please, we collectors of cast albums and mavens of Tony Awards trivia. In 1975, a lot of Jerry Herman fans were very upset when his favorite among his scores, Mack a…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 02:59PMSounds current, doesn't it? When I told friends I was reviewing something called How to Steal an Election, at least one responded, "Oh, is it new?" Not at all: The Off-Broadway musical by Wi…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 04:16PMIt can't be easy to cram two separate plays into one 70-minute running time, but that appears to be what playwright Deirdre Kinahan has done with The Saviour, a compact drama now on Irish Re…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 04:56AMDysfunctional families rarely emerge as dysfunctional as the one portrayed in Wet Brain, John J. Caswell, Jr.'s high-decibel whatsit of a comedy-drama on Playwrights Horizons' mainstage in a…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:47AM