Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Trudi Jackson and Mark Rice-Oxley in Playing With Grown Ups.Although Playing with Grown Ups isn't entirely successful as a play, it's refreshing to see a completely unsentimental look at mot…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 10:10PMMonday, March 9, 2015
Rosie Perez and David in Fish in the Dark.I didn't expect to enjoy Fish in the Dark as much as I did. That's not to say I had a great time. Larry David's Broadway debut as actor and author i…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:56PMFriday, October 17, 2014
I was late to the party in discovering Richard Nelson's Apple Family Plays. I caught only the last two during their Off Broadway runs at the Public Theater. So I was delighted to hear that o…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 04:32PMMonday, July 7, 2014
Religion isn't really my thing, but that didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying Renee Calarco's The Religion Thing, currently on the boards at the Cell thanks to Project Y Theatre, origi…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 04:39PMTuesday, July 1, 2014
The Mint Theater strays from its usual diet of British and Irish drama with a French curiosity from 1930 called Donogoo, about a South American land scheme. But comedy doesn't always transla…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 04:43PMThursday, May 15, 2014
Memorable performances sometimes pop up where you don't expect them. Sheridan's The Rivals is best known as the play that features the word-misusing Mrs. Malaprop, but the best performances …
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:59PMThursday, April 3, 2014
There's been some kvetching about the number of King Lears treading the boards of New York theaters this season, but I don't mind at all. Maybe it's because it takes me awhile to fully proce…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:13PMTuesday, March 25, 2014
Cuban playwright Eduardo Machado usually writes about his heritage, but Worship is about the often unhealthy, tumultuous relationship between students and the mentors they, well, worship. It…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:51PMWednesday, March 12, 2014
Similarities abound between Marty, Paddy Chayefsky's best-known work from the 1950s, and Middle of the Night, a less-familiar play from that same decade, now being revived Off Broadway by th…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 03:59PMFriday, February 21, 2014
Irish Rep's new musical, about convicts bound for Australia, has a book by Thomas Keneally (Schindler's List), music and lyrics by Larry Kirwan (the group Black 47) and direction and design …
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:01PMWednesday, January 15, 2014
I wasn't sure I was in the mood for two and a half hours of Tom Stoppard on the chilly night that I caught the Acting Company's production of his Rosencrantz abd Guildenstern Are Dead, but m…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:33PMMonday, December 2, 2013
The plucky little Pearl Theatre Company has survived 30 years in the Off Broadway trenches, an amazing feat. To mark the occasion, Terrence McNally was commissioned to write a play that pays…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 04:01PMFriday, October 18, 2013
CSC's nervy, nontraditional Romeo & Juliet, which I caught at a Sunday matinee a month after I saw the current Broadway revival, is a welcome surprise. I didn't expect it to be universally e…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:46PMFriday, September 27, 2013
The scion of a wealthy family moves to New York to become a playwright. That's the premise of George Kelly's Philip Goes Forth, as well as the dramatist's own biography. But while things wen…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 03:36PMMonday, September 16, 2013
How can a play that features a 9/11 terrorist fucking a Ponzi-scheme master in ass be as tame and trite as Lee Blessing's A User's Guide to Hell, featuring Bernard Madoof? Given the current …
SOURCE: Blank New World at 02:47PMThursday, September 5, 2013
Should I ever be lucky enough to get on the TARDIS, time-travel back to early-20th-century Vienna, and meet Freud, Mahler and others of their ilk, I would hope they wouldn't be as dull as th…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 09:08AMWednesday, July 17, 2013
Forever Tango...whether you see that as a promise or a threat all depends on your affinity for the hot Latin dance and those who perform it. Mine wasn't strong enough to be sustained by this…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:13PMThursday, June 20, 2013
That film and television now fulfill a role that theater once played is not such a bad thing. Case in point: There's no longer a need for playwrights like Sidney Howard to be quite so overt …
SOURCE: Blank New World at 02:55PMFriday, June 14, 2013
Lots of theaters (though certainly not enough of them) introduce their audiences to new playwrights, but not many can say they introduce their audiences to "new" playwrights who died 40 year…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:07PMThursday, May 23, 2013
Am I the only one who didn't see why Bob Glaudini's Jack Goes Boating received the all the praise that it did when it played Off Broadway several years ago? It seemed like Steppenwolf-lite: …
SOURCE: Blank New World at 10:24PMThursday, May 2, 2013
I almost never tire of dry, quirky, understated Canadian humor, and when that is the main thrust of The Drawer Boy, Michael Healey's play is a delight. But this tale of two farmers with a my…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 12:54PMTuesday, April 23, 2013
Think formalizing your final will is one of life's more soporific labors. I'm afraid it's not much more interesting watching Shakespeare accomplish the task in The Last Will, Robert Brustein…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 04:11PMMonday, April 22, 2013
When I heard this morning that Arthur Darvill was stepping into one of the lead roles in the Broadway production of Once, I was sure I missed a press release or three. Surely producers knew …
SOURCE: Blank New World at 04:36PMThursday, April 18, 2013
It sounds gimmicky, but I was really impressed with the creepy, evocative Macbeth now on Broadway, in which Alan Cumming gets to stretch his Shakespeare muscles by playing all of the major c…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 02:38PMFriday, April 12, 2013
Until I saw Zero Hour, a solo biodrama about the brilliant, difficult Zero Mostel, a few years back, I wasn't aware that Jerome Robbins had given names of suspected communists to the House U…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 11:10AMMonday, April 8, 2013
Amid all the big spring Broadway openings, don't overlook David Harrower's Good with People. I was reading a book of Pinter plays (how pretentious does that sound!) when I caught this thorny…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 10:52PMWednesday, February 27, 2013
Thanks to the Mint Theater Company I've had a lovely time getting acquainted with Irish playwright Teresa Deevy over the last three seasons. Their current offering, Katie Roche, isn't my fav…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:10PMMonday, February 11, 2013
It's quite delightful conducting an interview when your subjects are Danny Bursetin, who was equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking in the Broadway revivals of South Pacific, and Sarah Paul…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 05:27PMThursday, December 13, 2012
Sometimes the plays and films and TV shows that best fill me with the Christmas spirit aren't the ones that directly relate to the holiday. Take, for example, Red Bull Theater's jaunty, frol…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 03:51PMWednesday, November 28, 2012
Yep, there actually was an episode of This Is Your Life that featured a Hiroshima survivor meeting one of the pilots who dropped the bomb. Now there's even a play about it, written by Cusi C…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 04:33PMMonday, October 22, 2012
There's a Pinter lovefest going on over at the Irish Rep, with British actor Julian Sands of A Room With a View fame performing Pinter's poetry and prose--interspersed with reminiscences fro…
SOURCE: Blank New World at 02:00PM 
