Thursday, March 12, 2020
Company XIV cast of Seven Sins. Photo by Mark Shelby Perry.
Seven Sins by Company XIV, their most cohesive production to date, tells the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and the i…
Linked From Show Showdown at 12:48PMFriday, February 21, 2020
While it seems that a good half the theater-going public in and around New York City hotly disagrees with me, I'm squarely in the camp that believes Ivo Van Hove's maximal minimalism fails …
Linked From Show Showdown at 12:42PMThursday, February 20, 2020
I saw a very early performance of Coal Country, so this is a brief report rather than a review.
Coal Country is a documentary theatre performance developed by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen,…
Linked From Show Showdown at 05:42PMSaturday, February 1, 2020
One of the many joys of theatre is getting to experience how another person's brain and imagination work. Last night at La Mama, the brain and imagination belonged to Theodora Skipitares, w…
Linked From Show Showdown at 05:32PMTuesday, January 21, 2020
I was going to do a "best-of" for 2019 plus a "looking forward" for 2020, when I realized that their focus would be much the same: the treasure that is non-Broadway theatre.I'm not denying t…
Linked From Show Showdown at 11:42PMTuesday, December 24, 2019
There's a lot going on in Jagged Little Pill, which has to be the wokest jukebox musical you're likely to see on Broadway lately. Built around the era-defining third album of the same name b…
Linked From Show Showdown at 01:36PMMonday, December 16, 2019
Sven Ratzke; Photo by Hanneke Wetzer
Dutch-German performer Sven Ratzke is the best kind of David Bowie fan. When he sings his Ziggy Stardust songs, he closes his eyes, softens his face and …
Linked From Show Showdown at 02:48AMThursday, December 12, 2019
Ashley Dragon. Credit: Mark Shelby Perry
Even when Company XIV produces a problematic show, it’s vastly entertaining. While the Nutcracker Rouge’s version of this well-known holiday t…
Linked From Show Showdown at 02:54PMSunday, November 24, 2019
The narration for the MasterVoices production of the Gershwins' Let 'Em Eat Cake mentions that (1) it was the very first musical sequel (to Of Thee I Sing), and (2) it set the precedent fo…
Linked From Show Showdown at 05:36PMMonday, November 18, 2019
Midway through Fires in the Mirror, Anna Deavere Smith's moving and generous one-person show about the 1991 Crown Heights riots, Robert Sherman, the head of the City of New York's Increase t…
Linked From Show Showdown at 04:33PMSaturday, November 9, 2019
In the excellent Voyage Theater Company production of The Hope Hypothesis, running through November 15 at the Sheen Center, playwright-director Cat Miller deftly shows how easily innocence c…
Linked From Show Showdown at 04:24PMThursday, October 31, 2019
What is a play? There are many definitions, of which this one (from the Merriam-Webster website) is a representative example:
A composition in verse or prose intended to portray life or char…
Linked From Show Showdown at 06:48PMTuesday, October 29, 2019
Panama Hattie, the third show in the York Theatre Company's Cole Porter-a-thon, is a mixed bag that is ultimately great fun.
Simon Jones, Kylie Kuioka, Stephen Bogardus, Klea Blackhurst, An…
Linked From Show Showdown at 09:18PMTired of the news? Depressed by the weird meanness of humans? Maybe you need a mini-vacation. Maybe you need to bask in the weird wonder of humans.
Jayson Dominguez and the Wheel of DeathP…
Linked From Show Showdown at 02:18AMMonday, October 28, 2019
The production of Macbeth at the Classic Stage Company (CSC), directed and designed by John Doyle, is a streamlined affair. It runs 1:40 without an intermission; it has a cast of only nine …
Linked From Show Showdown at 12:33AMTuesday, October 22, 2019
Once upon a time, Broadway was full of larger-than-life stars (often women) easily identified by their distinctive voices and mannerisms. Gwen Verdon. Carol Channing. Ethel Merman. Elaine St…
Linked From Show Showdown at 06:03PMWhen a set of twins (Eve and Evan) press the wrong doorbell on Halloween, they are forced to fight for their lives against a manipulative, mean, and hungry witch. Can they save themselves? C…
Linked From Show Showdown at 04:24AMFriday, October 18, 2019
On the surface, Betrayal is about entitled Londoners who meet for fancy lunches, during which they chat about art and literature and the best way to get to Torcello from Venice during summe…
Linked From Show Showdown at 04:12PMWednesday, October 16, 2019
I bought my first Ben Bagley record, Irving Berlin Revisited, for 69 cents at a flea market in New Jersey a million years ago. Albums those days cost around four dollars, so it was quite a …
Linked From Show Showdown at 07:48PMWednesday, October 9, 2019
The cast; Photo by Katie Walenta
While much of Tonya Pinkins' Truth and Reconciliation: Womyn Working it Out, a collective of nine 10-minute plays and songs about women and oppression per…
Linked From Show Showdown at 06:36PMSaturday, September 14, 2019
Laughing Liberally: Make America Laugh Again, an evening of left-leaning stand-up comedy, provides a bubble of shared beliefs, politically correct (and occasionally incorrect) commentary, …
Linked From Show Showdown at 12:03AMMonday, September 9, 2019
When Keith Hamilton Cobb first took an acting class, he wanted to play Titania from A Midsummer Night's Dream. His acting teacher said no. Cobb continued to make creative suggestions; his t…
Linked From Show Showdown at 02:48AMMonday, August 19, 2019
My latest essay is up at Art Times:The holy grail of New York theater is a rave review in the New York Times. It doesn’t guarantee success (and a pan doesn’t guarantee failure), but a …
Linked From Show Showdown at 11:42PMThursday, August 15, 2019
Ian Spring and LEXXE as Alice. Photo: Mark Shelby Perry
This burlesque journey down the rabbit hole transforms Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a circus-tinged, sex…
Linked From Show Showdown at 05:12PMTuesday, July 30, 2019
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, I watched certain political plays with a sense of distance, deeply sympathetic to the characters and deeply grateful that those awful things weren't …
Linked From Show Showdown at 10:12PMIt took me a very long time to see Fidler afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish)--more on that in a minute--but I'm glad I pushed myself to go. In slowing down the musical's often frenet…
Linked From Show Showdown at 10:12PMMonday, July 29, 2019
In Series A, the first part of Summer Shorts at 59E59, all three plays circle around death. This is a lot for a 90-minute evening.The first show, Interior, is the most fully realized of t…
Linked From Show Showdown at 01:12AMTuesday, July 23, 2019
Ya gotta love Annie Golden. She has a sweetness to her, with a wild voice and a slightly goofy vibe. For a creative team to decide to shape a musical around her--even going so far as to name…
Linked From Show Showdown at 09:36PMMonday, July 22, 2019
Sometimes the plot in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth by Tom Stoppard, first produced in 1979, runs too close to home. But some background first:In Dogg's Hamlet, practically everyone speaks…
Linked From Show Showdown at 01:48AMFriday, July 19, 2019
Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth plays with language and slapstick, presents fascinating mini-versions of two of Shakespeare's masterpieces, vividly depicts the importance of …
Linked From Show Showdown at 08:36PMMonday, July 15, 2019
Ladyship, the new show by twins Laura Good and Linda Good, exemplifies how difficult it is to write a good musical. There is so much here to like: some beautiful songs, an original story, an…
Linked From Show Showdown at 12:42AM 
