Off-Broadway Reviews

Review of the LCT3 production of Power Strip at Lincoln Center Theater

Power Strip is a right-now story freighted with all the tales of virgins and pillage the world has ever seen.The plot has a raw quality, as it focuses on a young woman living by her wits, in a refugee camp. Yasmin (Dina Shihabi) has carved out a crude haven in a denuded olive grove, on the edge of a Greek camp for Syrian refugees — people fleeing barbarism and resigned to whatever is next. Her previous cosseted life, with expectations of marriage and children and order, is in ruins.Now she is a...

Review of Little Shop of Horrors, starring Jonathan Groff, Tammy Blanchard & Christian Borle, at Westside Theatre

The plant at the centre of Little Shop of Horrors that feeds on human blood may have had its sights on world domination, but the musical that was based on the low-budget 1960 comedy sci-fi film of the same name has actually long achieved it, so it ultimately got what it wanted. And now the show has come full circle, 37 years on from its Off-Off-Broadway beginnings at the WPA Theatre (now no more) in May 1982, before moving to the larger Orpheum Theater on Second Avenue in the East Village that...

Review of Soft Power at the Public Theater

One feels fortunate to be alive in a time where artists from marginalized demographics are getting a long overdue platform to stage boldly authentic and incisive works, made by and for themselves. Recent shows like Slave Play and A Strange Loop have also demonstrated their economic viability. With Soft Power, currently running at the Public Theater, it feels like Asian artists are finally getting their turn.The King and I, but with the roles reversed? It's less gimmicky than you'd think! When a...

Review of Dublin Carol at Irish Repertory Theatre

It's Christmas Eve in Dublin, circa 1999. A string of fairy lights and slightly tattered wreaths do their best to leaven the atmosphere at the funeral parlor where John Plunkett (Jeffrey Bean) works. With its vintage 1970's décor, perfectly executed by scenic designer Charlie Corcoran and properties designer Sven Henry Nelson, the office space is a veritable time capsule, a fitting metaphor for the state of suspended animation Plunkett inhabits. Toxic guilt and shame over his intractable...

Review of WP Theater/Second Stage Theater's Our Dear Dead Drug Lord

Quiet. Small. Submissive. What happens when this repression is taken so far that young women who are looking to reclaim their voice, strength, and power turn to dear dead drug lords and dictators for inspiration? What can women learn from the likes of the fearless? What do a group of high schoolers need from Pablo Escobar?There is an often-untapped power in women's anger; it can shift the tides of politics and turn the tables towards social change. After watching Alexis Scheer's Our Dear Dead...

Review of Sunday at Atlantic Theater Company

Unfortunately, Jack Thorne's Sunday, which has been commissioned by the Atlantic Theater Company and is currently playing the Linda Gross Theater, is high-jacked by its most obnoxious character, Milo (Zane Pais), and never recovers. A group of just college graduates gather for a monthly book group that narrator Alice (Ruby Frankel) describes as having "started as a post-ironic joke and continued as a post-ironic joke that we were post-ironic about being post-ironic." It devolves into an alcohol...

Review of Wives at Playwrights Horizons

Wives, by Jaclyn Backhaus, is both a serious and over-the-top crackling, comically directed (by Margot Bordelon) tour through history beginning in 16th century France with Catherine de' Medici, a dead husband and his live lover; jumping to Idaho in 1961 with a girl's night out with Hemingway's wives and a fish; leaping to the magic of Rajasthan, India in the 1920s under British rule and the power of everyone being a wife; and firmly landing in the present at Oxbridge University at a newly formed...

Review of Lois Robbins' L.O.V.E.R. at Pershing Square Signature Center

Validation is a part of our every day, connecting us to our phones, our email, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. We are linked to everyone we know and don't know, sharing who we are, or who we pretend we are, with the perfect picture of us and family, all smiles and joy, a depiction of our perfect life. We do this to feel validated, understood, and in a sense loved.L.O.V.E.R., currently running at Pershing Square Signature Center, is a production that validates a real life with its...

Review of Make Believe at Second Stage Theater

As we grow up, do we lose our ability to make believe? Or do we merely get better at the nuances of pretending and master the skill of mirroring the way we believe ourselves to fit in the world?In Bess Wohl's Make Believe, now playing at Second Stage's Tony Kiser Theater, the Conlee children face two tragedies, the departure of their mother under unknown circumstances and the death of a family member 32 years later, reuniting them.We get to see what has become of these children, how their quirks...

Review of Bat Out of Hell: The Musical at New York City Center

To determine if you will enjoy Bat Out of Hell, Jim Steinman's explosive musical that's blowing up the New York City Center stage for the next month, take this simple test. Does the simile, "We're glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife" give you A) goosebumps, or B) nausea? For a certain generation, that sweltering image, and the song that encompasses it ("Paradise by the Dashboard Light"), was the ultimate adolescent aspirational anthem, a jokey double-dare of sex and commitment aimed at...