Off-Broadway Reviews

Read the latest New York Off Broadway reviews on New York Theatre Guide. Discover more information on Off Broadway shows in New York City and beyond. New York Theatre Guide employs multiple critics to ensure a diversity of opinion about Off Broadway shows currently playing. Learn more about recent and past Off Broadway show reviews from New York Theatre Guide. Visit the Broadway page to read Broadway theatre reviews.

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  • Black No More

    The nicest thing I can say about Black No More, the New Group-produced musical at Signature Theatre, is that Tamika Lawrence is giving a Tony and Grammy Award-worthy performance. The cast is uniformly wonderful: Brandon Victor Dixon vamps amusingly enough despite having little actual singing or acting to do as the central Max Disher, a Black man who uses a machine to become white, and Lillias White belts to the rafters as an ancillary character. Sadly, it is all for naught.The music, lyrics, and...

  • Space Dogs

    If a pair of eager-beaver performances and cute overload were enough to make Space Dogs achieve orbit, then this new Off-Broadway musical about canines' ill-starred role in a Cold War throwdown, written by and starring Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire, could be categorized as out-of-this-world. But no. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know it takes more, including songs you want to hear again and a narrative with a strong point of view, smarts, and a surprise or two. As is, the show gets tugged...

  • Tambo & Bones

    "It's quite easy to write poorly and have a white person call you powerful," Tambo & Bones playwright, Dave Harris, details in an essay in the play's program. The new production, now open at Playwrights Horizons, proves his point perfectly. The three-act, 90-minute production, directed by Taylor Reynolds, is part minstrel act, part underground rap spectacle, part academic hoopla that throws racial tomfoolery and the n-word in the face of a mostly white audience who take the bait and call it...

    Playwrights Horizons
  • Prayer for the French Republic

    Prayer for the French Republic is an ambitious new play, currently running off Broadway at New York City Center with Manhattan Theatre Club, that clocks in at a jaw-dropping three hours. And the most amazing thing about it? Those three hours just fly by.Joshua Harmon remarkably explores a century in the life of one Jewish family while folding in 1,000 years of Jewish history. And in a dramatic feat, the play does not collapse under its own weight. Instead, Prayer for the French Republic is a...

    Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
  • <span style="color:#000000"Intimate Apparel<span style="color:#000000", Lynn Nottage's heartbreaking chamber play, returns to New York as a resplendent opera that magnifies the scale of the original without losing its razor-sharp critique of the toll that women pay for unequal relationships. <span style="color:#000000"What is most remarkable about the new production, which is presented at Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, is that it continues to function as a play. There is no...

  • SHHHH

    The sleek, bright lobby of Atlantic Theater Company's Atlantic Stage 2 and its scrappy, dimly-lit stage may as well be entirely different worlds. The intimate space has become a convincing studio apartment (Arnulfo Maldonado designed the set), and cushions in lieu of front-row seats make houseguests of the audience. The coziness borders on voyeuristic: There's a plainly visible toilet at the front of the stage, a bare mattress on the floor nearby, and candles and string lights casting their bits...

    Atlantic Stage 2
  • Alex Edelman: Just For Us

    Logging onto social media these days is like opening a potentially poisonous box of chocolates: You never know what bad takes, misinformation, and hatred you're going to get amid the good stuff. But that's why we use social media, comedian Alex Edelman suggests: to see bad opinions from safely behind our own screens, where we can feel self-righteous for disagreeing without ever having to truly face most of the people spewing their venom. Unless, of course, you're Edelman, in which case you're...

    Hudson Theatre
  • Long Day's Journey into Night

    In a bright stroke in director Robert O'Hara's intriguing but not always persuasive take on Long Day's Journey into Night set in Covid-era 2020, Mary Tyrone spends the opening moments silently practicing yoga. Dressed in leggings and a long-sleeve hoodie, the morphine-addicted matriarch motors through poses — downward dog, cat-cow, pigeon. Welcome to Lockdown's Journey into Night.Yoga actually turns out to be an apt activity for Mary in Eugene O'Neill's 1957 Tony winner. She is always posing....

  • Cecily Strong in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

    If alien life-forms ever come to Earth and require a human representative, take them immediately to Cecily Strong.She's already had the practice, after all, playing Trudy, who is explaining Earth to aliens in Jane Wagner's The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe at The Shed. I'd just as soon nominate Wagner (whose cosmic insights, about life's great importance being found in the small moments, are still captivating 30 years after the play premiered) or Tomlin (who made the play...

    The Shed
  • Holiday musicals are often cheery but don't quite leave an imprint. So when one does, it sticks like a wet candy cane. The Streets of New York, a musical revival adapted from Dion Boucicault's 1857 play The Poor of New York, is a festive production full of melodramatic storytelling and poppy tunes delivered with merriment by an unforgettable cast.The award-winning musical, previously staged in 2001 at Irish Repertory Theatre, has returned to the Off-Broadway house this winter. The classic...

    Irish Repertory Theatre

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