Off-Broadway Reviews

Review of Anything Can Happen in the Theater: The Musical World of Maury Yeston at York Theatre Company

Famous for hit musicals like Titanic, Grand Hotel and Nine, Maury Yeston is a Tony Award-winning composer whose stylistic gifts range from witty to uplifting to solemn. In Anything Can Happen in the Theater: The Musical World of Maury Yeston, Gerard Alessandrini, of Forbidden Broadway fame, has gathered a diverse cast of five singers to explore the wealth of material in Yeston's library. Clearly enjoying the music and each other, the group has a rapport that is vital when performing in a small...

Review of Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven at Atlantic Theater Company

How do you produce a play that is two hours and forty-five minutes long - not a musical, just a play - and have total confidence that you will not lose your audience by intermission? Make sure your writer is Stephen Adly Guirgis and your director is John Ortiz. I was so in it with this ensemble cast of characters in Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven, that I would have gladly spent three more hours with them. Raw human struggle served without a prescription for hope or cheerful poetic...

Review of Greater Clements at Lincoln Center Theater

What in tarnation is going on here? Why the sudden glut of plays that are three hours long? Have all the dramaturges traded in their shingles for a "Gone Fishin'" sign? Three hours is just too damn long - The Ferryman is an exception. Greater Clements has now joined the three hour club, and for no good reason unless exposition and obfuscation are your preferred delivery formats for the theatre.Let's start with the good news. Samuel D. Hunter has created a character, Joe, who is unstable in the...

Review of MsTrial at New World Stages

Dep Kirkland is the playwright, star and own worst enemy of MsTrial. Tasked with portraying a high-powered attorney who is not above committing a violent assault when tanked up on tequila, Kirkland underplays the part to mixed effect. And as playwright, this former trial attorney loads the script with legalese and misdirection in the first act, before unloading a devastating lesson on the misunderstanding and withholding of evidence in the second. Despite the play's punny title, this is no...

Review of Tony Kushner's A Bright Room Called Day at the Public Theater

A Bright Room Called Day, now at the Public Theater, first breathed life back in 1985. We know this because playwright Tony Kushner appears as a character in the story about 10 minutes in and tells us. Mind you, he is not identified as Kushner. He is not named anywhere except the program. He is Xillah (Jonathan Hadary), and presents himself as the author in a quandary. This is the play he wrote 34 years ago. It never worked until Trump was elected - and now everyone wants to produce it, but it...

Review of The Young Man from Atlanta at Signature Theatre

Horton Foote's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Young Man from Atlanta, is lovingly brought to life again by Signature Theatre at Pershing Square Signature Center. Directed with respectful humor by Michael Wilson, the play immerses us in the quietly desperate lives of Will and Lily Dale Kidder (Aidan Quinn and Kristine Nielsen) of 1950 Houston Texas. Six months ago the Kidder's only son, Bill, walked into a lake and drowned. Will accepts that his son committed suicide but Lily Dale wants to...

Review of Audible Theater's The Half-Life of Marie Curie at the Minetta Lane Theatre

"The Half- Life of Marie Curie" is a very clever title for Lauren Gunderson's new world premiere play, now being presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre, considering Curie discovered and named the elements radium and polonium, but it gives the wrong impression altogether. It should be the incredible life of Marie Curie. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the first person to win two Nobel prizes, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple...

Review of Evita at New York City Center

The legacy and history of the Broadway genre is defined most by its divas: Broadway's brightest and most archetypal stars have been women. They are charismatic, larger than life, and have voices that bring crowds to their knees and to their feet. Moreover, they are immense cultural properties that hold a special place in the hearts of those they reach.Both the titular character and source material of Evita reflect this principle. Eva Perón, as a complex political figure, has endured as an...

Review of Signature Theatre's Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deavere Smith

There are many interpretations of what happened. It's Crown Heights, Brooklyn and it's 1991, and it's the heat of August, and it's 8:20 on a summer night. People are on the street.There has been tension in this urban neighborhood for some time as the Jewish community that lives side by side with the African American community has been expanding its footprint, buying up property and changing the landscape. Then it happened. The spark that lit the fuse of an explosion.The driver of the car in the...

Review of The New Group's Cyrano, starring Peter Dinklage, at Daryl Roth Theatre

I wanted to like this production of Cyrano by The New Group, now playing Off-Broadway's Daryl Roth Theatre. I am a fan of Peter Dinklage (who has the briefest bio in the Playbill) having first seen him in the movie "Station Master." In addition, I heard great things about Erica Schmidt's direction of Red Bull Theater's Mac Beth earlier this. I was psyched.Sadly, this production did not cooperate with my wishes. Initially it could stem from the story itself - a tale of Roxanne (Jasmine Cephas...