Off-Broadway Reviews

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...

Review of Shakespeare in the Park production of Coriolanus at Delacorte Theater

What kind of mothering raises the best servant to the people? Is it conditional or unconditional? This year's Public Theater presentation of Shakespeare in the Park delivers an examination of mothering for political success in Coriolanus at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, directed by Daniel Sullivan.Caius Martius (Jonathan Cake) is a mama's boy to mother Voluminia (Kate Burton). Sullivan has him so tied to the apron strings that Cake rarely touches his own wife, Virgilia (Nneka Okafor),...

Review of #DateMe: An OkCupid Experiment at Westside Theatre

You simply can't go wrong choosing #DateMe: An OkCupid Experiment for an entertaining night out at the theater. It's laugh-out-loud funny, it is absolutely like nothing you've ever seen before, and if you don't walk out of the theater gobsmacked by some of the statistics you've heard, well, I don't know how, but you managed to fall asleep while everyone else was laughing.Wait, what? Statistics you say? Why yes, statistics. #DateMe: An OkCupid Experiment was created by Robyn Lynne Norris after...

Review of Little Gem, starring Marsha Mason, at Irish Repertory Theatre

In Little Gem at the Irish Repertory Theatre, three generations of the Neville family - grandmother, mother and daughter - stand on the the cusp of change. In a series of monologues delivered directly to the audience, each shares her unique perspective. They are three sides of one coin, who spin one tale of shared grief and hope.We meet the youngest Neville first. Amber (Lauren O'Leary) bursts with nervous energy and a line of fast talk that at times leaves one breathless. O'Leary endows Amber...