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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.
Playwright Deepa Purohit has had an unconventional career: Before co-founding a theatre company, she taught in public schools, opened a consulting business, and got a master's in public health from Columbia. These experiences gave her the insight to pen Elyria, a tale of the Gujarati diaspora in 1982 Ohio, now playing at Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater. Elyria is a coming-of-age story that investigates what happens when class and community prevent adults from coming into their...
There is nothing like children's theatre to inspire pure, unadulterated joy. At an 11:30 a.m. performance of The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show, now off Broadway for the third time, kids colored in pictures of their favorite Eric Carle characters in the lobby and grinned widely for pictures in front of a step-and-repeat, clutching caterpillar plushies. On the way out, I noticed a sea of "first show" flags, proudly held aloft by young, newly minted theatregoers. And that's not even to say anything...
Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 drama The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window hasn't had a major New York revival in 50 years. That fact alone would make this play, which premiered on Broadway five years after A Raisin in the Sun, an event. Add Oscar Isaac as Sidney and Rachel Brosnahan as his wife, Iris, and the magnetism intensifies. Despite the rarity factor and the pair of marquee stars, director Anne Kauffman’s revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a modestly engaging production of a...
In 2011, playwright Sarah Ruhl accepted a young poet named Max Ritvo into her playwriting class at Yale. In 2016, Ritvo died of a relapse of Ewing's sarcoma, a pediatric cancer. In between, the two forged a deep bond built on a shared appreciation for each other's curiosity, intellect, and warmth. Ruhl immortalized their exchanges in the epistolary memoir Letters From Max, and she builds on that work with her new play of the same name, a flesh-and-blood tribute to her late friend. Letters From...
Adulthood is all about rediscovering the things you loved when you were younger with fresh, mature eyes. Think pairing your favorite snacks with a glass of wine or finally noticing all the adult jokes in animated movies. The burlesque troupe Company XIV fills that niche in the live-theatre realm. The latest offering from the creators of Nutcracker Rouge, a sexy Nutracker adaptation that's returned every holiday season for a decade, is Cocktail Magique. Months since its premiere last September,...
Odysseus, the tortured hero of Homer’s Odyssey, spends 10 years lost at sea en route home to Ithaca. Ulysses (Sean Boyce Johnson), a Black American soldier deployed to Afghanistan, travels decades through his own bloodstream to reach his despondent wife and son, searching sea, river, and Harlem for the ancestor who will “baptize you of the blood on your hands,” as Deus (James T. Alfred) tells him, so he will be worthy of his home. Thus sets sail black odyssey, the modern retelling from Marcus...
In A Bright New Boise, playwright Samuel D. Hunter turns the cheerless break room of a big-box arts-and-crafts superstore into a setting to explore big ideas about faith and family. While those notions are individually intriguing, they don’t cohere into a collective impact in this work first seen off-off Broadway in 2010. The drama revolves around seemingly mild-mannered, 30something Will (Peter Mark Kendall), newly transplanted to Boise from a small community in northern Idaho. We meet him...
The Jewish people have long been referred to as the “people of the book.” The Wanderers, Anna Ziegler’s much-delayed Roundabout Theatre Company production, lets this nickname define its characters and setting. Pious Esther, for one, sneaks books from the local library, letting the tales of Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Women shape her view of a life beyond Brooklyn. Scenic designer Marion Williams turns a Williamsburg apartment into a wall of open books, a domineering structure that almost...
When we meet the adult characters of Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play, Soho Rep’s production now playing at MCC Theater, we learn too soon that there are no real benevolent actors. Robin (Nicole Villamil), eager to become a mother, has arranged to take custody of a boy she believes is three years old. Her wife is nowhere to be found. Her brother Ryan (Brian Quijada), a hyper-masculine gym owner, is skeptical but too immature to express his concerns without grabbing or referring to his genitals. By the...
From 1977 to 2018, the Cornelia Street Cafe was a thriving West Village hub for the arts. The place was renowned for its jazz music, composers exchanged works-in-progress as part of its Songwriters Exchange, and playwright Eve Ensler famously premiered The Vagina Monologues there in 1993. And in the years leading up to its shutdown, Tony Award-winning playwright Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) repeatedly went there to visit its impresario, Robin Hirsch. He's...