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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.
Downstate, the thoughtful and thorny drama by Bruce Norris, author of the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning Clybourne Park, is built on a plot structure as conventional as can be. A knock on the door and the arrival of an outsider turns the delicately, if not precariously, balanced world on the other side of the threshold upside down. But who comes knocking and who’s inside the door is anything but run-of-the-mill in this skillfully acted Playwrights Horizons presentation directed by Pam MacKinnon....
I'll admit I had some preconceived skepticism walking into Second Stage Theater's production of Camp Siegfried. About a summer-camp fling between two teenagers being gradually indoctrinated into Nazism, it reminded me of This Beautiful Future, another Off-Broadway "love story" involving a young Nazi from earlier this season. That show dangerously romanticized its characters in the name of nostalgia for young love and innocence, and I feared this show would do the same. My fears, luckily, proved...
Hao Bai's gorgeous set design for Madeline Sayet's Where We Belong transcends time and space. We're simultaneously on a bygone earth without borders and today's earth after people insisted on drawing them. We're simultaneously by the modern-day River Thames and the Massapequotuck River, as it was once called. Physically, Sayet also points out, we're watching her show just off Broadway, a street that used to be a key Lenape trading trail. Visually and audibly, Sayet's expertly written and...
Unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, so it’s long been said. In her conceptually ambitious and expertly acted play, Catch as Catch Can, Mia Chung takes that time-honored trope and puts her own theatrical stamp on it. Bottom line, she doubles down. Three actors play six characters – each an adult child and one of their parents — jumping genders and generations while they’re at it. In director Daniel Aukin’s staging at Playwrights Horizons, a trio of Asian actors play the characters who,...
"Following your heart" is an amorphous thing. It can be hard to know exactly what the heart wants: Sometimes it's a person or an object, but other times it's something less concrete, like freedom or respect. Regardless, it can be tricky to put one's desires into words. In that case, there's another option: expressing them with the body. That's the idea that grounds Only Gold, a new dance musical directed, choreographed, and co-written by Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. What shades of...
Kicking off a play with a piercing, guttural screech is certainly a way to make an impression. It is one of multiple moments in Noah Diaz's You Will Get Sick that make an impression. A man with an unnamed sickness floating in a burst of strobe lights as hay spills out of him like a torn scarecrow. A waiter taking burger orders while on the verge of sobbing. Linda Lavin singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with the intensity of "Last Midnight." This spiky 85-minute show packs itself with bold...
On paper, My Broken Language at Signature Theatre is a stage adaptation of Quiara Alegría Hudes's (In the Heights, Water by the Spoonful) same-named memoir, about finding the right blend of languages to capture the full vitality of her vibrant Puerto Rican family. On stage, the show is a living museum to the Pulitzer-winning playwright's family, constantly in motion, as the perfect cocktail of expression includes more than words. Visuals and movement are just as necessary to honor her family as...
Where the Mountain Meets the Sea, a heartfelt little show by Jeff Augustin, is a story that takes us from coast to coast, decade to decade. But for such an expansive story, a decidedly no-frills production. It doesn't need them. All it has, and needs, are a couple performers delivering a solid script, with music flowing throughout like waves. The magnetic storytellers are Billy Eugene Jones and Chris Myers, perfectly cast. They respectively play Jean, a Haitian immigrant to America, and his son...
With audiences on three sides of a small, knickknack-laden stage, which actors frequently spill off of with instruments in hand, A Man of No Importance at Classic Stage Company perfectly captures the feel of scrappy community theatre in a church basement. That's a high compliment, to clarify. In fact, it's the entire point of the show, a stirring and gorgeous one in its simplicity. The musical is set up as a play-within-a-play, with bus passengers in Dublin introducing the story of their...
On Straight Line Crazy's poster art, a pensive Ralph Fiennes towers above a diminutive New York skyline, in character as the notorious city planner Robert Moses. The image is an apt representation of the production. One can always count on Fiennes to deliver a riveting performance, but it's not quite enough to make David Hare's flat play as indelible as its subject matter. Moses, as head of multiple planning committees in the 20th century, oversaw the building of numerous bridges, highways,...