BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

When Kathryn Allyn, an opera singer now turned Great American Songbook chanteuse, took the stage at The Cutting Room last Tuesday night, she was all va-va-voom in a curve-hugging Valentine red dress. She joined her crackerjack band-musical director Frank Ponzio, bassist Tom Hubbard, and drummer Vito...

Forget the freshly slaughtered lamb that Richard is preparing. Playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's HUNTER GATHERERS is an all-you-can-eat buffet of betrayal, sexual awkwardness, blood, red wine, lust-filled passions, and a blurring of the lines between civilization and primal instincts. The hysterical...

In a two-reviews-in-one column critiquing shows from last March, my esteemed editor, Stephen Hanks quoted the poet Robert Browning: “A man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?” Hanks pointed out that Browning's famous line is about setting goals, striving, and ambition, all o...

“March is Cabaret Month” in New York gives us the opportunity to examine where we are, and, most importantly, where we have come from with this most magical of all art forms--Cabaret. So how very fortunate we are to see and hear veteran Broadway actress and cabaret performer, Karen Mason return ...

Abundance, now playing at the Beckett Theatre, was commissioned in 1989 and is based on true life stories of pioneering women . . . Clearly well researched, Abundance manages to feel both intimate and sweeping . . . Director Jenn Thompson makes one feel like a voyeur. When unexpressed, emotions are ...

Making their 54 Below debuts together, Emily Padgett and Erin Davie crafted a cabaret show that was filled with humor and heart. Singing duets and solo numbers, the lovely ladies who played Violet and Daisy Hilton in this season's Broadway revival of Side Show at the St. James Theatre skillfully ent...

Ben Rimalower just might be heading a revival of downtown theater. Following the wild success of his popular cabaret-theater piece, Patti Issues, which ran forever (and is still going strong), he's back with his latest entry into obsessive-compulsive issues, Bad With Money, running at The Duplex Cab...

ALTAR BOYZ opened Off-Broadway at Stage 4 of Dodger Stages on March 1, 2005. The award-winning, hit musical comedy closed after 2,032 regular performances on January 10, 2010. For two very special performances at 54 Below on March 1, 2015, actors who played the now iconic fictional Christian boy ban...

On the first evening of Flagstad: Triumph and Tragedy, Scandinavia House warmed in the presence of Norwegian actress Nina Bendiksen....

“Are You Havin' Any Fun?” the formidable Barbara Cook breezily asks in song with the intimacy of an old friend. Having had her first paid (50 cents) singing job at the age of eight, Cook looks back on a lengthy career feeling lucky. It's been weeks since she's sung due to health issues laying he...

Playing her debut NYC solo show I Came From Jersey For This to a sold out house at 54 Below, Jessica Vosk took the intimate venue by storm. Dazzling audiences with her talent, energy, sincerity, and humor, she put up a perfectly crafted cabaret tribute to her journey from singing with her dad in the...

Vocalist Joey Arias is not what he appears to the uninitiated. This is not a drag performer executing pastiche, but rather an artist serious about music with the talent to offer a full-blooded show. Lifelong affinity for Billie Holiday first professionally surfaced in 1987's Recording Arias on Holid...

Celebrating the centennial of Frank Sinatra, Paulo Szot returns to 54 BELOW with a brand new show inspired by Antonio Carlos Jobim, the founding father of bossa nova. Unfortunately, the end product is not the enchanted evening we'd expect from the Tony Award winner....

Veteran cabaret performer Raissa Katona Bennett and Musical Director Kenneth Gartman are very good friends who for the past few years have been performing together in what might be called the cabaret equivalent of movie shorts. But with 3Decades in the Dark: Raissa and Kenneth Go to the Movies (a fi...

54 BELOW has a successful series of one-offs where a talented cast sings the music of a certain show or group. Last Saturday the popular venue hosted 54 BELOW Sings Heart. Channeling the cherished goddesses of rock with might and candor, the cast left the audience pumped and euphoric....

At 60-something-years-old, one can accurately describe Tovah Feldshuh as what plucky is when it grows up. Feldshuh's mother Lily died at 103 having lived, one gathers, like the character her daughter played in Pippin: 'Oh, it's time to start livin'/Time to take a little from this world we're given/T...

When Mark Nadler, singing the iconic Irving Berlin song and Al Jolson standard 'Let Me Sing and I'm Happy,' strolls from the back of 54 Below to his rightful place center stage (accompanied by Nick Russo on banjo), he seems, in all respects, a jaunty, debonair thespian. The song is light, unembellis...

Saturday night, Alexis Cole continued a Valentine tradition at Jazz at Kitano with a different twist on By Request. Patrons were given an extensive list of songs from which to select favorites and blue file cards on which to write one or more choices. These were deposited in a small shopping bag. Af...

NYU Steinhardt Vocal Performance's student-run Players Club presents THE DROWSY CHAPERONE from February 13-15...

Stearns Matthews, a 2015 Bistro Award winner for Outstanding Recording, celebrated the late 2014 release of his debut album Spark last night at the Laurie Beechman Theatre. Giving an encore performance of his critically lauded Spark CD Release Show, the accomplished performer and three-time MAC Awar...

Marissa Mulder, who has been collecting rave reviews and awards in bunches over the past couple of years, debuted her new solo show, Instincts (with musical director Nate Buccieri), to a packed Metropolitan Room on Friday night January 30. It was the first effort in her new 'Residency' at the Chelse...

Buster Poindexter (aka David Johansen) doesn't so much play 'at' Cafe Carlyle as 'with' it. Like the bad kid from a black and white cult film, this charismatic artist establishes dominion over the highbrow room, determined to lower its bar as irrevocably as a limbo stick in a roadhouse lounge. A bli...

Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano exude warmth. Both superb musicians, they're polished without ostentation, symbiotic without deferring individual fortes, and infectiously (enviably) appreciative of one another without becoming saccharine. Original arrangements never trade lyrical meaning for novelt...

It's mid-February and all the stores are filled with red hearts and chocolates in an effort to bamboozle us into thinking love is in the air. Frankly, it may still be too chilly for love to survive in the air. Despite this, Alysha Umphress and Joshua Henry heated up 54 BELOW earlier this week with t...

The ensemble of the smash-hit musical Les Miserables has got to be one of the hardest working ensembles on Broadway. Last night this talented group impressed audiences by casting the wigs, dirt, and grime aside and singing the music that makes them tick at 54 BELOW....