OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

For over a decade, the unquestionably brilliant director/choreographer Austin McCormick's Company XIV has been dazzling audiences with unexpected wonders....

The almost completely circular, arena style seating of Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater makes it a perfect venue for The Wolves, Sarah DeLappe's 2017 Pulitzer finalist drama about the individuality hidden beneath the uniformity of a girls soccer team....

Though the teenage girls at the center of Jocelyn Bioh's endearing and poignant SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY all have wonderful qualities that should be appreciated and nurtured during their years at Aburi Girls Boarding School in central Ghana, there is one quality that prevents th...

59E59 Theaters is now presenting the world premiere of 'The Briefly Dead' through December 10th. Written by Stephen Kaliski and directed by Elizabeth Ostler, this reimagined Greek tragedy has clever modern touches that create an original theatrical experience....

Simply stated, you'll love 'The Mad Ones.' The NYC premiere of this musical is now onstage at 59E59 Theaters through December 17. The show features book, music and lyrics by Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk, direction by Stephen Brackett, choreography by Alexandra Beller and an exceptional cast....

Though her aggressive style of dishing out insults has earned her the title of standup comedy's Queen of Mean, Lisa Lampanelli comes somewhat closer to being the Empress of Empathy in her comedy revue about the serious subject of food and body image, STUFFED....

Like the city where it was born and nurtured, the American musical play differs from similar stage entertainments because it was developed by a combination of cultures merging into a unique new art form. It would be difficult to find greater evidence of this fortunate merger than in the musicals of...

The New York City premiere of TOYS: A Dark Fairy Tale, written by the renowned Romanian playwright, Saviana Stanescu and directed by Gabor Tompa is being performed at 59E59 Theaters through November 26. This two-hander is an engaging play, one that stirs the imagination....

Sex is sex and rape is rape. That's the cut and dry explanation we often hear nowadays. And while there are obvious instances where any reasonable person would determine that rape has occurred, there are also those instances that straddle the line between one and the other, where human subjectivit...

To watch New York stage treasure Everett Quinton engaged in his classic brand of silliness - or, to be more accurate, ridiculousness - is just as fulfilling a cultural experience as watching a great tragedian immersed in a dramatic Shakespearean role....

he sudden act of violence that occurs early on in on Julia Cho's urgent and sensitive drama OFFICE HOUR, is certainly not unexpected. The opening scene sets up the audience to be prepared for exactly this kind of thing to happen....

To give credit where it's due, Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer-winning STRANGE INTERLUDE is perhaps the best play imaginable about women's sexuality that could have been written by a 35-year-old American man in 1923....

The art of illusion meets the art of fine dining. The McKittrick Hotel, the home of Sleep No More is now presenting the New York City premiere of At The Illusionist's Table, an all-new intimate magic and dining experience that comes straight from Scotland....

Back in 1931, when the firm Kaufman, Ryskind, Gershwin & Gershwin had the novel idea to infuse that stodgy old music/theatre entertainment, the Broadway operetta, with the jauntiness of showtune and a chaotic mixture of comedic highbrow and lowbrow to tell the tale of an unqualified, but charismatic...

Perhaps the most surprising thing about FRIENDS!THE MUSICAL PARODY was the average age of the audience at St. Luke's Theater. Friends debuted in 1994, when some in attendance were barely walking, and many others not yet in middle school. I was about to graduate from college when the show first aired...

As anyone who has ever seen A CHORUS LINE will tell you, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger's screen classic THE RED SHOES has been tantalizing young dancers with dreams of ballet stardom since premiering in 1948....

If the spot-on hilarity of first scene of director/playwright John Patrick Shanley's THE PORTUGUESE KID could be replicated for the play's remaining three-quarters, this review would be happily exclaiming that New York has got a solid, old-school sexy romantic comedy in town....

When Sophocles' OEDIPUS REX was first performed over 400 years B.C., the Greek chorus that opened the play wore the traditional identical masks. But in Luis Alfaro's contemporary adaptation, OEDIPUS EL REY, the unifying costume piece for the Latino men who make up the choro is the orange jumpsuits w...

The NYC premiere of Occupied Territories, written by Nancy Bannon and Mollye Maxner, and directed by Mollye Maxner is now being performed at 59e59 Theaters through Sunday November 5. The show features inventive staging, riveting dialogue, and an outstanding cast....

As societies in post-apocalyptic stories go, the one envisioned by playwright Zoe Kazan in her insightful relationship drama AFTER THE BLAST, seems to have it pretty good....

The term 'alternative facts' wasn't part of the popular lexicon when Stephen Adly Guirgis' superb drama of public morality and personal convictions, JESUS HOPPED THE 'A' TRAIN premiered in 2000, but a major point of play is how, in our legal system, a lie can be regarded as truth when believed from ...

It was thirty-five years ago when FORBIDDEN BROADWAY's genius creator/lyricist Gerard Alessandrini first collaborated, so to speak, with Tony-winning composer/lyricist Maury Yeston. That's when he spoofed New York theatre's then obsession with religion-themed played by twisting the lyric of NINE's ...

'We opened for an eight-week limited engagement and could not give a ticket away for three weeks.' That's how Harvey Fierstein described the giant leap of faith that, in 1981, brought a trio of his one-act plays that had each premiered separately on East 4th Street at the basement of Ellen Stewar...

When their current engagement at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club concludes this weekend, members of the Belarus Free Theatre will return to their homeland, where they and their audience members can be arrested by the Belarussian K.G.B. for creating and attending a play....

To describe Diana Oh's newest performance art installation as the pep rally that precedes the dismantling of the patriarchy is by no means a knock on her vibrantly raucous mixture of glitter, soap bubbles, anger, art and activism. It's just that, unlike many of her previous ventures, she's unlikely...