OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

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...

Playwright/director Aaron Mark has a habit of leaving audiences in the dark. Not that his plays are especially hard to grasp, but the author who specializes sending chills up and down spines with his solo theatrical thrillers seems to enjoy having audience members sitting in pitch blackness for at ...

I will be in Hell because I don't love my mom, the central character of Max Posner's comedic drama THE TREASURER causally admits to the audience with unemotional matter-of-factness....

Regarded by The Public Theater's artistic director Oskar Eustice as a resident company of the Astor Place venue, Elevator Repair Service's niche has always been productions with a clear focus on words, such as their fully staged complete-text reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby,' titl...

For over twenty years, artistic director Dan Wackerman's Peccadillo Theater Company has specialized in mounting handsome productions of infrequently revived Broadway fare of notable pedigree, such as Elmer Rice's COUNSELLOR AT LAW, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d'Usseau's LADIES OF THE CORRIDOR and, mos...

The New York City premiere of No Wake, written by William Donnelly and directed by Veronica Brady is now onstage at 59E59 Theaters through Sunday, October 15. This is an affecting drama, one that truly captures the emotions of people who are dealing with an indescribable tragedy....

It may have been underestimated how popular TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS would prove to be when it opened at The Public's Shiva Theater last November. Actor/playwright Nia Vardalos' warm, funny and endearing adaptation of the same-named book of collected advice columns written for the literary website The...

If director Alexandra Spencer-Jones' intention was to stage an erotic word ballet that finds beauty in the well-chiseled male form through highly-stylized acts of choreographed violence, then the latest offering at New Work Stages certainly fulfills that goal....