OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

LYSISTRATA JONES had its New York premiere in a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway production at The Gym at Judson. It transferred to Broadway and opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on December 14, 2011. Living in Houston, this show was not even a blip on my radar. Having been a longtime reader of Bro...

Summers away from Hogwarts might have been rough on Harry Potter, but Potter fans can celebrate this summer with the return of Potted Potter - The Unauthorized Harry Experience - A Parody by Dan and Jeff to the Little Shubert Theater after its New York premiere last year. For die-hard Potterphiles, ...

With book and lyrics by Bill Russel, music by Peter Menick, and direction by Andy Sandberg, Off-Broadway's THE LAST SMOKER IN AMERICA is full of laughs and wit. The show's recording is representative of it's crude, witty, and laugh out loud nature. It features tracks one after the other that will h...

N.C. Hunter's bittersweet drama of aging parents is filled with pathos and charm....

If the sexiest part of the body is the brain, Jeff Gould's comedy is an effective argument for celibacy....

Jonathan Tolins' comical Streisand fantasy re-opens at Barrow Street Theater....

Though I'll admit it strikes the ear rather oddly to hear a character referred to as another one's slave in a play set in 1930s upstate New York, that's just one of the risks involved when transporting Shakespeare into a more modern setting. Nevertheless, director Daniel Sullivan's zippy new Delaco...

Jenny Schwartz's Somewhere Fun, receiving a splendidly performed and whimsically mounted production from director Anne Kauffman at the Vineyard, is one of those plays where an author's traditional response to the traditional post-viewing question is, 'Well, what do you think it means?'...

The argument for using the pop music method of 'slant rhyming' (frowned on by musical theatre lyricists as 'false rhyming' or using 'sound-a-likes') is that by not limiting lyricists to using perfect rhymes it greatly expands the number of ideas that can be expressed.  If that's so, the number of s...

Through clever use of multimedia, playwright/performer Moe Angelos' Sontag: Reborn offers glimpses at both the precocious enthusiasm of youth and the wry remembrances of one looking back upon those same years.  ('Childhood: a terrible waste of time.')  Both come in the form of novelist, essayist, ...

I must admit to smirking a bit when, only a few minutes into Israel's Gesher Theater Company's stage adaption of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, the main character removed his clothing and started soaking in a bathtub, contributing to the odd trend that has hit New York stages in the ...

I'd be hard-pressed to find a more accurate musical theatre representation of the idealized fantasy of 1950s suburbia than the lovely Kelli O'Hara in a lovely housedress singing in her lovely soprano of her enrapturement with her lovely life via Far From Heaven's opening song, 'Autumn in Connecticut...

Director Brian Kulick sets Classic Stage Company's interesting and spirited new production of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle during the fall of the Soviet Union, 'when the hammer and sickle were replaced by the Coca-Cola bottle.'  The production's Playbill cover depicts a satisfied loo...

If I were a classical music critic I might describe The Giacomo Variations as an ambitious exploration of common themes expressed in the three operas Mozart composed with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte....

The last time Mark Brown's charming and witty stage adaptation of Jules Verne's Around The World In 80 Days played Off-Broadway, it was in a pocket-sized production highlighted by a pair of on-stage Foley artists providing live sound effects.  But in the eye-popping new Off-Broadway production, dir...

If Betty Comden and Adolph Green were both born in Bombay, Singin' In The Rain might have wound up resembling The New Group's new musical, Bunty Berman Presents….  Not that Ayub Khan Din (book, music and lyrics) and Paul Bogaev's (music) Bollywood-set musical comedy is on the same level as that m...

I suppose Richard Foreman doesn't have many talkbacks after performances of his plays because, really, how many times can you respond to an audience member asking, 'What the f***?'...

Five months…  FIVE MONTHS after their previous musical comedy, Jumbo, opened at the Hippodrome, the trio of Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and George Abbott had a brand new one at the Imperial.  But far from seeming a rush job, their 1936 On Your Toes can easily be argued to be a huge step forward...

Rain Pryor has had many television roles. Most notably, you might remember her on the ABC series 'Head of the Class.' She's now a mom and calls Baltimore home. Nevertheless, New York welcomes her with open arms. Her autobiographical one-woman show, Fried Chicken and Latkes is running now at the Acto...

At separate moments early on in Sara Cooper (book/lyrics) and Zach Redler's (music) ambitious and noteworthy The Memory Show, each of the musical's two characters refers to herself as being a funny person while acknowledging that funny people are often the sad ones....

Wendy Beckett's LOVE THERAPY opens at the DR2 Theatre (101 East 15th Street) on Monday, April 29th. Directed by Evan Bergman, LOVE THERAPY is the fourth in a series of ten of Ms. Beckett's plays scheduled for opening by Peter Walters for Pascal Productions. Tickets are available via Telecharge.com....

Epic Theatre Ensemble's new adaptation of Shakespeare's classic brings the Wars of the Roses into the present day....

The only thing that'll keep you from dancing in aisles at The Public Theater's production of the enormously fun and exhilarating new musical, Here Lies Love, is the fact that there are no aisles.  In fact, there are no seats, save for a handful up in the balcony for this strictly standing room only...

After numerous miscarriages, unsuccessful tries with fertility medications and an arrangement with a pregnant American woman that falls through, white metropolitan couple Annie and Peter (Kerry Butler and Kelly AuCoin) decide to adopt a child from Africa....

A human ball of silver glitter hanging from a cord is lowered above what looks like a bungalow-sized muffin top.  (It's supposed to represent a turtle shell.)  Before the glitter ball makes its landing the cover is removed to reveal what looks like a tribe of humanish amphibians bouncing on trampo...