OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Regina Taylor's intriguing play has an African-American book publisher confronting the way technology has changed memory....

The National Asian American Theater Company's solid if unexceptional production of Awake and Sing, Clifford Odets 1935 drama of a struggling immigrant Jewish family in The Bronx, is opening just a few days after the 50th anniversary of the death of Odets...

Timmy The Great bills itself as 'a madcap musical for revolutionaries of all ages.' One could easily interpret this as meaning: It's for children from the Upper West Side. Actually, there's much here that anyone could enjoy. The show, based on a 1999 children's book about a kingdom where the adults...

With [TITLE OF SHOW] receiving mostly glowing reviews for its London premiere, I couldn't help but hope that the creative team that took the quirky, meta-musical from Off-Off-Broadway, to Off-Broadway, to Broadway (Jeff Bowen, Hunter Bell, Susan Blackwell, Heidi Blickenstaff, Michael Berresse, and L...

The boys behind Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson offer a crazily antic new Shakespeare musical....

One of two plays about LBJ aiming for Broadway, 'The Great Society' is a three-hour history lesson about the Johnson Presidency, from the shot that killed JFK, giving Johnson the office he'd always wanted, to LBJ's televised speech five years later announcing that he would not run again. It focuses ...

Baseball, girls, high school, and getting out: of course, these are the normal pressures of every fourteen-year-old boy. But when Charlie Rosa receives a special letter that makes him question everything and starts interacting with his favorite fictional character all of those pressures intensify c...

Summer in New York City is filled with outdoor theater events and different festivals. At 59E59 summer brings the annual SUMMER SHORTS. This is the seventh year for the event in which excellent writers, directors, and actors come together to present two series of three one-act-shorts. SERIES A de...

Paul Manuel Kane's interracial May/December romantic drama is very much a work-in-progress....

Our favourite childhood vampire rabbit is back, and ready to sing. BUNNICULA opened Off-Broadway, with Music and Lyrics by Sam Davis and Mark Waldrop and a book by Charles Busch. This creative team brought the childhood book by Deoborah and James Howe, Bunnicula, and it's accompanied family fun to t...

FANCY NANCY THE MUSICAL, produced by The Vital Theatre Company, opened Off-Broadway at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre in New York City on September 29, 2012. The popular production was extended twice. On November 24, 2012, it moved Downtown to The Culture Project and ran through April 28, 2013. Since it ...

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory team up for another look at the disdain for intellectualism....

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...