OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Nearly 40 years ago, producer Norman Lear brought a television program about a black family's life in a Chicago housing project into millions of American homes.  And while the show never ignored the dangers and hardships of living in an underserved, crime-ridden community, Good Times focused on the...

On paper, Annie Baker's The Flick is 122 pages long.  For a typical play this would mean a running time somewhere between two hours and fifteen minutes and two and a half hours at the most.  On stage at Playwrights Horizons, the performance I attended of director Sam Gold's production of The Flick...

GOD STEELING was a super interesting play. Couching this relationship story within the social and political climate of the early 1980s is not something that I frankly see enough. How race, social standing and culture plays into the lives of these union 'brothers' is a bottomless pool of material. Ov...

Before Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Robert Lopez's BOOK OF MORMON made Missionaries cool, Steven Fales began sharing his personal story in the riveting and compelling one-man show CONFESSIONS OF A MORMON BOY. The show first premiered at the Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City in 2001. Since then, h...

The woman who went by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, a self-described feminist with a B.A. in women's studies, hasn't been the only one to attempt to put her virginity up for auction, but being attractive, American and willing to appear on national television to explain how she wished to use the money...

As a public service for playgoers who do not understand French, nothing of any importance takes place in the final scene of Amy Herzog's Belleville....

Out of necessity, people tend to fall in love rather quickly in musical theatre.  Trying to jam a relationship into a two and a half hour entertainment often means a good thirty-two bars of lush music and romantic lyrics is all it takes to establish a lasting emotional bond....

While several of New York's non-profit theatre companies have been pursuing the noble cause of creating more exposure for contemporary women playwrights, the Mint Theatre Company has been cornering the market on the dead ones.  Fourteen of the company's forty productions were scripted by women, a s...

DIE: Roll to Proceed opened this week as a part of the WiredArts Fest. Taking place at the Secret Theatre in Queens, WiredArts Fest gives artists, producers and writers access to a global audience. The WiredArts Fest is a live-streamed performing arts festival where the audience is global, seating i...

Near the end of 'Sure Thing,' one of the sextet of David Ives one-act comedies that make up All In The Timing, a pair of strangers meeting in a café bond over their mutual love for the early films of Woody Allen.  Perhaps the current offering from Primary Stages will inspire couples to meet at the...

All these interesting rumors going around about how the new Broadway production of Cinderella is trying to make the title character more of a role model for young girls. I hear today they're changing the lyric of the big ballad to 'Do I Love You Because You're Feminist?'...

Bertolt Brecht's Baal is pretty much the type of play you'd expect to be written by a 20-year-old student who would eventually become known for using dramatic techniques meant to alienate the audience from any emotional connection to the characters.  Now his social commentary about a hard-drinking ...

Reading about the new Lanford Wilson revival makes me wonder if the weekly grosses for the last Stephen Sondheim Broadway revival were known as Follies' Tally....

In musicals like Fiddler On The Roof, She Loves Me and The Apple Tree, the team Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) once graced Broadway with scores that found poetry and elegance in the lives of everyday people.  But nowhere is that more apparent than in the boisterously fun and heavil...

Tracy Morgan was on The View today and said he'd like to play the title role in a Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!, but when asked to sing a bit of the song he said he didn't know it. Remarkably, though, he had the entire oak leaf monologue memorized. #OneOfTheseSentencesIsALie...

“If you'd like to sing along with us, please don't.  It confuses me.”...

It doesn't happen often, but, fair or not, there's always a little extra pressure put on a play when it comes to New York after having already won the Pulitzer Prize.  Quiara Alegría Hudes, a Pulitzer finalist for both Elliot, a Soldier's Fugue and her co-authorship of In The Heights, was awarded ...

Norm Lewis is in a commercial for Cialis. Unfortunately, it doesn't begin with him singing 'I Got Plenty Of Nothing' and end with him singing 'Bess, You Is My Woman Now.'...

Many of us have dieted in some way or another, trying to find just the right mix for a healthy lifestyle. Some of us have even fallen off the wagon. Where do you go when you find yourself more confused and overwhelmed than a novice cook attacking an Alton Brown recipe? Welcome to The Diet Show....

Norm Lewis is in a commercial for Cialis. Unfortunately, it doesn't begin with him singing 'I Got Plenty Of Nothing' and end with him singing 'Bess, You Is My Woman Now.'...

The subjectivity of the truth appears to be a running theme in the intriguing work of young playwright, Amy Herzog, who follows the recent success of After The Revolution and 4,000 Miles with a moving drama, The Great God Pan....

The 1978 musical is back for a limited run off-Broadway, courtesy of Prospect Theater Company....

It's a rare performer that can generate so much affection from an audience by regarding them with unrestrained contempt, but Jackie Hoffman has cultivated a unique niche for herself in New York's lengthy history of comic actors who partner with their Jewish heritage acting as straight man....

Have you ever wondered what might have happened to Tevya and Golde and their whole mishpucha had there been a sequel to Fiddler on the Roof? Well, the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene's production of The Golden Land may be the most unique way to find out how immigrant Russian Jews faired on New ...

Producer Rain Pryor is currently starring in her own critically acclaimed, solo autobiographical show "Fried Chicken and Latkes" and joins director Stephen Bishop Seely ("8 Million Protagonists") on the project. Rock WILK wrote and composed BROKE WIDE OPEN. The design team behind BROKE WIDE OPEN inc...