OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

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...

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....