OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

From The Jazz Singer to Fiddler On The Roof to Yentl and beyond, Jewish drama on the American stage has regularly explored the topic of youthful straying from traditional ways.  The newest example to hit Off-Broadway, based on Chaim Potok's 1972 novel, is Aaron Posner's My Name Is Asher Lev, a warm...

Yes, I'll say it.  The 1959 Broadway stage version of The Sound of Music is far superior to 1965 film adaptation.  Yeah, yeah, I know…  The Oscar-winning best picture has all that lovely Austrian and Bavarian scenery and those cute kids and, oh yeah, Julie Andrews as the young postulant, Maria,...

If the world were a little more just and the general public's taste for musical theatre a lot more cerebral, news of a new Michael John LaChiusa musical would cause the same kind of box office frenzy that in the 1940s and 50s greeted announcements of Rodgers and Hammerstein's latest.  Or at least m...

Did somebody decide when I wasn't listening that this would be the season where all translations of classic plays must contain occasional forays into anachronistic contemporary language?  First came An Enemy of the People and Cyrano de Bergerac, and now Carol Rocamora's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivan...

When it comes to television, the 37th President of the United States is best remembered for an unfortunate debate against John F. Kennedy and later for those infamous words, “I am not a crook.”  But it was a younger, more idealistic Richard Milhous Nixon who used television to warm American hea...

Playwright Richard Nelson first introduced audiences to the family of Apple siblings with That Hopey Changey Thing, which took place on election night 2010 and, by design, opened on that same night.  He pulled the same trick last year with Sweet and Sad, which opened and was set on the tenth annive...

You know those people who can eat whatever they want and never gain a pound?  Charlie, the central character of Samuel D. Hunter's touching drama The Whale, isn't one of them.  Charlie's dietary habits declined in a sharp downward spiral after losing his lover under tragic circumstances.  He live...

The program for Transport Group's premiere production of director Daniel Fish's stage adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's essay, House For Sale, tells us that every performance is different, because each actor has apparently memorized the entire ninety minute piece and the sections of the text they per...

Don't tell God, but for some people pop culture not even a century old can provide the same kind of spiritual inspiration and comfort as the ancient texts and traditions of organized religion.  Just ask Adelaide, the central character of Colman Domingo's wonderfully joyous, sweet and funny adventur...

Haven't you ever wished that you could go back in time and tell yourself something? You could just avoid disaster by saying to yourself "Don't forget your wallet on the store counter" or something less serious, like "Check your teeth for broccoli before the blind date." What if you could even visit ...

The only trouble with these 90-minute musicals that start at 7pm is that I really can't get all that enthused over the big 8:15 number....

I suppose there's nothing unusual about a little kid waking up one morning to see a group of her parents' friends socializing around the family piano.  It's just that when you're young Loni Ackerman, those friends include Mayor John Lindsay, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Nader, several members of the Black Pa...

When 18-year-old Josh pulls the string hanging from a box propped up on a shelf in his family's living room, he gets showered with dozens of soft white feathers.  The mile-wide smile and limitlessly joyful expression on his face, and the happy tingle you can imagine must be tickling his body all ov...

Media At Large Productions presents a revival of Tennessee Williams' play 'In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel', which incorporates dance as an atypical element....

Stephen Sondheim's “Uptown, Downtown,” that axed-from-Follies number about a woman who splits her personality between Schlitz and The Ritz, might well apply to the most recent plays of A.R. Gurney....

I'll spare you any idioms regarding the distance between apples and trees while examining the newest work of Daisy Foote, the playwright who carries on the lineage of one of America's treasured dramatist, the late Horton Foote.  But comparison is inevitable as the daughter's most recent work has a ...

It was a very clever idea playwright Jeffrey Hatcher had, to write a Chekhovian style comedy about American theatre's royal couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, set in their country home as they prepare to go into rehearsal for a production of The Seagull.  And Ten Chimneys, named after the Wisco...

In musical theatre, it's not enough to write a good song.  You have to write the right song.  Character, plot, placement and various intangibles all go into making music, lyrics and performance all effectively fit into a moment and contribute to the piece as a whole....

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Adam Rapp's Through The Yellow Hour is that the playwright/director has intentionally written a piece that will never be performed with a completely age-appropriate cast – at least not legally in this country – since it includes a fully nude, sexually sugge...

This one-man play-with-music is a smart, funny and poignant look at families, theater and idol worship....

Before the comedy boom of the 1980s began dotting New York and every other major American city with clubs devoted exclusively to showcasing stand-ups, comedians worked primarily between sets at music venues or at random comedy nights at bars and restaurants.  And while the emergence of burlesque as...

Sophie's choice was a casual coin flip compared with decision forced upon a young mother in Alexander Dinelaris' drama recalling the Ottoman Empire's Armenian genocide, Red Dog Howls.  As a 91-year-old grandmother enduring life with the memory of a horrific confrontation with three sadistic Turks, ...

It's not unusual for theatergoers at 45 Bleecker Street to see cheery 8x10 photos of the actors they're about to see displayed in the lobby, but those attending Culture Project's 10th Anniversary production of The Exonerated are greeted by more somber headshots.  Mounted before them are thirteen po...

In the life they had planned for themselves, upscale suburbanites Mary and Ben probably never thought they'd be trading hosting duties at weekend barbeques with people like Kenny and Sharon.  In the life they had planned for themselves Mary and Ben surely never imagined they'd be neighbors with peo...

Subtle British comedies of sex, morality and class like Mary Broome rarely wash up on these shores without the name George Bernard Shaw attached to them.  But thankfully the beachcombers of the Mint Theatre Company, specialists in providing sturdy mountings of the once popular/now obscure, came acr...