OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

In Cougar the Musical, book writer and lyricist Donna Moore humorously embraces the older woman-younger man dating phenomenon with the declaration that "inside the word C-O-U-R-A-G-E is Cougar," a notion that goes down as easily as the "Cougartini," the vodka and pomegranate juice cocktail the audie...

One Night Only, a part of the 2012 Araca Project, finishes its run today at the American Theatre of Actors (314 West 54th Street). Directed by T. J. Shanoff, One Night Only is a completely improvised musical. With music direction by Mike Descoteaux, One Night Only stars Kate Cohen, Matthew Van Colt...

When it comes to the subject of transracial adoption, it would be nice to think that any child is better off with two loving and supportive parents of a different race than with nothing permanent at all, but in Bennett Windheim's challenging play, Normalcy, which deals specifically with the issue of...

Before a grade-school backdrop depicting heathery hills, a pair of confused theatre-goers struggle with an outdated map of Broadway while an offstage chorus sings, “Brink of doom, Brink of do-om,” and before you can say “Come ye to the spoof,” the cast of Forbidden Broadway: Alive and Kickin...

The latest addition to the growing genre of stage adaptations of plays by the great masters that scale their sources down to a collection of indecipherable scenes that are just trying their darndest to be erotic is Playing With Fire, The Private Theatre's environmental/multi-media combo that is rumo...

So it was just announced that top shelf musical comedy performer Leslie Kritzer will be joining the cast of NEWSical on the same night Perez Hilton joins the cast.  I wonder…  Will this nationally known entertainment blogger be so impressed by the audaciously funny girl with the thrilling belt t...

Has there ever been a father/daughter theatrical combo that sets off sparks like when HAllie Foote acts in the plays of her father, the great Horton Foote?  For Primary Stages, she's been heartbreaking as the emotionally repressed title character in The Day Emily Married and downright hilariously s...

When Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's moralistic take on traditional European fairy tales, mostly penned by The Brothers Grimm, last hit town in a major production, it was April of 2002.  The city was still very much rattled by the events of the past September, but a positive spirit was growing ...

Before a frustrated New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses grumbled, 'Well, let's build the bastard a theater,' and designated city funds to build the Delacorte, Joseph Papp's dream of bringing free Shakespeare to everyone was being achieved by mobile units of actors that toured the city in s...

Once upon a summer of '83, a young aspiring actor named Woody Harrelson became close pals with a Harlem-raised fellow named Frankie Hyman while they both worked a construction job in Houston.  Eventually, they went their separate ways; one becoming famous for doing something other than playwriting ...

...we'll still be playin' his songs....

Barely looking, and certainly not sounding, much older than she was over thirty years ago, when her clarion vocals and chipper charm earned her a Tony nomination for playing an unexpectedly pregnant college student in Baby, you might be surprised to know that the weekend before her Monday night conc...

With New York's mayor pushing for size limits on sugary drinks and for keeping baby formula safely locked away until new moms are reminded of the benefits of breast milk, it seems like a good time for Bill Russell and Peter Melnick's tuneful and amusing new musical, The Last Smoker In America, which...

The last time the 1933 West End musical Nymph Errant was revived in New York, the Medicine Show Theatre Company advertised their production with the selling point that they haven't removed any of the show's racism.  Now, while going to see a racist musical is not exactly my idea of a fun night out,...

America may have abruptly lost its Camelot on the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, but in the extraordinarily rich and tender new musical Dogfight, it was the night before that a pair of drops in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea began to sparkle....

When Phil Geoffrey Bond was named Programming Director at 54 Below, it became a given that the theatre district's spanking new nightlife venue would include on its schedule Broadway-centric evenings geared for the knowledgeable musical theatre fan who appreciates both past glories and upcoming works...

So now that Patrick Page will be ending his stint as The Green Goblin in Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark and begin rehearsals for a piece just a tad worthier of his talents, Cyrano De Bergerac, his replacement Robert Cuccioli, a sensitive lyric interpreter with a beautifully masculine voice, will be t...

When the houselights went up for intermission at Gina Gionfriddo's  provocative comedy of gender issues, Rapture, Blister, Burn, my immediate impulse was to ask my guest – a 1980s Columbia University Women's Studies graduate who, like myself, remembers the days when an Upper West Side liberal's c...

Though the team of Richard Maltby, Jr. (lyrics) and David Shire (music) hasn't had much luck when it comes to book musicals (Baby and Big, despite their admirers, struggled through disappointing Broadway runs.) when it comes to Off-Broadway musical revues, the boys are two-time champs.  Their 1970s...

Backwoods 1800s America proves an unlikely, but ideal setting for Shakespeare's As You Like It in director Daniel Sullivan's enormously entertaining Delacorte production that mixes dexterous wordplay with rowdy comedy....

In The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov wrote: 'Suddenly a distant sound is heard, coming as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away.' That one sentence-one of the most controversial stage directions in western theater-has baffled sound designers for over a c...

The play ultimately is 30 to 40 minutes too long. It is set in the present but the neo-noir language, scenic and costume design causes tonal confusion. Ahonen's dialogue leads to some comedic moments, but overall The Bad and the Better comes off as playing at being a Tracy Letts play and very much ...

By the third act of Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles' 1946 romantic comedy, Love Goes To Press, one of the play's leading characters, a female war correspondent considered tops in her field, begins discussing marriage with the handsome soldier who has captured her heart.  When the stuffy British...

The words, “Once upon a time…,” were followed by that familiar Sondheim vamp, and Danielle Ferland skipped onto the stage just as she had 25 years ago as the original Little Red Riding Hood in Into The Woods.  Sure enough, there was a wolf there to greet her, but instead of encountering Grann...

Fadwa Faranesh, a bright, engaging Palestinian woman living in Bethlehem, hosts a cooking program from her home kitchen, where she prepares delectable dishes like tabouli and baba ghanoush in the traditional manner the women of her culture have been preparing them for centuries.  To her, food is an...