OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

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....

Sometimes in life what is needed most is editing. And so it goes with the Strand's original production of WHAT A GIRL WANTS. The play centers on a group of women preparing for a charity fashion show. Stacks of clothes next to the stage serve as a metaphor for a play that suffers from clutter. There ...

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...

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...