OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

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...

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...