OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

In the Flea Theater and the Civilians' YOU BETTER SIT DOWN: TALES FROM MY PARENTS' DIVORCE, four actors sit side by side in varying styles of chairs and play their parents, answering questions from actual interviews in one large confessional theater space. We go on a relationship journey of how eac...

Kids today. You're lucky if you can pry their attention away from the television, computer, tablet or phone. It would take a miracle to get them to sit through a musical, let alone a show where spoken words are scarce and the real delights are visuals, tricks and physicality. If you want to show you...

Maja Lieberman cannot tell a lie, and unfortunately, neither can I. Mario Fratti's OBAMA 44, now playing at the La MaMa Theatre, inherently lacks the necessary appeal to enable the audience to sympathize with any of its bizarre and one-dimensional characters, thus rendering an uninspiring and overa...

La MaMa, in association with Loco7 Dance Puppet Theatre Company, presents the World Premiere of Urban Odyssey. Conceived by Federico Restrepo and Denise Greber, Urban Odyssey depicts the experience of immigration to America through movement and visual theatre. A part of La MaMa's 50th Anniversary s...

Despite the loveable antics of those hard-working ladies from Texas, Broadway musicals have always been a little awkward around prostitutes.  The book of New Girl In Town (based on Anna Christie) gets tongue-tied when trying to be honest about its title character's former profession and the creator...

Inspired by true events that let to a 1969 race riot in author Monica Bauer's hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, 'My Occasion of Sin,' is a study on the power of music to unite and racism to destroy and is running at Urban Stages until April 15....

In the years between the fall of vaudeville and the rise of Comedy Clubs, Americans looking to enjoy some live stand-up would frequently gather at their local jazz venue, where rising stars like Lenny Bruce and Mort Saul would offer their observations in a rhythmic style that many would say mimicked...

Once upon a time, there were disgruntled parents who were bored with their children's mindless entertainment. Whatever were they to do? How could they enrich their children's lives with the wonders of live theater without becoming grumpy, sleepy, or dopey? The answer: the toe-tapping, fluffy Lucky D...

With its funny, sexy and sentimental book by master craftsman George Abbott and a catchy and clever score by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees is a textbook example of the kind of big and brassy musicals that made Broadway's Golden Age glitter.  Paper Mill's terrific new production is pack...

Every once in a great while, a person comes across a play, musical, cabaret, or other production that is so inspiring, so magnetic, so unique, with a passionate performance, stellar direction, beautiful music, and ingenious sets that truly leaves the audience both captivated and inspired. My Life w...

About ten years ago, Tommy Tune was starring in an Off-Broadway revue; a nightclub-style act he had been performing in Las Vegas.  I hadn't seen the show yet, but one night I was browsing through a theatre chat board and read a comment by someone who had just seen a preview.  The writer was very e...

Actress, owner and artistic managing director of Stage Left Studio, Cheryl King, performs the one-woman play, Grapefruit, about the life of late opera singer and playwright, Sally Lambert, who was to appear in the show herself until unfortunately succumbing to cancer shortly prior to its opening. W...

Sidney Goldfarb's Hot Lunch Apostles might have been quite the shocker when The Talking Band's original production, with its run-down carnival setting that has strippers trying to spice up business by presenting religious tableaus, premiered at La MaMa in 1983.  But if director Paul Zimet's spirite...

Style. Class. Grace. Charm. MAKE MINE MANHATTAN returns to its roots on the New York stage as a pocket revue after a larger Broadway production opened in 1948 and ran for nearly a year at the Broadhurst Theatre. This new revival preserves all the old-fashioned style and charm that was originall...

59E59 Theaters welcomes Pure Projects, Inc., in association with Uncle Frank Productions with the Off Broadway premiere of The Maria Project. Written and performed by Marcella Goheen and directed by Larry Moss, The Maria Project runs now through April 1st. Using documentary footage, music and stor...

Somewhere around the middle of Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson's solo play adaptation of Homer titled An Iliad, the storyteller, known simply as The Poet, halts his detailing of the Trojan War because something he just mentioned reminds him of an event that occurred in... And then he takes several mi...

In its opening moments, it would be completely understandable to assume that Assistance, Leslye Headland's viciously fun satire of the cutthroat dealings among entry-level twenty-somethings, might be mimicking David Mamet's dark comedy of film executives, Speed-the-Plow. ...

CAP21 Theatre Company presents the world premiere of MARRYING GEORGE CLOONEY: CONFESSIONS FROM A MIDLIFE CRISIS. Based on a memoir by Amy Ferris, this new play by Amy and Ken Ferris along with Krista Lyons, officially opened March 1 at the CAP21 Black Box Theater (18 West 18th Street). Frank Ventu...

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It's not your garden variety playwright who can draw you into a two-person drama with an extended dialogue comparing the healing effectiveness and fragrance of competing brands of foot salts.  But the comfortable comic exchanges that sweeten the early moments of Athol Fugard's Blood Knot cleverly ...

Though Eugene O'Neill was a grownup thirty-one years of age when Beyond The Horizon, his first full length play, opened on Broadway in 1920, the landmark domestic drama is boiling over with so much youthful angst you might expect its trio of lovers to start whipping out microphones to belt out emo...

Shortly into Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, the 17th Century Italian scientist shows his young companion a model of the Ptolemaic system of the universe, a gyroscope-looking creation depicting the sun and planets and other celestial bodies revolving on golden bands of orbits around the earth.  And if yo...

The controversy remains fresh as a Daisey down at The Public Theater, where extemporaneous monologist Mike Daisy returns for a new engagement of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs....

Given its pedigree as a Pulitzer winner that swept every playwriting award an Off-Broadway entry could win during its premiere run in 1997, you would think that Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive would follow the lead of other Off-Broadway successes like Driving Miss Daisy, Steel Magnolias and, mo...

The original Broadway cast album of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along is one of those handful of recordings - like Mack and Mabel and Candide - that a musical theatre lover can listen to hundreds of times without hearing a clue as to why the show flopped.  The quick answer, ...