OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Could Jesse Eisenberg's ASUNCION, now playing at the Cherry Lane Theater, be our modern-day 'Odd Couple'? Like that classic Neil Simon comedy, ASUNCION tells the story of two mismatched male roommates attempting to co-exist in a small city apartment....

The wardrobe sure has gotten petite since it's gigantic 2005 film adaptation. Inventively set to a smaller scale, and a shorter running time for a younger audience, Off Broadway Family Theatre's production of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' gives a fresh new look at the classic novel....

I'm not going to lie. It's hard, coming from Sketch/Improv background like myself, to not know about The Reduced Shakespeare Company. Their fast, physical wit is what every Sketch Comedian and Improviser aspires to work toward....

'I want you to know that the most exciting part I've received recently is my new knee.'...

'Do you really think Apple doesn't know?'...

After more than 14 months at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, Mark St. Germain's clever and engrossing two-hander, Freud's Last Session, which depicts a visit between the aging atheist Sigmund Freud and the young, newly-Christian C.S. Lewis, who had satirized the famed psychiatrist in The Pilgr...

When considering the genre of 'girls night out' offerings currently playing Off-Broadway, the selection ranges from initially unintentional (Naked Boys Singing) to 'best when inebriated' (Miss Abigail's Guide...) to 'men really don't get this' (Love, Loss and What I Wore).  But Motherhood Out Loud,...

Though he did have a brief - very brief - stint on Broadway before Lemon Sky premiered in 1970 at midtown's Off-Broadway Playhouse Theatre, Lanford Wilson was still at that point regarded as a downtown playwright.  One of the leading scribes of the crew consisting predominantly of gay men who creat...

Tabloid theatre might be the best way of describing Dan Klores' The Wood, a drama that attempts hard-hitting, journalistic toughness in painting a somewhat nonobjective portrait of New York newspaper columnist Mike McAlary.  The author delivers a lot of ink-stained passion in his tale of a local ki...

This week I had my first experience with the joyful adult visual fantasia known as Arias With A Twist; a madcap collaboration between puppeteer/designer/director Basil Twist and cross-dressing chanteuse Joey Arias that first hit town three years ago. It's an eye-popping blast....

The First Ladies Project is a well-crafted satire written in the Second City style. It is interesting to note that three of the ensemble graduated the Second City Teen program. This sharpness is evident in moments such as Laura Bush's Stand-up routine and Lucretia Garfield's diphtheria-inspired rap...

Last season, playwright Richard Nelson invited us to spend election night 2010 at the Rhinebeck home of schoolteacher Barbara Apple and her aging uncle, Benjamin as her left-leaning sisters and brother gathered for dinner and conversation about family matters and the country's political climate. Ti...

I've heard of some directors who, as soon as they've taken on a new play, grab a black marker and scratch out every stage direction the playwright wrote into the script, as though the author's only business was to write dialogue and allow each individual stager to create the rest....

Last year around this time, Elevator Repair Service had Gotham playgoers abuzz with their cover-to-cover, word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, re-titled Gatz. Director John Collins' off-beat adaptation, which had Computer Age office workers assuming the roles of Fitzgera...

Brooke Shields was looking for something a little out of the ordinary when she wanted to treat her cast-mates from The Addams Family to a fun time out this past Wednesday night, so she turned to one of Gotham's favorite burlesque queens, Calamity Chang....

There would be far fewer complaints about having too many revivals on Broadway if they were all done the way the Mint Theater Company does them.  Under artistic director Jonathan Banks, each piece mounted in their intimate space has an interesting story behind it, usually that of a forgotten playwr...

Though Hero: The Musical, is being pushed as, 'the first Korean Broadway-style musical to be shown overseas,' it's really of a theatrical style firmly rooted in the West End. Commissioned to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the death of Korean freedom fighter, An Chunggun, Hero comes off at bes...

It's inevitable that The Woodshed Collective's The Tenant, a site-specific theatrical interpretation of Roland Topor's novella via Roman Polanski's film adaptation, will be compared with the downtown hit, Sleep No More. Both require audience members to freely walk through several floors of rooms, e...

The obligatory Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark spoof that everyone figured would be a part of the 2011 New York International Fringe Festival obviously did not benefit from a series of workshops and readings before making its debut at the Bleecker Theatre. This one had to be a rush job....

Michael Walker's new play 'Dancing in the Garden', having its New York premiere in this year's New York International Fringe Festival, explores some issues surrounding growing up Lesbian in a strict Catholic family....

There isn't much to say about playwright/director Tony Georges' muddy drama of a dysfunctional East Texas marriage, Tricks The Devil Taught Me, except that what seems like a perfectly capable company of actors and designers have found themselves employed in the service of a play that is simply nowhe...

The best known works of playwright/cross-dressing actor Charles Busch fall into two distinct categories. There are the plays he stars in and there are the plays populated by characters that probably regularly attend the plays he stars in....

The unfortunate case of laryngitis inflicting Death Takes A Holiday's leading man, Julian Ovenden, divided press reservations for the new musical into 'before' and 'after.'  I was originally scheduled to see the show the week of its opening, but when understudy Kevin Earley began filling in, many ...

Cabbages and Kings Theatre Co. presents 'Portrait and a Dream' by Jacob Marx Rice, part of this year's New York International Fringe Festival....

In a week where we've been reminded how even the classics of the American musical stage are rarely revived in Broadway or Broadway-bound productions without their deceased authors' work being anything from tweaked to drastically rewritten, it's very refreshing to see a major revival where the materi...