OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

'Let me tell you something.  I find my husband so Goddamned irritating that I'm planning to leave him.'...

Matthew Lopez's gripping new play is running at Manhattan Theater Club....

For nearly 300 years, theatre scholars have doubtEd Lewis Theobald's claim that his Double Falsehood was an adaptation of Cardenio, a lost collaboration by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher.  But the recent acceptance of highly-regarded publisher Arden Shakespeare has, in the eyes of many, prov...

No, dear playgoers, the fact that you've ventured into an unmarked building on a dark SoHo street, walked down a long hallway draped in red and are now in an open loft sitting mere inches away from a young couple enthusiastically going at it in a standing position up against one of the building's pi...

With a solidly funny book by Larry Gelbart and Bert Shevelove and a clever, under-appreciated score by Stephen Sondheim (It remains Broadway's only Best Musical Tony-winner with eligible music and lyrics that were not even nominated for Best Score.), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is...

Although I'll admit to not being completely familiar with Cole Porter's See America First and George M. Cohan's The Governor's Son, it's quite possible that Frank Loesser's score for Where's Charley? could be considered the finest Broadway debut for a composer/lyricist who would eventually occupy a ...

Stephen Sondheim famously commented that his Sweeney Todd is an opera when performed in an opera house and a musical when performed in a theatre.  A similar comparison might be made for composer/lyricist Joe Iconis' Things To Ruin, which in the past several years has played New York engagements in ...

Though the sexual revolution was revving into full force in 1965, you'd never know it by America's popular entertainment.  Barbara Eden may have been dressed in a belly dancer outfit while starring in the new hit series, I Dream of Jeannie, but the network censors made sure her belly remained cover...

The thought crossed my mind more than once during the intermission of Rick Elice's delightfully funny romp, Peter and the Starcatcher, now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop.  Why was the versatile comic actor, Christian Borle, fresh from an acclaimed dramatic turn as Prior Walter in Signatur...

Austin, Texas-based ensemble, The Rude Mechanicals (fondly known as the Rude Mechs) are creating a spectacle at the Dance Theater Workshop with Kirk Lynn's THE METHOD GUN....

It isn't just Curtis Moore's action-accenting electric guitar licks that give Richard Thomas a rock star presence in director Barry Edelstein's swift and rowdy production of Timon of Athens, a stinging morality tale attributed as a collaboration of sorts between William Shakespeare and the younger s...

The most touching, delicately nuanced and beautifully realized work in The Public Theater's premiere production of Compulsion is, quite honestly, a wooden performance.   Rinne Groff's fictionalized tale of the Broadway dramatization of Anne Frank's diary begins with a life-sized marionette depicti...

The always pleasing Gregg Edelman is an actor with a special knack for revealing the educated, articulate side of America's Average Joe and in Black Tie, A.R. Gurney's latest comedy inspired by his WASPy Buffalo upbringing, that talent is put to exceptional use....

The Red Bull Theater, those specialists in making Jacobean drama hip without going hipster, have assembled an excellent company for Jesse Berger's vividly realized mounting of the 1621 rarity, The Witch of Edmonton....

The biggest Broadway event of 1937 was undoubtedly the gala opening night of I'd Rather Be Right.  Not only did the new musical boast a score by Richard Rodger and Lorenz Hart and a book by George S. Kaufman (who also directed) and Moss Hart (the pair had just won that year's Pulitzer for You Can't...

Name your musical The Road To Qatar! and in less than five words and an exclamation point you've communicated to your audience what to expect; a zany, lightweight, tuneful fish-out-of-water comedy set in an exotic locale featuring a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby-ish pair with a healthy dose of sex and romanc...

In April of 1949, Rodgers and Hammerstein shocked the Theatre World by writing a song for their new musical professing that humans developed racial prejudice by nurture and not by nature.  Later that same year, a scene in the new musical by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill showed two racially differ...

The New York stage is often a haven for self-destructive couples on display, but rarely is that self-destruction so bluntly in view as in Rajiv Joseph's intriguing Gruesome Playground Injuries.  The work of this imaginative playwright, who'll be making his Broadway debut later this season with his ...

Though I try to avoid pronouncing century-old plays as being as relevant today they were a hundred years ago, a little tweaking here and there - perhaps the mentioning of a critically acclaimed musical that fails at the box office while another that suffers from horrible pre-opening word of mouth ne...

Back in the 1930s, when hip New Yorkers got their doses of political satire by taking in the latest Broadway musical comedy, it wasn't uncommon for then-President FDR to pop up in a show; either in person, as played by George M. Cohan in Rodgers and Hart's I'd Rather Be Right or, more frequently, th...

Actors who bear a substantial resemblance to a legendary celebrity or historical figure are often inspired to turn that stroke of luck into a one-person show.  If Bern Cohen ever had any doubts about his resemblance to political activist Abbie Hoffman, they were certainly dissolved one evening in t...

The central figure of Diana Amsterdam's tragedy of manners is a young, terminally ill accountant named Paul (Ted Caine) who spends most of the evening silently lying in a hospital bed surrounded by a carnival of denial.  Unable to communicate, it's unclear how much of his wife, Sheila's (Christine ...

First-time playwright Tommy Nohilly seems intent on ramming edgy family dysfunctions in the audience's faces with Blood From A Stone.  Unfortunately there's no play underneath to support it all.  Director Scott Elliott and The New Group do a heck of a good job covering up the flaws of the text mos...

Dear Glenn Beck,...

The old showbiz adage about always leavin' 'em wanting more isn't always the best advice, as exemplified Adam Bock's fascinating, understated and, in the end, frustratingly incomplete, A Small Fire.  In his usual fashion, especially when teamed up, as he is here, with director Tripp Cullman, Bock t...