OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

I'll resist the temptation to call director Paul Alexander's Off-Broadway mounting of Dracula anemic or toothless, but will note his remarkable achievement of assembling a production that manages to be aggressively bad in so many ways and yet never achieves the 'you gotta see how bad this is' status...

No, that nice young man offering to pour you a glass of wine as you enter the New York Theatre Workshop's auditorium is not an intern or an Equity membership candidate earning weeks; it's one of the three madcap musicians who will be spending the next two hours trading punch lines, wheeling a trio o...

The First Amendment, that noble invention of our founding fathers that grants all Americans the right of free speech, must frequently be defended under less than noble circumstances; the right of a neo-Nazi group to hold a march in the heavily Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois, the right of Lenny...

People usually think I'm joking when I tell them that one of my favorite original Broadway cast albums is the one for the Swiss mime troupe, Mummenschanz.  But yes, they did record an album; one of audience reactions during a live performance at the sadly-gone Bijou Theatre during their 1977 three-...

Before anyone removes a lick of clothing in EndTimes' decidedly secular song and sketch revue, Naked Holidays, an unlikely matchup of a perky and cultured Brit (Ruthie Stephens) and a snarling Mexican heavy metaler (Alessandro Colla) leads the cast of nineteen young and attractive performers, most o...

New Yorkers looking to make the yuletide a little decadent this year would be well-advised to drop the kiddies off at Mr. Balanchine's ballet over at Lincoln Center and hop a train to Brooklyn for the always-enticing theatre/dance troupe Company XIV's elegantly erotic Nutcracker Rouge....

'We found all the people who didn't see Donny and Marie tonight,' Suzanne Carrico chirps with a big smile as she surveys her Metropolitan Room audience.  In her new show, featuring material from her CD, What Christmas Time Means To Me, the MAC Award winner might be called a little bit American song...

Listening to the popular theatre critic/journalist Peter Filichia talk about musicals can be twice as entertaining as half the shows on Broadway.  Ever hear his story about the audience reaction at the first preview of Bring Back Birdie?  Or the way he one-upped David Merrick after being tossed ou...

Dances Patrelle returned this holiday season with their 15th anniversary production of The Yorkville Nutcracker. The ballet completed its limited run December 12th at Hunter College's Kaye Playhouse. ...

Scott Burkell and Paul Loesel's new musical THE EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY presented by Dream Light Theatre Company is an exploration of love, friendship, and those pesky, unwanted household appliances....

Cameron Mackintosh's 25th Anniversary production of Les Misérables, presented by The Paper Mill Playhouse, has finally hit the friendly American shores after touring Britain, and perhaps symbolic of its Atlantic crossing is the new opening picture devised by co-directors Laurence Conner and James P...

2010 marked the year the legendary American Composer Stephen Sondheim had his 80th Birthday, and there were many celebrations in his honour. The last one was a celebration at Carnegie Hall with the New York Pops under the direction of Steven Reineke. Kate Baldwin, Christiane Noll, Aaron Lazar and ...

Creating new opportunities for beautiful blondes with enchanting soprano voices is a topic generally not included in discussions of non-traditional casting in the theatre, but when it was announced that Kelli O'Hara would be starring in the Encores! concert production of Bells Are Ringing instead of...

While the campy antics of Devil Boys From Beyond may suggest an unlikely blend of screwball classics like His Girl Friday with infamous sci-fi fare such as Plan 9 From Outer Space, the movie title that kept popping into my mind was Clash of The Titans.  Not because of the mythical physiques of beef...

Sure, in America the guilty have just as much a right to a fair trial as the innocent.  But when someone you believe is guilty doesn't get one, is that a wrong you can be all that enthused about righting?  That's one of the discussion points that might be mulled over by leftist radicals downing sh...

While Ira Levin will forever be remembered as the novelist who made the phrases 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Stepford Wives' indelible entries into American pop culture, devotees of musical theatre fondly regard him as the bookwriter/lyricist for one of Broadway's more intriguing flops, 1965's Drat! The C...

Our Postmodern Town might be a more descriptive title for Will Eno's Middletown, a play that coats the Thornton Wilder standard of normal American life as it pertains to the cycle of life and death with a whitewash of Samuel Beckett absurdity.  And if even half of the play's two hours contained the...

Early on in Lisa Kron's politically-charged romantic comedy/drama, In The Wake, audiences are reminded of a scene that traditionally takes place in many American households every fourth Thursday of November.  While the rest of the family is ready to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, there's one per...

Abigail Grotke... a real-life person named Abigail Grotke... has been collecting vintage books on relationship advice for 25 years, amassing over a thousand volumes published from 1822 to 1978, with titles such as The Unfair Sex, She Cooks to Conquer, How to Get a Teen-Age Boy and What To Do With Hi...

Perhaps not content with merely being the best comic actress on the New York stage, Jan Maxwell follows her hilarious turns in last season's revivals of The Royal Family and Lend Me A Tenor by refreshing her dramatic chops a with a riveting, edge of your seat performance in John Doyle's senses-tingl...

'Let's see if we can do this without a microphone,' peeped Jo Sullivan Loesser, as she prepared to fill the 1,495-seat Town Hall with 'Somebody, Somewhere,' which she introduced in the 1956 original Broadway production of The Most Happy Fella.  While the age of the widow of the great Frank Loesser ...

This past Friday afternoon I read that this person has been meeting with producers to consider the possibility of appearing on Broadway, in order to, 'expand her brand by taking to the stage.'  That evening I heard the 82-year-old Marilyn Maye, after nearly ninety minutes of superlative interpretat...

When asked how she kept her voice strong and healthy week after week while starring on Broadway, Ethel Merman famously quipped, 'You have to live like a f***ing nun!'  If that's the case then I suppose Scott Shepherd should be up for sainthood any day now.  In Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service's c...

Though set designer Anna Louizos supplies a realistically grimy subway platform for Primary Stages' mounting of the new a cappella musical In Transit, the characters scurrying underground are disappointingly squeaky clean....

It's always a good sign when you walk into a theatre for a comedy and right away the set is making you laugh.  Such was the case for me with the playful space Jo Winiarski created for the Pearl Theatre Company's uproariously funny mounting of The Sneeze, Michael Frayn's vaudevillian octet of comedi...