OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

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...

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 ...