OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

When Tama Janowitz coined the phrase 'Slaves of New York' with the title of her 1986 collection of short stories, she was referring to how the lack of affordable apartments in the city flings people into quick romantic commitments or has them cling onto unhealthy ones for the sake of having a place...

As much as I enjoy listening to some Kander and Ebb anytime, it's very refreshing to see a young performer do a complete show about New York without hearing that all-too-familiar vamp. Making his cabaret debut with a one-night gig at The Metropolitan Room, Ben Cherry shows himself to be an engaging...

'Me Benchley. Benchley bad boy. Benchley go.' Theatre critic and Algonquin Round Table founding member Robert Benchley was heard muttering the above words as he got up from his chair and walked out in the middle of the opening night performance of Jean Bart's 1926 Broadway play, The Squall. Wh...

The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's web site sports an unusual parental warning for their upcoming production of Jersey Boys: Jersey Boys is not recommended for children under the age of 16 due to strong 'authentic Jersey' language. Catherine Skidmore, who brought the warning to my attention,...

Those four Jews were in a room bitching again last Sunday afternoon. No, I don't mean The Marvelous Wonderettes. I mean Whizzer, Jason, Mendel and Marvin, also known as Stephen Bogardus, Jonathan Kaplan, Chip Zien and Michael Rupert. As any fan of neurotic, gay musical theatre will tell you, they...

Michael Dale reviews Charlayne Woodard's new solo piece The Night Watcher. From Jess Goldstein's flowing and flattering wardrobe to Geoff Korf's embracing lighting to Obadiah Eaves' jazzy sound design to the soft images in Tal Yarden's projections, everything about the production surrounds Woodard ...

I can't say I've ever really associated important events in my life with what I was wearing. Oh sure, I remember the powder beige tux I wore to my 1977 senior prom (my date picked it out) but since moving to New York I think it's safe to just assume I was wearing black whenever anything significant ...

One of the most interesting chapters in William Goldman's classic book of commercial Broadway, The Season, involves the pre-opening troubles with the musical, Golden Rainbow. (Yes, I'm beginning a review of Little House on the Prairie with an anecdote about a glitzy Steve & Eydie vehicle. Just go ...

There's very little I can recommend from Vigil, Morris Panych's two-person play which I'll assume was meant to be darkly humorous and quirky, but ends up a rather dreary and frequently ugly ninety-five minute affair....

In his lengthy notes discussing the thought process behind his LAByrinth Theater Company/Public Theater mounting of Othello, director Peter Sellars explains how our view of Shakespeare's drama of an outsider Moor put into a position of power in an otherwise white society, must change in an era where...

While calling the recent entertainment at The Triad Erotic Broadway may carry the same lack of appropriateness as expressed in the traditional arguments against the moniker Holy Roman Empire (It's really more 'cute and sexy' than erotic and the material's ties to Broadway are sporadic at best.), the...

I'll readily admit to letting out a quiet, though not exactly inaudible, 'Wow,' as I entered the main auditorium at 59E59 and took a first glimpse at Kris Stone's New York apartment set for Primary Stages' premiere production of Cusi Cram's A Lifetime Burning. The high-ceilinged collection of sharp ...

While I certainly wouldn't suggest that Andrea McArdle has been living in the past, that's where she's spent most of her Broadway career; first getting noticed as the Depression-era social climber in Annie, and then nabbing roles in Les Misérables, State Fair and Beauty and The Beast (Hey, 'once up...

The star of Town Hall's 3rd Annual All Singin', All Dancin', the traditional finale to the Scott Siegel-created Broadway Summer Festival, didn't take the stage until the end of curtain calls, but his vibrant presence was felt throughout the evening....

Let's get one thing straight right from the start. Men do not write monologues about their penises. They don't. Men don't say things like, 'I'm worried about penises,' and they don't require a context of other penises in order to understand this limb that dangles between their legs and jumps up l...

A good musical will often send audience members out of the theatre wanting to pick up a copy of the cast album. But the new musical version of Jack Heifner's 1976 Off-Broadway hit, Vanities, might send more than a few attendees to the public library to read a copy of the playscript, or at least hop...

While the title of Town Hall's third annual production of Broadway's Rising Stars suggests a look into the future, I prefer to linger a bit in the present. With a cast consisting of 22 recent grads from such musical theatre savvy institutions as NYU, Carnegie Mellon, AMDA and The Cincinnati Conserv...

'If they don't know who the hell I am by now,' the evening's star deadpans to the Metropolitan Room staff member who asks if she has any press releases to distribute, 'they can just cut open my neck and count the rings.'...

You know it's all heading in this direction, don't you? So why delay the inevitable and let's make 2010 the first year where America Votes For The Tony Awards!...

The marquees of Broadway will once again dim tonight; not to honor a great actor or playwright or director but to commemorate the passing of Harry Edelstein, owner of the theatre district's legendary Café Edison....

The entirety of The Public Theater's positively scrumptious new Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night is played on and around designer John Lee Beatty's grassy field, which is dominated by two large hills. It's the kind of setting that might remind you of dozens of locales in Central ...

While collectors of musical theatre trivia may be quick to mention that Anika Larsen - the cherubic-looking blonde with the belty R&B voice - was the only performer to be in both the original Broadway cast of Xanadu and the original Off-Broadway cast of Zanna, Don't!, it's her unusual upbringing tha...

Along with contempt, familiarity is also pretty good at breeding hit Broadway musicals. Take The Wiz, for example; the perfectly pleasant but sketchily written 1975 Tony winner for Best Musical that, if it weren't based on L. Frank Baum's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (which became an iconic Am...

While the casting of Phylicia Rashad as the manipulative, pill-addicted matriarch of Oklahoma's abundantly dysfunctionAl Weston family in Tracy Letts' epic comedy/drama, August: Osage County may seem an odd choice for those who only know the actress from her television roles as the elegant Clair Hux...

If you're old enough to recall the pre-Jimmy Carter era of American comedy, when dark pieces like Jules Pfeiffer's Little Murders and Robert Altman's MASH drew humor from a sense of being emotionally anaesthetized from the ugliness of your surroundings, you may be tricked into assuming that Theresa ...