OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Parsons Dance REMEMBER ME is an all-new version of last season's collaboration with choreographer David Parsons the lead vocalists of East Village Opera Company (EVOC), featuring the music of their rock opera band....

Sex. Masturbation. Porn. These are topics that our society shies away from openly discussing, at least within the daylight hours. America is not a land where candid talks about one's self-pleasuring habits are commonplace. We can see an arm blown off on TV but we can't hear the word vagina without g...

Brilliant Traces at Theatrelab Brilliant Traces opens with a bang. More specifically it opens with several bangs and a shout and a disheveled woman in a wedding dress bursting onto the scene in a mighty erratic ball of energy....

Alternative Theatre Company presents Joe Marshall's 'The Gayest Christmas Pageant Ever!', a tepid comedy about a struggling West Hollywood LGBT Theatre putting on a Christmas show....

I had the immense pleasure of taking another visit to Grover's Corners, New Hampshire last week, via the fascinating David Cromer production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town that opened in February at the Barrow Street Theatre. Back then I wrote that the director's non-traditional take on the play - wh...

The Keen Company delivers a finely nuanced production of five Thornton Wilder short plays, which show the playwright's concern with matters spiritual and secular....

A couple of years ago I went to The Flea Theater and had a fun time with A.R. Gurney's then newest play, Post Mortem. It was a clever little piece taking place in the future about a college student writing his thesis on a long-forgotten playwright named A.R. Gurney, and was filled with self-referen...

On the night when baseball's all-stars were blasting dingers into the bleachers of Yankee Stadium, the cast of Scott Siegel's A Night At The Operetta, was having their own home run derby on the stage of Town Hall, knocking melodies by Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml out of the park....

Michael Reidel reports today that Bebe Neuwirth has been signed to play Morticia in Andrew Lippa, Rick Elice and Marshall Brickman's new Addams Family musical and that Nathan Lane is being sought to play hubby Gomez.  That's all very well and good but the casting coup I'd like to see is Adam “C...

The time had already come and passed for The Faux Marx Brothers & Co. to hit the stage with the final performance of The York Theatre's Mufti production of Minnie's Boys on Sunday night when Producing Artistic Director Jim Morgan announced that the show had to be held up a bit because there were peo...

Lighting designer R. Lee Kennedy has a planetarium's worth of stars flooding the Connolly Theatre's stage at the outset of Transport Group's production of Nancy Shayne's new musical, Marcy In The Galaxy. But gleaming through the clusters is the face of Donna Lynne Champlin, shining with hopefulness...

You know those very annoying packs of young drunkards you run into around 3am or so while wandering the bar-stuffed streets of the Lower East Side or the West Village, trying to find the nearest open pizza joint or Gray's Papaya in a quest to carbo-absorb the evening's alcoholic intake? The kind th...

February of 2008 has turned out to be a heck of a terrific month for non-traditional and daring Off-Broadway musicals. (Do we have any more opening by tomorrow night?) Following the exhilarating Next To Normal and the entrancingly Dadaist The Blue Flower we now have Joshua Schmidt (music and libre...

It took barely a sip of post-theatre cocktail for one of my companions to breathe a mournful sigh in memory of the lost art of letter writing. I imagine this was not the first time such sentiments were expressed following a performance of Vita & Virginia, Eileen Atkins' cerebrally romantic stage pi...

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...