OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Eugene O'Neill might not have been the first playwright to have time come to a halt mid-conversation while characters reveal hidden thoughts through internal monologues - a technique I'm sure is familiar to more Americans through Groucho Marx's spoof of his Strange Interlude in the film version of A...

Everyone has their own idea of what makes great theatre. For some it's adventurous writing, for others it's well-detailed performances and for others it's dazzling production values. More often it's a combination of many qualities. Whatever your definition of great theatre is, where in New York a...

'We love you, Liza!,' a faint, but audible voice yelled from what seemed to be a far corner of the Palace Theatre's mezzanine. And though the 62-year-old entertainer was understandably still catching her breath after a spirited vaudevillian delivery of Styne, Comden & Green's tongue-twisting comic m...

'Why do I feel like a fucking tourist in my own neighborhood!?!' That is the angry, anguished cry of Robert, a Polish-Puerto Rican native of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who has seen the crime and neglect of his lifelong neighborhood remedied by a gentrifying influx of high-end restaurants, art galler...

Penned by a pair of downtown revue writers (Betty Comden and Adolph Green), composed by a wunderkind New York Philharmonic conductor (Leonard Bernstein), choreographed by a Ballet Theatre soloist (Jerome Robbins) and originally directed by musical comedy master George Abbott, there's never been a mu...

'Sooner or later we're bound to get it right.' That's the final line of Road Show, the new Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical, directed by John Doyle, that's opened at The Public. It was also the final line of Bounce, the Harold Prince directed previous version of Road Show, which for a time was ...

Yes, I know… Bury The Dead is not exactly the kind of title that's going to send box office sales into a tizzy. And sure, the Connelly Theatre, located on 4th Street between Avenues A & B, may be a perfectly lovely and intimate venue but it's a bit of an unpleasant hike from the nearest subway s...

I believe it was Chekhov who said that if a hammer appears on stage in the first act, somebody better use it to build a shelf in the second act. Well, Adam Rapp's Kindness contains no carpentry but there is quite a bit of suspense involving the appearance of a hammer. And while the play, directed ...

If you're feeling nostalgic for those sweet innocent days when guys could continually act like self-centered jerks and intelligent, attractive women would sleep with them anyway, a trip to Second Stage's funny and energetic revival of Howard Korder's Boy's Life is certainly in order....

Thanks to my BroadwayWorld colleague Adrienne Onofri for sending me this video of a showtune singin' hockey mom making her political preference known....

Although Mike Daisey's exploration of national defense, past and present, If You See Something Say Something, arrives at Joe's Pub just in time to serve as a companion piece to the Metropolitan Opera's production of Dr. Atomic, there is nothing minimalist about this monologist. He may spend the ent...

Three years ago I named D'Jamin Bartlett's performance of 'The Miller's Son' at BroadwayWorld's Standing Ovations IV concert, thirty-two years after she introduced the song in A Little Night Music, as one of my most memorable theatre moments of 2005. I may have to put her back on the list for 2008....

It's perfectly understandable if years from now, or maybe fifteen minutes after leaving the theatre, the only thing you clearly remember about the Roundabout's new production of A Man For All Seasons is Frank Langella's extraordinary performance as the highly-principled Chancellor of England, Sir Th...

Lee Blessing's plays have always shown a wonderful knack for vivid story-telling (A Walk In The Woods, Cobb), but in his new Off-Broadway offering, A Body Of Water, the author is intentionally not telling us the story. Likewise, I won't be completely telling you the story of why I found the piece, ...

They say you can get a lot of things on Craig's List; a date… a job… arrested… But actor and stand-up comic Bob Greenberg got the title of Best Alfred Hitchcock Look-A-Like of 2008. BroadwayWorld was on hand for photo coverage of that prestigious competition when it was held a couple of week...

Ah, there's nothing like watching the marriage of a pair of tortured intellectuals crumble before our eyes from the safe distance of an auditorium seat to happily send audience members to the nearest nightcap retreat with that special glow that comes from a satisfying night at the theatre. And acto...

Okay, so New York City Opera has commissioned Philip Glass to write a new opera about Walt Disney. Let's start taking bets. How many clueless parents are going to be taking their toddlers because they assume the Disney name means it's for kids?...

As I was leaving the Mint Theatre after their simply marvelous production of J.B. Priestly's 1957 drama, The Glass Cage, I overheard a woman saying to her companion, 'That play had everything! Greed… love… revenge… sex… everything!'...

'Only the great deserve the darts of satire,' proclaimed an advertisement for the New York leg of the Bolshoi Ballet Company's 1936 American tour, a classy reply to the spoofing they were receiving from George Balanchine's dance piece La Princesse Zenobia, a highlight of George Abbott and Rodgers an...

While the phrase 'Shakespeare in the Park' brings to most New Yorker's minds thoughts of getting up early and waiting in line for hours to see one of the Public Theater's Delecorte productions, savvy Gothamites know that the warmer weather annually brings dozens of free outdoor Shakespeare performan...

There's an interesting point buried beneath the innocuous entertainment of writer/director Roger Bean's The Marvelous Wonderettes, a somewhat cute little show utilizing girl group and female soloist pop hits from the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, that interesting point could have easily been made w...

It's my firm belief that if composer Leroy Anderson, lyricist Joan Ford and bookwriter/lyricists Walter & Jean Kerr had named their brash and funny 1958 musical comedy about the love/hate relationship between a silent movie director and his reluctant star anything other than Goldilocks, it might not...

The vocal miracle that is Marilyn Maye is once again working magic in the cozy confines of The Metropolitan Room, where, in the past two years, she's opened a wondrous quartet of engagements to break a 16-year exile from Manhattan....

Dan Wackerman, Artistic Director and frequent stage director for the Peccadillo Theatre Company, has regularly displayed a golden touch for mounting crackling revivals of long-forgotten Broadway plays like Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d'Usseau's The Ladies of the Corrido...

Though it took She Loves Me's Ilona Ritter just one trip to the library to discover the magic of books, musical theatre's bookwriters have traditionally been underappreciated for their vital contributions and dramatic artistry. This morning I actually blurted out at my computer screen, 'Damn, why d...