OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Our new poll concerns some of our great Broadway veterans who, amazingly, have yet to win their first Tony Award. Who would you like to see finally win the big prize? The versatile actor, John McMartin? Mega-popular composer/lyricist (and once nominated as a co-bookwriter), Stephen Schwartz? The...

The history of Broadway's attempts to make commercially successful sequels of hit musicals is not a pretty one. But the Opening Doors Theatre Company, now in its second season at The Duplex staging pocket-sized versions of some of Broadway's most beloved flops, can offer a fabulously fun time from ...

After earning high accolades from its appearances in both New York and Toronto's Fringe Festivals and winning a Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) award for 'fair, accurate and inclusive representation of people and events in the media as a means of eliminating homophobia and discrimi...

Musical theatre, at least in the popular denominations practiced here in Gotham, has long been known to preach a message of gay rights to an eagerly accepting congregation, and those who would deny the natural occurrence or the legal acceptance of homosexuality have been generally depicted as hatef...

Set designer Derek McLane exercises no subtlety in immediately establishing the mood for Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's drama Good Boys and True.  On entering Second Stage's theatre the audience is greeted by three walls full of dozens and dozens of sports trophies neatly displayed in wooden shelves that...

Spotted at Cafe Edison:  Hillary Clinton and Cubby Bernstein in serious conversation huddled over bowls of motzah ball soup.  As Leo Frank sang, this is not over yet....

Arriving on Broadway six years after La, La, Lucille, followed-up by Yes, Yes, Yvette and inspiring Betty Comden and Adolph Green to imagine a musical named If, If, Iphigenia, No, No, Nanette is the kind of delectably frothy musical comedy confection you might not naturally associate with being the ...

I mean it with the most sincere amount of respect and admiration for both gentlemen when I write that Peter Gallagher seems to have morphed into Jerry Orbach.  At least in his portrayal of Bernie Dodd, the hard-driving Broadway director convinced that when the star of his new play suddenly leaves f...

Though Julie Wilson was certainly not the first and by all means not the last great singer to have her heart stomped upon by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's 'Surabaya Johnny,' there is no one I can name more deserving to claim it as their signature song.  (Okay, maybe Lotte Lenya, but you know that...

You'll please forgive me if I've run out of superlative adjectives with which to describe the work of Marilyn Maye, who, after a 15-year absence from New York's cabaret scene, just opened her 4th Metropolitan Room show in a baker's dozen months....

Several years before Urinetown's Mark Hollmann began writing satirical songs about the public's right to pee he teamed up with playwright Jennifer Fell Hayes to pen a delightful musical for young audiences about one of New York's lesser known cultural landmarks.  Fare For All at The Mount Vernon Ho...

I suppose the main difference between a violent protest and an act of terrorism is whether you're on the side of the person who set off the bomb or the person who was killed by it.  In Primary Stages' premiere production of Willy Holtzman's drama, Something You Did, the person responsible for the b...

When last we left The Mint Theater, that extraordinary collective of theatre archivists that specialize in mounting first-class Off-Broadway productions of time-obscured plays by still-famous names, they were teaching many New Yorkers that Leo Tolstoy took a crack at playwrighting once with his grim...

With three different directors placing their marks on the material during its pre-Broadway tryouts and two actors who were not quite up to the vocal demands of the dramatic score playing the leads (Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas), Marc Blitzstein (music and lyrics) and Joseph Stein's (book) Juno,...

Though The Metropolitan Room's fine martini selection always suits my refreshment needs very nicely, on Monday night I was feeling a severe hankering for something their bar doesn't stock, PBR in a can.  That's because I was having a swell ol' time watching Daryl Glenn, Jo Lynn Burks and company si...

I suppose it's too late in our current president's administration to see Conversations In Tusculum, playwright/director Richard Nelson's fact-based prequel to assassination of Julius Caesar, completely as a commentary on George W. Bush.  Sure, certain thoughts may come to mind when the Roman dictat...

The thing that always strikes me about Euan Morton, from his New York debut in Taboo to his Obie-winning stint in Measure For Pleasure and various other plays, musicals, concerts and cabarets, is that the guy seems incapable of expressing a dishonest emotion.  While some performers may dazzle you w...

Never one to refuse a complimentary martini or two at Sardi's (remember that the next time you spot me spreading an extra shmear of that cheddar cheese concoction over crackers at the upstairs bar), I too was invited to attend the presentation of three songs from the upcoming musical version of Shre...

I don't know about you, but when I first heard the title of Sarah Ruhl's comic fantasy, Dead Man's Cell Phone, it immediately brought to mind the title of Sister Helen Prejean's book, Dead Man Walking.  The sister's title refers to those who are still living but imprisoned on death row, but Ruhl's ...

As I write these words the opening night party of Roundabout's revival of Sunday in the Park With George, which I'll be seeing on Saturday, is no doubt in full swing, but despite the sublime glories of that Steven Sondheim/James Lapine creation, there's another musical in town about radical artists ...

You would think that Edith Wharton's fizzy little comic novel, The Glimpses Of The Moon, might have been a perfect property for Rodgers & Hart or Kern, Wodehouse & Bolton to musicalize when it was fresh off the presses in 1922.  But no, it took until 2008 for New Yorkers to get a glimpse, not to me...

In the 1979 revival of Oklahoma!, Christine Ebersole insisted that when it comes to men she 'cain't say no,' and this weekend she's showing City Center audiences that when it comes to performing, the same words apply.  Despite suffering musical theatre's most talked-about flu since Faith Prince pla...

There are several reasons I'm looking forward to this week's Encores! concert performance of Charles Strouse (music), Lee Adams (lyrics) and Betty Comden and Adolph Green's (book) 1970 musical version of All About Eve, retiled Applause, this weekend.  Like hearing those mod Broadway rock orchestrat...

There's a great moment in Cecil B. DeMille's gloriously overblown epic, The Ten Commandments, when Sir Cedric Hardwicke, playing Pharaoh Sethi, upon discovering that his beloved son Moses is really Hebrew, makes a proclamation that the name of Moses must be stricken from the history books, despite h...

When a cabaret show is promoted as containing 'an eclectic mix of style and sound,' I generally don't expect to hear 8, count 'em 8, Rodgers and Hart classics, but who am I to question Christian Hoff's good taste in music?  Though never officially announced, Hoff was to star in a proposed Broadway ...