OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Sure, it's a bit early in the game, but what might turn out to be the funniest scene to hit New York stages in this young theatre season occurs at the end of the first act in Jonathan Spector's sharp and empathetic social commentary, EUREKA DAY....

While the name Walt Disney will certainly be familiar to all those arriving at the Delacorte for Public Works' stage adaptation of the 1997 animated musical feature Hercules, hopefully a good deal of them will leave Central Park remembering the name Lear deBessonet....

The whole of Contact High from Theater 511 is greater than the sum of its parts, which is a good thing in light of this show's plethora of moving parts within its kaleidoscopic plot. The result is a timely coming-of-age pop-rock musical that tells a lyrical and satirical story of drug addiction, the...

One of the tightest ensembles of actors you're apt to see applying their craft on a New York stage these days is the quartet of youngsters portraying siblings aged 5-12 in Bess Wohl's engrossing drama of childhood memories, Make Believe....

In Patience, Daniel (Joshua Gitta) is a former prodigy who is now the world's #1 professional solitaire player. He's also going through a millennial 'mid-life' crisis. Young, black, talented, and restless, he inhabits a solo space in a game/sport that values reactions not reflections, shuffling betw...

'They're out of control,' an exasperated Bradley Dean cries out in a plea of victimization. 'Can you believe they tried to destroy my new housing project?' And from there you can pretty much predict where the plot of Jim Steinman's wildly oddball and frequently hilarious Bat Out of Hell is going....

Like most things in New York City, one can judge the quality of something by how long it's been around. From restaurants to boutiques to shows, the power is in popularity and perseverance. Going strong on stage in NYC since 2007, the Gazillion Bubble Show has proven it has both, plus a little someth...

Performance art. Living in New York City, we're surrounded by it daily: musicians jamming in Central Park, subway buskers moving between train cars to perform backflips and handsprings, the occasional flash mob coming out of nowhere and creating the perfect Instastory. But even though we're blessed ...

It was forty years ago when Shakespeare in the Park's Delacorte Theater was last invaded by The Bard's CORIOLANUS, but perhaps The Public's politically-minded artistic director Oskar Eustis thought this would be a good time to present a drama about an inexperienced politician who initially gains fav...

Perhaps if, like most first attempts at playwrighting penned by a young unknown who is also cast in the leading role, Domenica Feraud's RINSE, REPEAT had a modestly-produced premiere production in a small black box theatre, this reviewer would be more enthused to recommend an interesting work in pro...

It's doubtful one will find a more romantic, nor a sexier theatergoing experience within the five boroughs this summer than seated close to someone special in one of Theatre XIV's cozy champagne couches when nearly directly above you, aerialists Marcy Richardson and Nolan McKew are performing a sens...

Gather your group and enjoy a seasonal entertainment treat. 'Summer Shorts,' the festival of new American plays, is now onstage at 59E59 Theaters. It's an event that theatergoers look forward to every year with original plays by noted artists presented in short form....

Like Aaron Posner's UNCLE VANYA-inspired LIFE SUCKS, still packing in the disillusioned masses at Theatre Row, the new offering by MCC is more of a freestyle riff on its sullen source material, lifting subtext to the surface in contemporary vernacular and shaving the whole thing down to a quick-pace...

Spiritual Resistance in the face of oppression is the theme for this season of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.  Their programming has been curated to accompany the exhibit 'Auschwitz.  Not Long Ago.  Not Far Away.'  Hannah Senesh, the first of four mainstage productions, is definitely w...

When he passed on at age 60 in 1933, Addison Mizner was best known as the architect whose Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean style helped define the emerging visual culture of South Florida. When his younger brother Wilson Mizner died two months later, he was best known as a raconteur whose name cou...

The thought of spending time at a lake for a reunion tends to conjure up images of relaxing on the dock, grilling food, and mixing drinks with conversation. Time at Black Lake, though, is more mercurial in nature, rippling across relationships. At Black Lake unfolds as an opaque memory/mystery play ...

IN THE PENAL COLONY open at New York Theatre Workshop...

The NYC premiere of a marvelous musical, Two's a Crowd is now onstage at 59E59 Theaters through August 25. It has a book by Rita Rudner and Martin Bergman, directed by Mr. Bergman, with music and lyrics by Jason Feddy....

In the second act of Chris Urch's excellent drama about a particularly ugly era of Uganda's intolerance of homosexuals, The Rolling Stone, James Udom is granted what might be considered the most challenging acting assignment to be currently witnessed on a New York stage....

Sometime between the era when a tap-dancing hopeful would go out there a youngster and come back a star and nowadays when tourists go out to Applebee's hungry and come back with a less than satisfying dining experience, many of the Broadway venues on that legendary strip of real estate called 42n...

When bookwriter Chris D'Arienzo's 1980s hair-band tuner Rock of Ages moved from Off-Broadway's New World Stages to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in April of 2009 - with a score made up of rock classics by Journey, Styx, Asia, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, Foreigner and a bunch of others - it was, to this ...

Technically, the silver lining of the black hole trash compactor featured in Black Hole Wedding is that whatever it doesn't suck in, it stretches out: a golf club, clothing, even a pom-pom shaking marketing director. Theatrically, this 'spaghettify' strategy also works well for the show itself, a ca...

Perhaps it would be regarded as exploitative to directly quote the passage here, but the last several minutes of playwright Isaac Gomez's THE WAY SHE SPOKE consists primarily of the names, ages, causes of death and physical states of the corpses of several dozen women who were murdered, in scenarios...

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth are two early plays by Tom Stoppard which were written to be performed together.  Both use Shakespearean text to overtly entertain while being subtly subversive.  Presented by the Potomac Theater Project this summer, the double bill is enormously entertaining....

In Alfaro's take on Euripides' MEDEA, titled Mojada, the varying attitudes towards assimilation within a family of Mexican refugees who lack documentation lead to a devastating conflict....