OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

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....

Directed by Richard Romagnoli and presented by PTP/NYC for a run at Atlantic Stage 2, 'Havel: the Passion of Thought' has been delighting audiences since its July 9th start; it really is quite the addition to the group's thirty-third season. In a time when artists were silenced in Czechoslovakia bec...

A small, young girl (Serena Parrish)-tattered and dirty-walks across the living room of a cabin. She's holding a candle, taking in her surroundings with laser focus. She's a whisper; a ghost living in the shadows. Then everything goes black....

Through the leadership of Reverend Bernard Scott, Greenwich Village's Judson Memorial Church became a center for emerging artists during the 1950s, welcoming the experimental, the avant-garde and the political to have their work seen without fear of censorship....

Written by Solnik, directed by Nikki Reed and presented by Executive Artistic Director Crystal Fields, "Birds of Paradise" is being performed in the East Village for a very limited run. With opening night this past Thursday and running only through July 14th, this show is definitely one I recommend ...

People who love magic and many more will thoroughly enjoy mentalist and magician, Gary Ferrar who is presenting the show, 'NOTHING HERE IS REAL' in New York City....

Chamber musicals don't get much more chamber than composerlyricistbookwriter Grace McLean's In the Green, an intriguing new piece receiving its premiere at LCT3's Claire Tow Theater. Musically complex, dramatically abstract and, as presented by director Lee Sunday Evans, intensely intimate in style,...

The last time a well-known actor not especially noted for singing graced a major New York stage with a one-person autobiographical musical that focused on personal tragedy, it was Suzanne Somer's unmissably jaw-dropping narcissistic spectacle, THE BLONDE IN THE THUNDERBIRD.  But fear not, playgoers...