OFF-BROADWAY THEATER REVIEWS

Unlike the vast majority of musicals granted concert productions by City Center's Encores! Off-Center, the collaborate effort known as WORKING did not play an Off-Broadway run before hitting Times Square. Instead, Chicago's Goodman Theatre production transferred to the 46th Street Theatre in 1978, w...

From the epic poetry of Ernest Lawrence Thayer's 'Casey At The Bat' to the sharp-edged vernacular of Ring Lardner's newspaper columns and the nostalgic innocence of Roger Kahn's 'The Boys of Summer,' baseball has been inspiring great literary flourishes for well over a century....

'How many of you would just... pretty much like to have sex with me?', a character asks audience members in the middle of a play....

'Only my dogs will not betray me,' confesses a world-renowned opera diva in Charles Ludlam's 1983 downtown triumph, GALAS....

'Don't roll your eyes at me,' a person of influence instructs a promising young musical theatre writer. 'I'm the chair of the Second-Coming-Of-Sondheim Award so I know what the f... I'm talking about!'...

There's a rather highbrow gag in the long-ago Broadway musical TOVARICH, where a Gatsby-era gentleman asks an elegant lady if she's read James Joyce's new novel, 'Ulysses.' 'Just the final fifty pages,' she replies with a lustful wink in her voice....

Dropped calls are the worst--unless you're Luke Wilson, and then dropped gumballs cause a bigger headache. Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson ricochets plenty of candy and themes, but in its 75 minutes, this thin workplace-humor production doesn't give us enough to chew on....

A young African-American woman living in 1964 rural South Carolina is interrupted on her way to a voter registration rally by a pair of white men who not only rough her up until she's on the ground and bloody, but convince a police officer that it was her fault....

The NYC premiere of 'Handbagged,' written by Moira Buffini and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, is now on stage at 59E59 Theaters as part of Brits Off-Broadway. This unique, fascinating play captures elements of history and the stark differences between Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher...

If, when the smoke clears on the Democratic Party's selection process, their next nominee for President of the United States turns out to be recent Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, history might point to director Kenny Leon's fun and stylish Shakespeare In The Park production of Much A...

Though Zhu Yi's YOU NEVER TOUCHED THE DIRT is set in a large estate on the outskirts of Shanghai, New Yorkers will certainly recognize it as a gentrification story, where the homogeneous conveniences of the modern would come at the expense of a community's history and distinctive character....

When the audience enters Atlantic Theater's Stage 2 for Carla Ching's Nomad Motel, presented as part of their New Play Development program, there's a very familiar type of character already hard at work on stage; a quiet young man, seriously at work composing music with his electric guitar....

Playwright Christopher Shinn, who directs Second Stage's new production of his 2008 Pulitzer finalist Dying City, places a large black void at the upstage wall as part of designer Dane Laffrey's otherwise realistic depiction of rather non-descript Manhattan apartment. Don't, like this reviewer did, ...

It's the players, more so than the play, that's the thing in director Erica Schmidt's psychologically intriguing Shakespeare adaptation titled Mac Beth. As with the current Daniel Fish-directed Broadway production of OKLAHOMA!, the focus of the evening is not so much on the text, but on the characte...

One of the many skills of the extraordinary, detail-oriented stage actor Marin Ireland is a habit of being so good that she can lift the audience's perception of a play that isn't quite there. For example, a year ago at this time, as she was making Tennessee Williams' SUMMER AND SMOKE, generally reg...

Though the 1976 musical SO LONG, 174th STREET didn't even last a fortnight on Broadway, it wouldn't be surprising to see the York Theater Company's completely delightful revised version, ENTER LAUGHING, THE MUSICAL, return the Joseph Stein/Stan Daniels effort to the main stem someday, especially if ...

'Posting Letters to the Moon' is now making its U.S. premiere at 59E59 Theaters. The show features correspondences written during WWII by British actress, Celia Johnson and her husband, writer Peter Fleming. Their beautifully written letters to each other are full of affection, longing, honesty, and...

There's a scene in poet-turned-playwright Aziza Barnes' fast and furiously funny debut stage piece, BLKS, where the main characters, a trio of black Brooklyn women in their 20s 'out on a mission to resurrect our fly back' find themselves at the corner of Prince Street and Broadway, where the N,R sub...

Playwright Chisa Hutchinson, describes Constance Daley, the character who voices her solo play, Proof of Love, as 'close as you can get to a WASP while being black.'...

Playwright Elise Forier Edie is often asked how much of The Pink Unicorn is true.  She answers 'all of it' and 'none of it.'  All of the events depicted happened to someone, including herself.  A high school refused to allow the formation of a Gay and Straight Alliance Club.  Transgender childre...

Latecomers to director Terry Kinney's finely-acted Signature Theatre revival of Sam Shepard's 1977 dysfunctional family drama, Curse of the Starving Class, will miss the showstopping bit of stagecraft that opens the production, as set designer Julian Crouch's kitchen interior of a worse-for-wear Cal...

While even savvy New York theatregoers aren't able to keep up with everything in the city that never sleeps, hopefully after five opportunities to enter the ring with the wildly innovative and imaginative Japanese Theatre Company Kaimaku Pennant Race (KPR) from May 15-18th at Japan Society, they wil...

At its core, The Buffalo Play is a unique contemporary centering of human folly set among flora and fauna, pitting Woman (apologetic and naive) against Buffalo (snorting and skeptical). They engage in a primal tete-a-tete that explores what it means to be an outsider, to be human, and the repercussi...

Though the world-famous 35-year-old Montreal-based entertainment troupe Cirque du Soleil has never been known for making political statements with their extravaganzas of culture and athleticism - and while the timing is undoubtedly just coincidental - one can't help at least a passing thought of how...

That crazy cacophony of choreographic chaos that careens across the City Center stage shortly after the commencement of Act II is the main reason for Encores! to bring back the smash hit 1947 musical comedy High Button Shoes....