Theater Reviews
Billy Elliott
Based on the 2000 film about a young boy in a Northern England coal mining town who wants to become a ballet dancer–against the wishes of his embarrassed widowed father and older brother, both on strike in the infamous 1984 showdown with Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union government–Billy Elliott the musical succeeds thrillingly by juxtaposing Billy’s unlikely dream with his blackened, grimy reality...
Farragut North
Beau Willimon’s Farragut North begins with Stephen, the 25-year-old wunderkind press secretary of Governor Willis, a presidential candidate, regaling his drinking buddies (Ben, his eager assistant; Ida, a friendly New York Times correspondent; and Paul, who runs the Willis campaign) with war stories in an Iowa watering hole days before the Democratic caucus...
The Grand Inquisitor
The Grand Inquisitor as minimally as possible; our narrator/inquisitor both describes the action and speaks all the dialogue as Christ sits motionless throughout until he stands and walks to the inquisitor at the end...
The Master Builder
The Master Builder is a genuine classic that’s not staged that much; of course, its last time on Broadway was in Tony Randall’s wrongheaded 1992 National Actors Theatre production...
Boys’ Life
Howard Korder’s Boys’ Life follows a trio of buddies–Phil, Jack, and Don–who, after college, finally are dropped into the real, adult world for which they are woefully unprepared...
To Be or Not to Be
A highly unnecessary adaptation is To Be or Not to Be, based on the classic 1942 movie directed by Ernest Lubitsch and starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny...
Bedroom Farce
Bedroom Farce is simply one of Ayckbourn’s most deeply funny yet melancholic plays: four married couples who have been together from a few years to several decades play out, in the course of one night...
A Body of Water
Lee Blessing’s A Body of Water, a slippery slope of a play that tries to find the mysterious and unsettling in the mundane: a wedding ring, a buttered bagel, a set of car keys, a young girl’s photograph. Moss’ and Avis’s amnesiac responses to their surroundings could be a metaphor for any kind of extreme reaction, such as post- September 11 fear, blocking out a horrible past event, or a refusal to face a failed relationship...
Kindness
Adam Rapp’s Kindness begins with its 17-year-old protagonist, Dennis, masturbating to the porn channel in the midtown Manhattan hotel room he shares with his mother, Maryanne, who’s sick from cancer....
13
13 follows Evan, a Jewish kid from the Upper West Side who is plucked from the center of the universe and dropped in a hick Indiana town after his parents’ divorce...
A Man for All Seasons
A Man for All Seasons has been dramatically diluted by the subtraction of The Common Man, a Brechtian device in which Bolt used an actor to narrate, fill in historical gaps, move scenery, and play small but significant roles like the executioner...
The Seagull '08
Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull doesn’t merely waver between comedy and tragedy, it weaves both together until it’s irrelevant whether one calls it a comedy with tragic overtones or a tragedy with comic overtones...
Equus
In Peter Shaffer’s Equus, a 17-year-old young man blinds six horses by stabbing out their eyes in a stable where he had an abortive sexual encounter with a young woman. The bulk of the play recounts the attempts of psychiatrist Martin Dysart to explore the motives and background of the boy, Alan Strang, to discover why he committed this heinous crime...
The Tempest
Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, is not only an artful summation of the Bard’s entire career but also a humane study of reconciliation containing his most eloquent poetry and profound insights into human nature...
Three Changes
In Nicky Silver’s Three Changes, a Manhattan couple’s seemingly contended home life is shattered by the unexpected arrival from Los Angeles of the husband’s brother, creator of a hit TV series who’s down and out following its cancellation and his subsequent trip to rehab...
Beast
In Michael Weller’s Beast, Benjamin Voychevsky—a U.S. soldier killed in a Baghdad firefight—climbs out of his coffin and joins another badly disfigured soldier, Jimmy Cato, for a series of surreal misadventures that begin at a German military hospital and end on Crawford, Texas ranch, where they confront their Dr. Frankenstein...
Shaw and Stratford, Part 2
A second trip to the Canadian theatrical idylls of Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake yielded even greater theatrical riches, as I saw a trio of terrific shows at the Shaw Festival and a production for the ages at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival–again reconfirming that these fests are the standard by which all others are measured...
Buffalo Gal
A.R. Gurney’s plays have always been about his hometown of Buffalo, the second-largest city in New York State that’s been plagued by bad press about its winters—which really aren’t that bad, occasional snowstorms notwithstanding—and the failures of its sports teams (four straight Super Bowls losses for the NFL Bills, anyone?)...
Some Americans Abroad
In Richard Nelson’s insinuatingly funny Some Americans Abroad, several college students and their teacher-chaperones travel to England to dip their toes in British Culture–which consists mostly of attending London (and Stratford) theater...
[title of show]
[title of show] is a musical about two men pursuing their dream -- the writing and performance of an original musical -- with the assistance of a pair of female friends...
Damn Yankees
City Center Encores! began its Summer Stars series last year with a staging of Gypsy that set the bar at an almost impossible height. Could the series hit another home run? Even though this summer’s production, Damn Yankees, is another sure-fire audience pleaser, there’s an almost inevitable letdown -- but only if you compare the show to Gypsy, which I will now stop doing...
The Marriage of Bette and Boo
Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo concerns itself with broken relationships, alcoholism, cancer, stillbirth, and the Catholic Church. Naturally, it’s a comedy...
A Perfect Couple
With a sure hand and a light touch, Brooke Berman’s A Perfect Couple studies the unexpected travails of Amy and Isaac, two fortysomethings who are engaged to be married. Unlike Berman’s Hunting and Gathering, which suffered from terminal cutesiness, A Perfect Couple is wise and generous to its characters...
Hamlet
The subtleties of Hamlet are almost impossible to register at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where free Shakespeare reigns. Oskar Eustis’s limp production merely pays lip service to the Bard’s sublime tragedy...
Saved
The movie Saved!, which cleverly satirized both Christian evangelism and teenage confusion, is now the Off-Broadway musical Saved. The dropped exclamation point nods to what’s missing from the new version – namely, sharp observation and the facing of thorny issues...
reasons to be pretty
In reasons to be pretty, Neil LaBute again takes aim at the ongoing war of attrition between the sexes...
Port Authority
The gift of gab doesn’t always translate well to the stage, if the latest monologues by Irish playwrights are any indication. Earlier this season, we had Abbie Spallen’s feeble Pumpgirl at the Manhattan Theatre Club. And now there’s Conor McPherson’s Port Authority, a presentation of the Atlantic Theater Company...
Good Boys and True
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Good Boys and True seems like an anachronistic throwback, but this admittedly conventional play is so well-constructed that it’s hard to resist its dramatic pull. Scott Ellis’s fine production at the Second Stage Theatre is also a plus...
Boeing-Boeing
Comedy doesn’t get much creakier than Marc Camoletti’s farce Boeing-Boeing, which inexplicably is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most-performed French play in history. But the actors of the current Broadway revival take Camoletti’s flat, dated, possibly untranslatable humor and send it through the air like so many supersonic jets...
Top Girls
Written by Caryl Churchill in 1982, after Margaret Thatcher became England’s first female Prime Minister, Top Girls takes stock of the state of feminism. In Churchill's view, Thatcher’s ascendancy negatively influenced how women saw themselves, as careerism won out over a nurturing family life...
Glory Days
Glory Days presents a challenge to reviewers: How to clearly convey the show's level of achievement without being downright cruel? Here is one attempt...
Endgame
Andrei Belgrader’s production of Endgame demonstrates that Beckett’s bleakly beautiful work is still relevant today if only because, in an age of increasing technological advances, the alienation that he so effectively evoked remains an overwhelming force...
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Laura Linney and Ben Daniels star in the Roundabout Theatre Company's lackluster revival of Mark Hampton's play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, based on the novel by Choderlos de Laclos that also inspired such films Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont ...
The Country Girl
Clifford Odets' The Country Girl has been taken out of mothballs by director Mike Nichols and offered up in a highly problematic new production starring Frances McDormand, Morgan Freeman, and Peter Gallagher...
Thurgood
In case you haven't noticed, four of our finest African-American actors are performing on Broadway this spring. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, we have both the legendary James Earl Jones and the super-talented Terrence Howard. In The Country Girl, there's the great Morgan Freeman. And now, with the opening of Thurgood, we're privileged to enjoy a magisterial performance by Laurence Fishburne in the title role...
Cry-Baby
Lightning has not struck twice in the second attempt to adapt a John Waters film to the musical stage. The first try, Hairspray, is now in the fifth year of its Broadway run, has been seen throughout the country in tours and regional productions, and served as the basis for one of the best movie musicals of recent years. But don't expect Cry-Baby to come anywhere close to that level of success and popularity...
A Catered Affair
Based on a 1956 film which in turn was based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky, the Broadway musical A Catered Affair tells the story of the Hurleys, a financially struggling Bronx family whose members bicker back and forth over whether to give daughter Janey a dream wedding or spend that money to purchase a taxi medallion for father Tom...
From Up Here
Liz Flahive’s From Up Here attempts to honestly and humorously deal with the dysfunction that lies at the heart of the modern American middle-class family...
The New Century
Four short plays comprise The New Century: three (mostly) monologues followed by the title piece, which brings the trio from the others together. “Pride and Joy” introduces Helene, a Massapequa mother of three who explains that her daughter is a lesbian, her eldest son has had a sex change operation and is now also a lesbian, and her youngest son is gay and into bondage, S&M, and scatological sex...
South Pacific
The gorgeous Lincoln Center Theater revival of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein-Joshua Logan musical South Pacific does great honor to this masterpiece and to the memory of its creators...
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