The Treasurer, by Max Posner, at Playwrights Horizons, is a provocative, worthwhile study of a middle-aged man with two brothers (offstage except for their voices) who becomes...
I’ve scoured my archive of reviews, and to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been an enthusiastic traveler on the Suzi-Lori Parks ride. She has,...
Every so often, there appears what I call a “paperback play.” What I mean by that, is play that, whether or not the author has some...
We can get certain things out of the way quickly. Michael Moore is a brilliant documentarian and an almost frighteningly prescient connector of dots on the...
After several years of press releases, rumors and anticipation, the last thing you expect from a retrospective anthology featuring key moments in the work of an...
I want to be very careful in assessing The Suitcase Under the Bed, in honor of the place where undiscovered, unproduced plays by Irish playwright Teresa...
When a theatrical work is presented with honesty and integrity and a high level of craftsmanship, quite often I find that the notion of whether or...
I have very little memory of the first NYC production (1992) of the acclaimed play Marvin’s Room (1990). I have an only-vague impression of finding it...
There’s an anecdote about actor Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed. You can Google what his final words actually were but the popular simplification of the tale...
As some of you may know, some of my best professional experiences as a musical dramatist (and related to that) have been in Canada; and as...
How to properly review A Dolls House, Part 2? Is it entertaining? Is it well delivered? Does the audience respond enthusiastically, with laughs, applause, and even,...
What do we need another review of Hello, Dolly! for? To tell you that the shows a classic? Hardly. To describe the score? Not so much....
Groundhog Day may be the most entertaining musical ever, in which the score was almost entirely irrelevant, except as a mood setter that happens to utilize...
The Lightning Thief is one of the first, if not the first, offerings of TheatreWorks New York, the commercial arm of TheatreWorks USA. It’s a full...
It’s the annual late season logjam! So in order to catch up, I’m going to blast through a few things in brief yet try to be...
Significant Other has been remounted on Broadway. What are the producers thinking? No, all right, maybe I know, maybe they want to give this little comedy, a critical hit...
As straightforward a drama as it seems to be, it’s harder than you’d think to make Arthur Miller’s The Price really land with the impact it deserves. And...
Time was, she had her [stuff] together, a prize-winning advertising executive, who knew her products, knew her market of women transitioning in and through middle age,...
When you’re working on/unveiling a musical, you want your audience to give you three things, to let you know you’re communicating what you intend. All are...
As for the offerings at the Signature actually produced under the Signature banner … Playwright Will Eno is fond of dealing in ambiguities. But perhaps uniquely,...
Meet Ken Carpenter (Reed Birney): late fifties, early sixties, retired, Midwest sensibility, settled into a staid existence, not unpleasantly, just unremarkably; wakes up in the middle...
The Pershing Square Signature Center is among the busiest and most prolific theatre centers anywhere, offering a combination of new and revived material, primarily by contemporary...
There aren’t many American playwrights who can own “funny” for its own sake the way David Ives can at the top of his game. And yet,...
Part of August Wilson’s cycle of plays about the black experience in 20th Century America, Jitney—originally produced well after a number of the plays had established themselves,...
Some quick capsules on current short runs: The boilerplate states that, “The Dork Knight traces the ups and downs of actor Jason O’Connell’s personal and professional life...
