Wednesday, February 12, 2014
No Broadway show in recent memory elicited a more potent blend of scapegoating and Schadenfreude than Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which was conceived in 2002 by producer Tony Adams, score…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:37PMTuesday, February 4, 2014
As the lights come up on the first scene, a young man with a bum leg and his stronger, abler friend awaken to greet another gray, dirty summer morning on the Bowery. From the rooftop they've…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:12PMFriday, January 24, 2014
In John Patrick Shanley's Outside Mullingar, Brían F. O'Byrne plays a pathologically shy, quietly quirky farmer named Anthony, whose family farm abuts the one owned by Rosemary's family. Ro…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:00AMThursday, January 16, 2014
Hi, all:I thought I'd tip you off, if you are interested, to a lively, interesting, and occasionally maddening discussion that was sparked a few weeks ago by an essay titled "Critical Genero…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:29PMSaturday, January 4, 2014
Photo: Gerry GoodsteinWhen I was a kid, my parents took my sister and me to a lot of theater in our hometown of Pittsburgh, which has a much stronger arts scene than I think most people assu…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:03AMSunday, December 22, 2013
Joan MarcusThe composer Jeanine Tesori has a knack for capturing, in her scores, the ebbs and flows of complex, imbalanced relationships. Through recurring motifs, overlapping melodic lines,…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:48PMFriday, December 6, 2013
Hi, all. It's been a very long semester and I've seen very little theater, and I've missed blogging a bunch. I plan to rectify that starting....now:Last night, along with, um, everyone, I go…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:44PMThursday, October 3, 2013
Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play is not warm or fuzzy or uplifting or heartbreaking. Its characters are not especially finely wrought or deeply nuanced, and do not Learn…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:40PMWednesday, September 25, 2013
Kafka's The Metamorphosis is, for all its terse language, sparse emotional display, and brevity, a tale with some pretty huge themes about family dynamics, the personal and professional worl…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:38PMMonday, August 26, 2013
Soul Doctor is not the greatest show on the planet, for sure, but it's certainly not the worst, either--and while there are problems with the show that have been cited repeatedly by critics …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:56PMMonday, August 19, 2013
My ten-year-old daughter, a native New Yorker, is occasionally bummed that we don't have space for a dog, that she has to share a bedroom with her little brother, and that we don't yet let h…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:00PMTuesday, July 30, 2013
When Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford's musical I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road opened at the Public in 1978, the theater critics who reviewed it were hostile. (The enormo…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:41PMMonday, July 22, 2013
Hi:There will be more theater reviews from me in the coming weeks (whether you want them or not!). In the meantime, I wanted to share the fact that the American Music Review newsletter, whic…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:56PMThursday, June 27, 2013
About two years ago, I resolved to refuse, on principle, to see any stage musical that was originally a movie. I've decided to back down from this noble (read: foolhardy) sacrifice in recent…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:59PMMonday, June 24, 2013
Photo: Sara Krulwich Immersive theater is hot in New York right now, but that doesn't mean you should always believe the hype. I've seen a bunch of shows that employ immersive…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:11PMMonday, June 10, 2013
1) The Tonys are the honeybadger of awards shows. They don't give a shit, they have loose skin, and they are absolutely, completely, and totally badass.2) Neil Patrick Harris should host eve…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:18AMFriday, June 7, 2013
Murder Ballad, which is currently running at the Union Square Theater after a critically and commercially successful stint at MTC earlier this fall, is everything everyone says it is: paper …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:44PMThursday, June 6, 2013
Howdy, people:Some of you might know this, and some of you could probably not care less, but anyway, sometimes I write for the Oxford University Press blog, since OUP published Hard Times an…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:04AMSunday, May 26, 2013
Joan MarcusThis past theater season has been a real roller coaster for me, reception-wise. I saw Kinky Boots begrudgingly, and in a monumentally horrible mood, and seriously out for blood,…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:29PMWednesday, May 22, 2013
Experimental approaches to well-known plays can sometimes pay off in enormous ways. The National Theatre of Scotland's production of Macbeth, currently at the Barrymore, made me think of a w…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:44PMWednesday, April 24, 2013
Photo: Michael J. Lutch Allow me to cut right to the chase: Diane Paulus's revival of Pippin, which opens Thursday, is sublime. At the risk of sounding cliched, there are just not enou…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:30PMSunday, March 24, 2013
Photo Credit: Bruce GlikasYoung Charlie Price (Stark Sands) of Northampton, England, has just unwillingly inherited his family's struggling shoe factory. His girlfriend wants him to sell it …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:14AMSunday, March 17, 2013
Hey, fellow theater geeks. Do you remember a time, not so long ago, when "Smash" was a brilliant, highly anticipated idea? OMG, a show that finally shows the whole world how cool and edgy an…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:00PMMonday, February 25, 2013
1) I have not set foot in a movie theater in a full calendar year, at least.2) Nonetheless, missing the awards telecast was simply not a possibility.3) Seth McFarlane is cute, charming, and …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:56AMTuesday, February 19, 2013
Photo Credit: Broadwayworld.com"My name is Asher Lev!" The title of the 1972 Chaim Potok novel, and the Aaron Posner play based upon it is, when uttered by the title character, no mere how-d…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:27PMWednesday, January 9, 2013
The Other Place, which ran last spring at MCC and which opens tomorrow night on Broadway at MTC's Friedman Theatre, has been described as a "psychological thriller" and a "dark comedy." It s…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:23PMTuesday, November 27, 2012
If you blinked, then you missed The Peformers, which ran for all of four performances on Broadway and closed last Sunday. It's sort of a shame, because the show was very funny, and, as my fa…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:14AMMonday, November 26, 2012
Circles loom large in Mies Julie, Yael Farber's adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie currently running at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo. A slow fan circles endlessly above the stage. As they…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:42PMSunday, November 18, 2012
Truly brilliant, innovative theater is also deeply humbling, and thus I doubt that I will be able to adequately describe Ivo van Hove's Roman Tragedies, which was performed over the course o…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:14PMSunday, November 11, 2012
A few weeks back, I was invited to participate in the Gallery Players' first talk-back, appropriately titled GalleryTalk, which took place this weekend after one of the performances of the G…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:09PMMonday, November 5, 2012
Please note: This is not a traditional review. I saw Annie this past weekend, but shortly enough after the hurricane that I don't feel I can discuss it without my downbeat mood, compiled wit…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:13PM 
