Bad-history plays are a thing now. By “bad” I don’t mean poorly researched, but ones incongruously reframed for comic or deconstructive effect (Drunk History, but arty). Out with perio…
SOURCE: Time Out at 10:02PMMy gateway show was not Cats—nor was it Les Miz or Phantom. I grew up, like any self-respecting theater snob, disdaining such tourist trash from afar. Lacking youthful nostalgia for Andrew…
SOURCE: Time Out at 07:45PMWhen Mark Zuckerberg was recently photographed with his laptop camera and microphone jack covered in tape, complacent technophiles began to sweat. If the head of Facebook worries about perso…
SOURCE: Time Out at 09:02AMGrowing up a straight white boy in small-town New Hampshire, I wasn’t exactly destined to care about Broadway musicals, much less love them and write essays about how we may be living in a…
SOURCE: Time Out at 08:01AMSilence is golden in Bess Wohl’s exquisite play set at an upstate meditation retreat where six strangers take (and mostly break) a vow not to speak. But baser metals also emerge from the v…
SOURCE: Time Out at 12:37AMAnyone who attends Conor McPherson’s Shining City a second time won’t be surprised by a certain coup de théâtre at the very end. Those who saw it at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2006 know…
SOURCE: Time Out at 05:02AMThe 70th annual Tony Awards will be broadcast on CBS on June 12 from the Beacon Theatre. So now it’s time for our annual tradition, dear reader, of bestowing our can’t-lose predictions a…
SOURCE: Time Out at 03:24PMDrama cannot happen without a controlled release of information that keeps the characters in the room and the audience wanting more. It helps to have vivid dialogue, an unpredictable plot an…
SOURCE: Time Out at 07:17AMThe global neocircus giant Cirque du Soleil does things no else on Broadway can. Its acrobats execute quadruple backflips off a teeterboard, their heels seeming to brush the rigging high abo…
SOURCE: Time Out at 01:02PMBritish playwright Nick Payne excels at a subgenre let’s call the Science Weepie. He deploys facts to frame or metaphorize the problems of his protagonists, and the collision of data and h…
SOURCE: Time Out at 05:31AMBars are outstanding factories for human suffering—and deliverance. Everywhere from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to Louis C.K.’s hauntingly great web series Horace and Pete, wa…
SOURCE: Time Out at 09:58AMThere’s a fiery revival of Tennessee Williams’s great drama buried under the truckload of 1990s regietheater clichés that Benedict Andrews dumps all over St. Ann’s Warehouse’s playi…
SOURCE: Time Out at 09:13PMGeorge C. Wolfe s reimagining bursts with joy and style.
SOURCE: Theater News Online at 07:52PMThe full title of this extraordinary showbiz excavation-renovation masterminded by George C. Wolfe—Shuffle Along or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed—is v…
SOURCE: Time Out at 07:30PMAt the dramatic crux of Tuck Everlasting, a 102-year-old man trapped in a 17-year-old body asks an 11-year-old girl to wait six years until she’s legal, at which point she will drink from …
SOURCE: Time Out at 12:15AMOne’s sorely tempted to praise the delightful new musical Waitress using lots of bakery metaphors. After all, its hero is a pastry genius with relationship woes named Jenna (Jessie Mueller…
SOURCE: Time Out at 06:38PMThe regicide and rebellion of the history plays are on full display in this fine feast of Shakespeare.
SOURCE: Theater News Online at 07:23PMFrom Death of a Salesman to his first show on Broadway, Time Out New York's David Cote ranks Arthur Miller's 10 best plays
SOURCE: Time Out at 04:33PMArthur Miller’s penetrating study of the Salem witch trials is expertly adapted to resonate today.
SOURCE: Theater News Online at 08:47PMThere are two types of audience members attending Ivo van Hove’s The Crucible: those who take their seats and, when the curtain rises, wonder, Why’s it set in a classroom? and the other …
SOURCE: Time Out at 10:27PMFor a play about test subjects going through extremes of sadness, lust, joy and despair, The Effect leaves you slightly cold.
SOURCE: Time Out at 11:48PMDesire is chemical, or so the scientists say. When that special someone draws near, their scent can cause a fuss in the hypothalamus, prompting a rush of dopamine, adrenaline and oxytocin. P…
SOURCE: Time Out at 10:17AMDavid Harrower’s hellishly compelling play reaches deep into the psyches of two characters marked by a past experience.
SOURCE: Theater News Online at 09:51PMContrived and gently pretentious, Greg Pierce’s Her Requiem is the Off Broadway equivalent of a New Yorker short story (an improvement, I suppose, on all the new plays that seem like Netfl…
SOURCE: Time Out at 07:49PMThere was plenty on offer on Broadway this past year, but one musical took the cake.
SOURCE: Theater News Online at 07:36PMExplaining why a thing is funny is hard enough. Trying to account for something you know is hilarious—but then isn’t—is tougher still. Case in point: The Roundabout Theatre Company has…
SOURCE: Time Out at 09:53PMAlthough the titans Zero Mostel, Jerome Robbins and Harold Prince are reflexively linked to this 1964 classic, there’s another, uncredited, father of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s Marc Chaga…
SOURCE: Time Out at 07:47PMMamet and Pacino hand over an ungainly and pretentious monologue.
SOURCE: Theater News Online at 05:32PMDespite the built-in obsession with gadgets, science fiction always orbits back to a familiar subject: human psychology. All those robots, rockets and aliens are just shiny metaphors for our…
SOURCE: Time Out at 09:50PMNew York Theatre Workshop’s sold-out, buzzy Lazarus is hard to describe. Blame the holiday season, but I feel it’s like one of those old-timey TV Christmas specials, in which an isolated…
SOURCE: Time Out at 08:07PM