Tuesday, May 6, 2014
In Sharr White's Annapurna, a by-the-numbers but diverting two-hander, Emma shows up in ex-husband Ulysses's dilapidated trailer 20 years after she took their son and disappeared while …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:00PMSunday, May 4, 2014
Decades ago, the brilliant and beloved acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were doing a play together. Lunt was surprised and pleased when his line asking for a cup of tea received a…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:31PMFriday, April 25, 2014
The often delightful (but too frequently slow) DonJuan, or Wages of Debauchery, adapted from a Czech classic, is conceived and directed by Vit Horejs and presented by the Czec…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:42PMSaturday, April 12, 2014
Catherine Trieschmann's new play, The Most Deserving, aspires to be both entertaining and significant. It is completely successful in the former regard, and not so much in the latter.Kristin…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:12PMTuesday, April 8, 2014
You can credit Ted and Lo for truth in advertising; their show does hurt a bit. It also entertains, charms, and delights. I'm not sure that it gels overall, but what can you expect from a so…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:04PMSaturday, March 29, 2014
Okay, they were both previews. Okay, maybe they'll fix the problems (if they even perceive them as problems). But in one week I have experienced not being able to see and not being able to h…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:50PMSunday, March 23, 2014
Sir Patient Fancy is a humorous yet serious look at the effect money--or lack of money!--has on romantic relationships. Written in 1678 by Aphra Behn, England's first female professional pla…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:30PMKyle Nesbit. Congratulations, Kyle. You have won the copy of Nothing Like a Dame. Here are the correct answers: Angela Lansbury: 4Audra McDonald: 2Bebe Neuwirth: 10Betty Buckley: 3Carol…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:43PMSunday, March 9, 2014
To win a copy of the very enjoyable Nothing Like a Dame (review here), just match up the quote and the dame and send your answers to [email protected]. A winner will be picked at random from …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:25PMSaturday, March 8, 2014
What happens when you assemble five writers (Kara Lee Corthron, Sarah Gancher, Virginia Grise, Dipika Guha, and Lauren Yee) and three directors (Elena Araoz, Lydia Fort, and Lauren Keating)…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:16PMThe not-quite-accurate publicity synopsis for Emily Schwend's new play Take Me Back goes as follows:James Kautz Photo: Russ RowlandAfter a four-year stint in federal prison, Bill is back at…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:52PMThursday, March 6, 2014
Axis Company's Nothing on Earth (Can Hold Houdini), written and directed by artistic director Randy Sharp, has all the ingredients of a fascinating and thought-provoking thriller. Harry Ho…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:00PMWednesday, February 19, 2014
Part sketch comedy, part minimalist drama(s), Caryl Churchill's Love and Information is unlike any show I've seen. Consisting of dozens of playlets, some barely a minute long, Love and Infor…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:56PMThursday, February 13, 2014
A door opens and closes, and two people walk into an expensive but messy apartment. The man, Philip (Thomas Jay Ryan), is in his 50s, white, well-off--the owner of the apartment. The woman, …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:56PMMonday, February 10, 2014
Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's A Little Night Music is perfect. Its romance, cynicism, earnestness, silliness, wry humor, brilliant lyrics, and scrumptious music add up to two and a hal…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:27PMIf you are a fan of musical theatre, you will greatly enjoy Nothing Like a Dame, Eddie Shapiro's collection of long, thoughtful interviews with many of the most brilliant women doing musical…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:52PMMonday, February 3, 2014
I guess Thomas Bradshaw was aiming for satire when he wrote the dreadful and stupid Intimacy, but satire requires a point of view, intelligence, and more discernment than shown by, say, a bu…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:03PMJessica Dickey's Row After Row sneaks up on you. The story seems simple: three Civil War re-enactors share a table in a bar following a re-creation of the battle of Gettysburg. Tom and Cal a…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:31PMFriday, January 31, 2014
It's the moment. The lonely Italian-born Iowan housewife and the dashing photographer dance. And the audience's focus is pulled onto a neighbor, singing.It's another moment. Their love is gr…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:26PMMonday, January 27, 2014
Hannah CabellPhoto: Rob StrongThe Pilot's name doesn't matter because being a pilot is absolutely what she is, over all other forms of identification. She lives to fly "My Tiger/My gal who c…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:40PMSunday, January 19, 2014
One of the risks of writing cutting-edge theatre is that time can wear down sharp edges into blunt instruments. It is the classics that rise above their time and place. Joe Orton's farce Loo…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:20PMInside John Patrick Shanley's 105-minute Outside Mullingar is a potentially wonderful 85-minute play. As it stands (or stood at the preview I saw), it meanders too much and takes too long to…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:11PMTuesday, January 7, 2014
The brilliant revival of Machinal, Sophie Treadwell's expressionistic 1928 dissection of a woman's life, climbs off the stage and under your skin. This nerve-rattling production is directed …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:00PMFriday, January 3, 2014
Simple Dreams is Linda Ronstadt's "musical memoir," and in it, she discusses her forays into light opera (The Pirates of Penzance) and opera (La Boheme). Ronstadt is remarkably modest for so…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:00PMWednesday, January 1, 2014
Madeleine George's latest play, The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence is by turns breathtaking, annoying, beautiful, overwritten, and gorgeous. A mash-up riff on three Watsons--the J…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:50AMSaturday, December 21, 2013
Disappointing shows, in alphabetical order:The Big Knife: A waste of an excellent cast. And while Richard Kind was fine, I don't know why everyone made such a big deal of his being able to p…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:36PMThursday, December 19, 2013
Whew! Another year has jetted by with astonishing speed, leaving me some 80 shows in its wake. While reviewing the year as a whole, it strikes me that the lesson of 2013, as of the past few …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:50PMTuesday, December 10, 2013
Beautiful, the Carole King biomusical, is stuffed with one incredible song after another. The result is an entertaining and enjoyable evening. Would it be too much to wish it were also good?…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:34AMSunday, December 8, 2013
The Pigeoning is 70 minutes of pure delight. This brilliant piece of puppet theatre is the story of Frank, an office worker who cannot function unless everything on his desk is aligned perfe…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:20PMFriday, December 6, 2013
Kudos to Craig Zadan and Neil Meron for producing a live TV version of The Sound of Music. There's something incomparably sparkling, vivid, and delightful about live performances. In the act…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:13PMThursday, November 28, 2013
Charles Fuller's drama One Night, the story of a veteran suffering from PTSD, presents the audience with a bizarrely conflicted experience. The inarguable horrors of rape, war…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:31PM 
