Thursday, 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 12:31PMSaturday, November 23, 2013
After Beth Henley's interminable and unpleasant new play, The Jacksonian, finally ended, an audience member turned to me and said, "What was that?"Excellent question.The story of a divorcing…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:35PMSunday, November 17, 2013
Frances Tannehill, actress and lifelong Manhattan resident, died after a brief illness in Upper Manhattan on August 5th.Known for her stunning looks in addition to her talents as a dramatic …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:39PMWednesday, November 13, 2013
Bottom line: If you love to laugh and have silly fun; if you enjoy being entertained by top-notch performers with excellent timing and beautiful voices; if you've even heard of such movies a…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:11PMSunday, November 3, 2013
Julie Taymor's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is full of wonders, yet it is not quite wonderful. Actually, there are two shows here. The first, the one by Taymor and her creativ…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:08AMSunday, October 27, 2013
Based on Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic memoir, the equally brilliant musical Fun Home tells the story of Alison (depicted at three ages by three different performers); her father, a not…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:52PMMonday, October 21, 2013
David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, directed by Rebecca Taichman, clearly finds itself hip, snarky, insightful, and significant, but it's merely an olio of unoriginal ideas tossed together wit…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:43PMThursday, October 10, 2013
The Landing, John Kander and Greg Pierce's musical triptych at the Vineyard, is theoretically about love, loss, betrayal, fantasy, and death. And yet it is not about much of anything, really…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:20PMWhat does an all-female Julius Caesar teach us that we don't already know about Shakespeare's tale of betrayal, ambition, and male stupidity? Not that much, really--but it does make the thin…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:56PMSunday, October 6, 2013
Jon Robin Baitz's 1988 play The Film Society, which takes place in South Africa in the 1970s, explores racism, compromise, the closet, friendship, and many other interesting themes. Unfortun…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:43PMThe glorious Tamar of the River, running through October 20 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, is a must-see for anyone interested in nontraditional, engaging, and accessible musical thea…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:24PMTuesday, September 24, 2013
In her sweet mash-up Shakespeare's Sister, director/adaptor Irina Brook serves the audience Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and actual soup.As the audience enters, five women are already o…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:18PMGeorge Kelly's Philip Goes Forth at the Mint is an uneven production of an uneven play that nevertheless entertains and satisfies. Written in 1931, Philip Goes Forth treads familiar ground w…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:09PMSunday, September 15, 2013
I went to see Ethan Coen's Women or Nothing with some misgivings due to its tagline: "Women or Nothing is a play about two women so desperate to have a child that one of them will even sleep…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:42PMSaturday, September 14, 2013
Watching the delightful production of George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell being presented by the Pearl Theatre Company and the Gingold Theatrical Group, I had to periodically remind mys…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:03PMFriday, September 13, 2013
While watching Lee Blessing's mediocre A User's Guide to Hell Featuring Bernard Madoff, I found myself writing Caster's Rules of Satire.General Rules Rule 1: A satire should be entertaining.…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:06PMWhat does a playwright owe a living person on whom he or she bases a character? What does a playwright owe the audience who comes to see a play "based on actual events"? Some people argue th…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:12PMSunday, August 25, 2013
The real-life siblings Mary and Charles Lamb lived in the 1800s in London and wrote together. The fictional (but-somewhat-based-on-Vivien-Leigh-and-Laurence-Olivier) Lee and Oliver are forme…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:37PMSunday, July 28, 2013
Rory O'Malley, Bryan Fenkhart, Autumn Hurlbert, Lauren Molina, Roe Hartrampf, Heath CalvertIf you are looking for an entertaining piece of fluff, the musical Nobody Loves You at the Second S…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:37PMLast night, I visited an old friend who I hadn't seen in decades. The friend was I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road, and the reunion was lovely. Renée Elise GoldsberryI'm…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:09PMHow did I respond to The Past Is Still Ahead, written and directed by Sophia Romma, at the Midtown International Theatre Festival? Let me count the ways: I thought it was brave, moving, inte…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:35PMThursday, July 25, 2013
Do you suppose the performers in the Cirque du Soleil are actually human? For much of Quidam, I was convinced that they are stunning aliens visiting us from some magical realm where gravity …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:23PMSunday, July 21, 2013
The website for the movie Pina says, "Pina Bausch [was] a legendary dancer and choreographer. Her unique creations transformed the language …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:36PMSaturday, July 6, 2013
Please welcome guest blogger Emma-Caster Dudzick. As an avid Harry Potter fan, Potted Potter sounded to me like an impossible feat: presenting all seven J.K. Rowling books in only 70 minutes…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:35PMThursday, July 4, 2013
I guess that Barbra Streisand is a legitimate target of satirists and imitators. It's not as though she simply does her acting and directing and retires to her quiet life. She has put hersel…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:47AMSunday, June 30, 2013
If you never had the amazing experience of seeing Colleen Dewhurst perform live, you can get a taste of how wonderful she was through the magic of technology. In 1959, John Steinbeck's Burni…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:40PMTuesday, June 25, 2013
Due to some technical thing or other, we have lost Liz's fabulous Here Lies Love Review. If you happened to have it on an email or feed or just cut and pasted it, could you get it back to us…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:59PMMonday, June 24, 2013
Playwright Mark Roberts is not a member of the Amoralists, but his play Rantoul and Die, well-directed by Jay Stull, is Amoralist material right down to its DNA. The characters are working c…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:00PMWednesday, June 19, 2013
You have through July 14th to catch N.C. Hunter's A Picture of Autumn at the Mint, and you really should. This 1951 drama/comedy features a huge house and characters that would fit right in …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:38PMTuesday, June 18, 2013
Here's the basic formula of reviewing: a bunch of people, frequently talented, sometimes brilliant, strive for weeks, months, or years, often at great sacrifice, and then I show up and judge…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:35PMSunday, June 16, 2013
In Frankenstein Upstairs, Mac Rogers once again uses science fiction as his delivery system to present us with his unique combination of insight, humor, wisdom, and compassion. The plot is s…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:17PM 
