All articles by Tony Marinelli
Matthew Leavitt’s "Sukkot" begins with a deceptively simple premise: a grieving widower builds a sukkah because he believes it is the closest remaining path to his late wife. From that pre…
What ultimately distinguishes this production is its refusal to flatten Shakespeare into a contemporary thesis. It neither apologizes for the play's misogyny nor sensationalizes it. Instead,…
César Alvarez's "The Potluck," directed with uncommon daring by Sarah Benson, is that increasingly rare theatrical achievement: a musical willing to risk confusion, contradiction, and forma…
A theatrical audition has always carried the faint aura of ritual: a small room, a handful of strangers vested with authority, and an actor asked to compress talent, vulnerability, and despe…
Walsh has long been fascinated by characters imprisoned within the architecture of their own memories, people condemned to relive the past not because they have forgotten it, but because the…
What emerges over time is not merely a friendship but one of the most intricate love stories currently playing in New York. Ari and Brit have been entwined since birth, neighbors in a traile…
Few musicals occupy quite the same place in the American theatrical imagination as "La Cage aux Folles." Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s 1983 landmark arrived disguised as an old-fashi…
Throughout, Rice and Roland demonstrate extraordinary command of tone. They move effortlessly from slapstick to philosophical inquiry, from broad clowning to moments of startling vulnerabili…
Helen Banner’s "In the Devil’s Hands," receiving its haunting world premiere at Zoopraxic’s newly opened Long Island City performance space, is one of those rare theatrical experiences…
For most of its running time, "Dirty Books"—a slyly seductive immersive production written and directed by Mara Lieberman for Bated Breath Theatre Company—behaves less like a play than l…
There are evenings in the theater when one feels not merely entertained but altered—mysteriously unfastened from the ordinary mechanisms of perception and delivered into some older, strang…
Visually, "Specimen" resembles the fever dream of a junk dealer raised on 1970s science fiction. We anxiously anticipate the arrival of Robot B-9 from" Lost in Space" shouting “Danger, Wil…
John, discovered as an infant in a basket outside the grand department store known as the Emporium, grows up haunted by the place’s almost metaphysical allure. Like so many Wilder protagon…
The evening’s pleasures derive less from narrative surprise than from tonal dexterity. Sindelar knows exactly how ridiculous this world is, but resists the temptation to become smug about …
Inside, "Canciones" unfolds less like a play than like an actual family gathering one has somehow wandered into midway through the evening. The house hums with side conversations, overlappin…
The title refers to the catastrophic 73 seconds between the Challenger’s launch and explosion, and Mezzocchi turns those seconds into the play’s governing existential paradox. Had Rosema…
Inspired in part by "he Magic Mountain," Thomas Mann’s 1924 meditation on illness and temporality, Zimet’s play borrows not its plot but its sensibility: the peculiar dilation and contra…
What lingers, long after the final moments—which are, indeed, superb—is not a tidy judgment but a series of disquieting questions. Clements refuses the comfort of easy condemnation, even…
Derek Murphy’s "The Bad Daters" arrives Off Broadway from Ireland and the United Kingdom with the unassuming air of a chamber piece and the stealthy force of something far more piercing: a…
Where past and present commingle—as they so insistently do in a play like "Love Story"—the burden falls squarely on the director to furnish the audience with a legible temporal grammar. …
There are evenings in the theatre when the air seems to tighten, as though the room itself has drawn a breath it cannot quite release. Such is the case with "Kenrex," a work of unnerving com…
Van Zandt is a cyclone that tears through the intimate confines of SoHo Playhouse’s Huron Club, detonating with the force of lived experience refined into art. What might, in lesser hands,…
Di Zou as Pearl and Rebecca De Mornay as Evelyn in a scene from John Patrick Shanley's "The Pushover" at the Chain Theater (Photo credit: Dan Wright Photography) Encountering a John Patrick …
In Luke Murphy's astonishing "Scorched Earth," a vitality is rendered with a ferocity that feels at once ancient and bracingly new. Murphy, working under the banner of his multidisciplinary …
For all its incremental gestures toward inclusivity, "Saturday Night Live""now improbably in its 51st season"has remained curiously bereft of a regular South Asian cast member, a lacuna that…
The narrative architecture of "Vanya""its languors, its longings"is assumed, even beside the point. In its essence, this distilled adaptation unfolds less as a conventional staging than as a…
There is, in "The Last Audition," something almost defiantly modest"a chamber piece of sorrow that refuses the grandiloquence of tragedy even as it circles one. The play, a solo vehicle of h…
Hayes proves wholly persuasive, gliding among a gallery of supporting figures (Hayes delineates 11 distinct characters with astonishing lucidity, his transitions so fluid they seem almost in…
Yet the production proves curiously reluctant to pursue the implications of its own provocations. The philosophers, rather than evolving into distinct and dynamically opposed sensibilities, …
New American Ensemble may be young, but this production announces a company of rare precision and ambition. Every element"the mulch underfoot, the bar at your shoulder, the dead tree overhea…
Anthony Rapp in Kenny Finkle's "Touch" at The East Village Basement (Photo credit: Table 7 Strategies/Kevin Kulp) In Touch, a work of disarming modesty and unnerving emotional precision, a l…
In the hands of Michael John LaChiusa (music, lyrics and book) and George C. Wolfe (book), the feral, syncopated verse of Joseph Moncure March's Prohibition-era poem is not so much adapted a…
In "Entangled:12 Scenes in a Circle K off the I-40 in New Mexico," the beguiling and philosophically mischievous collaboration between Mona Mansour and Emily Zemba, the American desert becom…
What begins as a satirical clash between corporate swagger and academic idealism gradually deepens into a more unsettling inquiry. The play's true subject, it turns out, is not merely the ar…
If the show's point of view occasionally feels one-sided, that imbalance ultimately serves its chief purpose: entertainment. 'Body Count' may not function as a comprehensive treatise on cont…
Slater's performance is a revelation of synthesis. Known for his buoyant athleticism in Broadway's "SpongeBob SquarePants" and his chilling portrayal of the Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald i…
Actors Kerry Ipema and Natalie Rich, joined by the live Foley artist Kelly Robinson, proceed to conjure Spielberg's dinosaur epic. They marshal an arsenal of materials so defiantly homespun …
In Lauren Yee's exuberant and stealthily devastating new comedy, "Mother Russia," history arrives not with a bang but with an order of fast food. Two young men, perched at the lip of a new w…
The premise"a radio broadcast"might seem theatrically inert, yet Rau ingeniously implicates the audience by issuing each spectator a set of headphones. We are not merely watching propaganda;…
To enter the performance space of Paul Pinto's "MANO A MANO" is to find oneself seated not before a proscenium, but around a giant Arthurian round table, a scenic choice that immediately dis…
Chang is an agile performer, and his quick shifts among characters recall the early solo work of urban shapeshifters who built entire neighborhoods out of voice and posture. Yet here the gal…
The opening gesture of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno""that immortal confession of midlife disorientation in which a wanderer finds himself astray from the "straight road" and deposited in a "da…
The afterlife has always enjoyed a sturdy tenancy on the musical stage, but "High Spirits""Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray's tuneful graft onto Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit""has, until now, …
For Heartbeat Opera's presentation of Massenet's exquisite "Manon," the co-adaptors Rory Pelsue, who also directs, and Jacob Ashworth, the company's artistic director, take a scalpel to Mass…
By loosening the moorings that usually tether one actor to one role, director and adaptor Karin Coonrod peers, with unusual intimacy, into Lear's psychic weather. The choice to distribute hi…
Anne Gridley begins "Watch Me Walk" by taking its title at punishingly literal face value. She introduces herself, grips her walking stick"never a cane, a semantic correction that quickly re…
The choreography by Toran X. Moore is exquisitely attuned to both context and cast. Moore's steps and motifs create a full canvas of movement that breathes with the beat and bends to the dem…
Sarah Kirkland Snider's first opera arrives with a confidence that feels almost paradoxical: it is at once tightly focused and lavishly expansive, a work that fixes its gaze on a single hing…
What "If We Kiss" captures, with rare delicacy, is the way young people experience such convergences as both comic and catastrophic. The play treats adolescent feeling with respect, refusing…
Greenberg's greatest achievement is his refusal to inflate or apologize for the material. He treats "The Baker's Wife" as what it is: a musical of sensibility rather than momentum, concerned…
