Wednesday, April 3, 2013
A SHOWCASE FOR EMERGING ARTISTS When watching Artistic New Directions’ presentation of An Eclectic Evening of Shorts: Boxers and Briefs VI, a collection of six ten-minute plays, plus three…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:02PMFriday, March 22, 2013
SUGAR RUSH An adorable piece of clever and very funny fluff, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike takes spoonfuls of ingredients from Chekhov’s plays and mixes them i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:56AMMonday, March 18, 2013
THE BEAUTY OF MAKESHIFT THEATER Even with all its flaws Bedlam’s revival of George Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece Saint Joan is an immersive and ultimately gratifying theatrical experience. …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:40PMWednesday, March 13, 2013
A LESSON IN CHARACTERIZATION Carol Kane’s magnetic performance turns Craig Lucas’s dramatically thin comic thriller The Lying Lesson into compelling entertainment. Ms. Kane plays Bette D…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:52PMFriday, February 8, 2013
A DULL DESCENT INTO HELL The charisma and passion Ethan Hawk brings to the title role, Vincent D’Onofrio’s powerful stage presence, a gnarly set by Derek McLane, lovely songs by Latham a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:01AMWednesday, January 30, 2013
FUNNY CONVERSATIONS ABOUT DEATH Hamish Linklater’s very funny, sharp and tender new play The Vandal begins on a cold winter night as a down-on-her-luck middle-aged woman waits for a bus on…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:09AMWednesday, January 23, 2013
THE ANTICHRIST IN A COLLEGE DORM The Amoralists’ staging of Lyle Kessler’s new play Collision, directed by David Fofi, is an admirable but flawed effort to explore the motivations of a y…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:12AMSaturday, January 19, 2013
AS HARMLESS AS A PICNIC Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Picnic is the perfect show to take your mom to. I know because I did. An excell…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:58PMThursday, January 10, 2013
LAURIE METCALF BELONGS IN THE OTHER PLACE In The Other Place, Sharr White’s riveting and affective play, Laurie Metcalf delivers a poignant and masterfully crafted performance as Juliana, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:05PMFriday, December 21, 2012
CHEKHOV REINVENTED, SORT OF The whimsical premise behind Kristen Kosmas’ brilliantly conceived and deftly executed creation There There is this: Christopher Walken, while touring Russia in…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:36PMTuesday, December 4, 2012
I THINK I HEARD BELLINI TURNING IN HIS GRAVE Imagine yourself sitting tied to a chair in a stuffy, dark room with a very dull senile old man who talks on and on and on and on and on and on a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:00PMSaturday, December 1, 2012
HALF & HALF Australian Made Entertainment’s new production of Andrew Bovell’s well-crafted relationship thriller Speaking in Tongues really gets going in the second act. The play, di…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:52PMMonday, November 19, 2012
DARK AND DELIGHTFUL A liberatingly surreal and exquisitely poetic masterwork, Fernando Arrabal’s Garden of Delights is a sinister fairytale that concerns itself with the inner struggles of…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:02PMTuesday, November 13, 2012
AFLOAT ON HIGH ASPIRATIONS Many positive things can and should be said about Sheila Callaghan’s Port Out, Starboard Home, a play about a three-day cruise at the end of which the passengers…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:21PMTuesday, October 30, 2012
NOT SURE WHAT IT IS BUT I LIKE IT Staged in the basement of The Chocolate Factory, with exposed pipes, beams and support columns, the drawbacks of Sibyl Kempson’s wonderfully inventive new…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:58AMThursday, October 25, 2012
A BAD DAY FOR A GREAT PLAY It’s a problem when the most effective elements of a dramatic show are the sound and visual effects, but such is the case with Cherry Lane Theater’s production…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMFriday, October 19, 2012
WELL INTENTIONED, ILL-CONCEIVED Whispers of “pretentious” could be heard in the audience of Paul David Young’s new play In the Summer Pavilion, which doesn’t seem like a fair assessm…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:37PMMonday, October 15, 2012
PUT IN AN UNCOMFORTABLE POSITION Anticipating having to review Owen Dunne’s new play Positions, the feeling I had while watching it – knowing the production to have travelled 600 miles …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:38PMThursday, October 11, 2012
AN AMUSING TRIFLE A.R. Gurney’s entertaining, dynamic but trivial new play Heresy reinvents the story of Jesus Christ (in the play he’s called Chris), changing the setting from 33 A.D. J…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:00PMTuesday, September 25, 2012
HOW LOVE DIES: TWO VERSIONS Brian Friel’s excellent 1968 play Lovers is actually two separate plays with similar themes and settings. Both take place in a small town in Ireland in the mid …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:39PMSunday, September 23, 2012
NOTHING WILD, EXCEPT… Tess Frazer gives a stellar performance as Willie in Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned, a play about an orphaned girl living alone in her family’…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:49PMThursday, September 20, 2012
THEATRICAL ADVOCACY, THE GOOD KIND The Exonerated is theater as activism and proud of it, so it’s difficult to speak about it from a purely artistic perspective as mixing art and politics …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:11PMTuesday, September 11, 2012
GUILT OF HOPE AND DESIRE The idea that the amount of guilt one feels depends more on one’s character than one’s crime is the subtext of Marie Jones’s play Fly Me to the Moon, an entert…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:26PMMonday, September 10, 2012
IT AIN’T MOZART Louis Nowra’s Cosi tells the story of Lewis (Adam Zivkovic) a recent college graduate with a theatrical background who gets a job in an insane asylum. There, he find hims…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:50PMWednesday, August 29, 2012
EXPLOSIVE AND EXQUISITE “I’d rather be unhappy in her world than happy in another,” says the Man about the Woman, in Philip Ridley’s outstanding new play Tender Napalm, about a coupl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:59PMThursday, August 9, 2012
FUN, FRIVOLOUS, FLAMBOYANT, AND FULLY FORGETTABLE The remarkable thing about Bullet for Adolf, the new play written by Woody Harrelson and Frankie Hyman, is how entertaining it is despite i…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:56PMThursday, July 26, 2012
HISTORICAL FIGURES FOR DUMMIES As the audience settled in and Stephen Bradbury, who plays the waiter and also serves as a partial narrator in Otho Eskin’s new play Final Analysis, came out…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:25PMRICE MILK Vassily Sigarev’s powerful play Black Milk takes place in a remote train station in the hinterlands of Russia, where a couple of young con artists, having just swindled the local…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:40PMSunday, July 22, 2012
FUGEDDABOUDIT! To use a slightly modified quote from a certain NYU professor notorious for his directness (which was misinterpreted by many sensitive arts students as brutality), here is the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:01AMThursday, July 19, 2012
FRANKENSTEIN REVISITED Neal Bell’s play Monster dramatizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, keeping the basic story points of the novel intact: Victor Frankenstein (Joe Varca), a brilliant y…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:21AMMonday, July 16, 2012
HELL WITH NO INTERMISSION Hell: Paradise Found. Genesis: And so did Seth Panitch rummage through the intellectual compost heap and picketh he out from it clumps of sour clichés and bits of …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:50PM 
