ALBANIAN/AMERICAN STORYTELLING As my Albanian friend put it: "The legend of Doruntine is the very core around which the Albanians' national code of morals is organized (say those who believe…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:24PM[SHARE]FIRST CLASS Directed by Cosmin Chivu, the staged reading of Tadeusz SÅ‚obodzianek's play Our Class at the Skirball Center is everything one would expect from such an enterprise when put t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:34AM[SHARE]PUTA TO THE TEST Inspired by the Ancient Greek drama surrounding Hippolytus, and set in a present-day South Bronx bodega, Desi Moreno-Penson's new play Comida De Puta attempts to combine Nuy…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:51AM[SHARE]OK KILLS In Tom Diriwachter's Great Kills, Tim, an overeducated 40-year-old loser who still lives in his father's house on State Island, invites his successful childhood friend Robert over t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:40AM[SHARE]LIVING ROOM THEATER Not long ago a frequent theater companion commented to me about a production we had just seen: "So many of these shows, if (the performers) had put them on at home for ju…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:31AM[SHARE]JUDGMENT ON A GRAY BEACH PROCESS Elia K. Schneider stages an engaging spectacle with her Judgment on a Gray Beach, Your Process Has Begun, a dialogue-free experimental piece that imagines th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:37AM[SHARE]KEEP WANDERING Always charming and energized, The Bats (the resident company of The Flea Theater) put forth yet another valiant effort, this time with the world premiere of The Nomad, with b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:17PM[SHARE]ON SOLID GROUNDLING Writer/director Marc Palmieri puts together an entertaining piece of theater with his comedy The Groundling, about Bob, the middle-aged owner of a successful landscaping …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:00PM[SHARE]THE MANE EVENT Watching writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer's one-man show The Lion, directed by Sean Daniels, the element I am most taken with is Mr. Scheuer's radiant charisma. His earnestne…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59PM[SHARE]UNWIELDY BUT SOULFUL Tom Diggs's allegorical fable Kind Souls attempts to examine how two loving individuals behave when forced to choose between losing their lives and losing their souls. W…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:28PM[SHARE]PASSIVE APPROACH MAKES FOR SUPERFICIAL DOCUMENTARY We are a fly on the wall in Jody Lee Lipes' documentary Ballet 422, which follows 25-year-old New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancer and emergi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:46PM[SHARE]NO ONE BUT US CHICKENS At intermission, following the first act of Ross Howard's black comedy satire No One Loves Us Here, my companion expressed to me, in a whirlwind of expletives, her bel…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:05AM[SHARE]A BUMPY ROAD TO A STRAIGHTFORWARD POLITICAL THRILLER A deadly explosion goes off in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The U.S. blames a terrorist group they say is funded by the…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:45PM[SHARE]WIZARDLY THEATER THAT COMES WITH A HEART The Woodsman, James Ortiz's delightful and dark invention, which he stars in and co-directs with Claire Karpen, dramatizes the story of how the Tin M…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00PM[SHARE]THE WORLD ON A SWING The year is 1948 and a hack reporter (the entertaining Evan Pappas), ordered by his editor to do a hatchet job on Barney Josephson and his revolutionary Greenwich Villag…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:26AM[SHARE]DELIGHTFUL IN SPITE OF ITSELF Ordinarily, a musical with a book as superficial, obvious and corny as Daniel S. Wise's Soul Doctor would make me cringe. Add to this David Schechter's on-the-n…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:29AM[SHARE]FOREST ENTRY After her car breaks down during a storm, Josie (a sympathetic Rachael Hip-Flores), a young woman searching for her father years after he mysteriously vanished, happens upon a c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:29PM[SHARE]BEHALF AND HALF Personal works of art, in which the artist must invent a new language all her own to communicate her unique dreams, are, for me, the most valuable kinds. But one consistent c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:40PM[SHARE]A TWIN/LOSE SITUATION Henry Krieger's succulent score and the co-leads' powerful, penetrating voices are among the few reasons to see Side Show, a dull bio-musical set in the first half of t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:31AM[SHARE]MAJORÂ TO MINOR The Pearl Theatre Company and Gingold Theatrical Group's revival of George Bernard Shaw's 1905 comedy Major Barbara feels like theater for people who go to shows for the sa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:49PM[SHARE]SINKING SHIP SAILS IN UNCHARTERED WATERS My favorite element in Powerhouse, a delightful new devised play created by director Jon Levin, writer Josh Luxenberg and the Sinking Ship Ensemble, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:49PM[SHARE]BRAWL IN THE FAMILY Ozzie (Bill Pullman) and Harriet (Holly Hunter) are living out the American dream. They have a house, a car, a TV, and two sons: happy-go-lucky high-schooler Rick (Raviv …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:50PM[SHARE]RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE AS SURREAL BURLESQUE Delightful wouldn't be a word I'd expect to use when describing a Robert Wilson show. But The Old Woman, adapted by Darryl Pinckney from an absurdist…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:05AM[SHARE]BETTER CROSS THIS OFF YOUR LIFT Nothing quite fits together in Walter Mosley's flat, agenda-heavy and undisciplined Lift, about a young black man and woman who find themselves trapped in a s…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:59PM[SHARE]SEE THE MOVIE Imagine John Boorman's film Deliverance staged, "panties" scene and all, as a piece of dinner theater, with all the performers looking very serious and projecting their voices,…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:00PM[SHARE]WARM TUB The lights come up on a couple, Helene (Hannah Bos) and Derek (Paul Thureen), reading in a Jacuzzi, inside a cozy Colorado skiing cabin one cold winter evening sometimes in the 1980…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:27PM[SHARE]HOW TO FAKE HONESTY "I exaggerate," states Lauren (Jessica Ranville) at the beginning of Lying, which gets a delightful staging by Jessica Burr and her company Blessed Unrest at the Interart…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:46PM[SHARE]AN UNCANNY PERFORMANCE FROM PODULKE; LESS SO THE PLAY'S ENDING In Thomas Gibbons' Uncanny Valley, directed by Tom Dugdale, Alex Podulke plays Julien, a sophisticated artificial human, who wa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:56PM[SHARE]SHOW ME THE MONEY Two couples are having aperitifs at a luxurious home in the Hollywood Hills (sexy stylish set by Derek McLane). They are Steve (Fred Weller), an aging action superstar; Mis…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:01PM[SHARE]WHEN BEING A STARVING WRITER IS NO LONGER ROMANTIC Austin Pendleton's breathtaking performance and Ira Lewis's penetrating script make Chinese Coffee, with all its flaws, a most worthwhile o…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:56AM[SHARE]THE UNKNOWABLE WORLD THAT WE LIVE IN Is it possible for true love to be unrequited? Or, to put it another way, is it possible for unrequited love to be true? These questions, on the surfa…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:30PM[SHARE]
