Saturday, March 14, 2015
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 02:37AMSunday, March 1, 2015
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 12:17PMWednesday, February 18, 2015
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 07:00PMSunday, February 8, 2015
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 earne…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59PMMonday, February 2, 2015
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.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:28PMSunday, February 1, 2015
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 emer…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:46PMNO 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 b…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:05AMTuesday, January 27, 2015
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 t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:45PMSunday, January 18, 2015
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…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:00PMMonday, December 22, 2014
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 02:26AMMonday, December 15, 2014
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-t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:29AMTuesday, December 9, 2014
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 08:29PMMonday, December 8, 2014
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 05:40PMWednesday, November 19, 2014
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 …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:31AMTuesday, November 18, 2014
MAJOR 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 …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:49PMSunday, November 9, 2014
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 12:49PMThursday, November 6, 2014
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 07:50PMFriday, October 31, 2014
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 absur…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:05AMTuesday, October 28, 2014
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…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:59PMTuesday, October 21, 2014
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 v…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:00PMTuesday, October 14, 2014
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 08:27PMSaturday, October 11, 2014
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 Inte…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:46PMMonday, October 6, 2014
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, wh…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:56PMMonday, September 29, 2014
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 10:01PMSunday, September 28, 2014
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 worthwhi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:56AMWednesday, September 24, 2014
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 surface…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:30PMTHE GOOD, THE LOST, AND THE VAIN Owen Gould Davis, Sr.’s thoughtful and masterfully crafted 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Icebound, which explores Puritan vanity and its many ironies, …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:29AMSunday, September 21, 2014
A CABARET SHOW THAT GOES FOR BAROQUE Mae West, the sage and sybarite from Brooklyn, used to say, “Let joy be unrefined,” a point of view that also suits Austin McCormick, artistic direct…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:00PMMonday, September 15, 2014
ASPHYXIATING Neither the excellent quartet playing quality pieces that are at times rousing, nor Karl Ruckdeschel’s lovely period costumes, are enough to make Solitary Light, with music an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:00PMTuesday, September 9, 2014
A BIO-DRAMA THAT WORKS “Of course I care (what she thinks), I hate her,” says a character in Lauren Gunderson’s Bauer, a San Francisco Playhouse production about the German artist Rudo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:16PMMonday, September 8, 2014
SMOKIN’ The premise of Kim Davies’ new play Smoke, that two strangers, a young man and woman, who independently come to the kitchen to have a cigarette while a friendly S&M sex party…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:46AM 
