Monday, May 25, 2015
Original, inventive, as touching as it is funny, actor-writer Joe Hutcheson's 90-minute one-man show is rich, wise, and deeply human.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMMichael López Sáenz's new play raises intriguing questions, but right now he's clearly not prepared to explore the answers.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMWriter-director Bob Sloan's biographical play about Judy Holliday is hagiographic entertainment that skates lightly across the surface of its subject's life.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMBefore you can play with reality, you have to establish one, something Tom Jacobson's "The Twentieth-Century Way" never does.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMTrying to refashion a flop musical into something that works is a dicey business at best. One thing is essential: The material, however flawed, must have intrinsic quality. "Platinum," at it…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMComposer-librettist David Chesky takes no prisoners as he goes after the state of American art and culture with a rapier in his largely delightful satiric comic opera.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMWriter-actor Steven Fales' second installment of his "Mormon Trilogy" left me wondering if this unquestionably interesting story of growing up a gay Mormon really needs three shows to tell i…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMFor the most part, Joe Salvatore's "verbatim interview play" about open relationships among gay men is engrossing and illuminating.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMtan Richardson's new play, based on the true story of a Harvard witch hunt undertaken against a group of gay students (and one tutor) in the spring of 1920, packs quite a punch.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMThough adapter-performer Brian Foyster's work in the one-man stage adaptation of John Knowles' 1960 novel is never less than intelligent and always tasteful, the end result diminishes its so…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMTeresa Deevy's long-lost play is a worthy addition to Ireland's dramatic literature and shows Deevy to have had a singular, perceptive ear for the dialogue of ordinary people.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMIf you think there's no fresh way left to tell a gay coming-out tale, then you haven't seen Harrison David Rivers' exhilarating new play.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMDear Harvey does play as if the idea were to create an educational piece for students, but author Patricia Loughrey's interviews and intimate reminiscences with Milk's family and colleagues …
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMWriter-director Tony Devaney Morinelli's play began life at a private high school. In the Fringe it is being put forward as a professional production. It's not.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMThe 73-year-old "The Cradle Will Rock " retains every drop of its passion as it slices mercilessly at the dark heart of untrammeled American capitalism, even if director Larry Marshall's pro…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMWhen you find yourself repeatedly checking your watch during a 75-minute intermissionless show, something's not working.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMEdward Albee's "Me, Myself & I" is a not-to-be-missed serving of delicious existential vaudeville and a ferociously comic foray into the realm of the absurd.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMOnce Cheryl Howard the writer catches up to Cheryl Howard the actor, this one-woman musical bio of Josephine Baker is almost certain to be special.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMAidan Matthews' "Exit/Entrance," originally produced at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1990, is getting its belated American premiere thanks to Origin Theatre Company and the First Irish Festival.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMAcclaimed opera singer and Tony-winning musical theater actor Paulo Szot is sticking his toe into the cabaret waters at Café Carlyle.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMCody Daigle's ambitious and well-meaning new play "A Home Across the Ocean" has talent and a fresh story, but it is ultimately undone by predictability, naiveté, and sentimentality.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMDirector Ivo van Hove's deconstruction of Lillian Hellman's sturdy melodrama comes off as an acting exercise that would probably be very helpful somewhere around the middle of rehearsals.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMIrish playwright Deirdre Kinahan is making a vivid New York debut with the tightly written two-hander "Hue & Cry." This imaginative account of two cousins meeting on the eve of a fam…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMW.H. Smith's 1844 "The Drunkard" is a seminal play in American social and theatrical history. It was the nation's most popular drama until the advent of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMUnwilling to be an opera and afraid to be a musical, Adam Bock and Todd Almond's adaptation of this classic Shirley Jackson novel never gathers sufficient force.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMWork as imaginative and wholly successful as "Brief Encounter" doesn't come along every day. It was an exhilarating reminder of why I fell in love with the theater in the first place.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMLee Hall's "The Pitmen Painters" is a bit like the art made by its characters: Whatever it lacks in technique it more than makes up for in expression.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PM"Office Hours" is by turns amusing and pointed and yet also forced and thin. The play is a too-gentle lament for the loss of classics-based education.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMGeorge Bernard Shaw's infamous play on the subject of female prostitution may be 117 years old, but its ideas still feel decidedly modern in director Doug Hughes' largely crackling productio…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PMIt seemed like such a good idea on paper: Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in "Driving Miss Daisy." Plenty of laughs are landed, but the primal power of this intimate meditation on race…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:58PM 
