Thursday, March 14, 2019
MAYOR DREAMS COME TRUE SOME OTHER TIME The 42nd Street Moon production of Fiorello is just fine, if you allow for the looseness of staging, the clumsy choreography, and the overall sensation…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:07PMTuesday, March 12, 2019
THE BOYS IN THE BLAND “Every day a little death/In the parlor, in the bed.” Thus spake Stephen Sondheim in his waltz time operetta A Little Night Music. And it is not totally frivolous t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:08AMWednesday, March 6, 2019
CARRYING BAGGAGE Although it is written with an almost childlike simplicity, Mfoniso Udofia’s Her Portmanteau tells a wrenching tale of the profound effect that separation creates when a w…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:46PMSaturday, February 23, 2019
YOU MOSCOW, YOU MOSCOW The avant-garde seems more interested in re-invention these days than in invention, but from the point of view of someone who had thought that there was nothing new un…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:01PMSunday, February 3, 2019
B-SIDE MYSELF Breathes there a soul who hasn’t sung along with a favorite album? And, ah, if the songs we sing were rare and challenging and related to one’s life, we might have …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:13AMThursday, January 24, 2019
MAKE A CALL ON THIS INSPECTOR In Stephen Daldry’s architectually inspired revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an astute mixture of comedy of manners/tragedy of class/…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:19PMThursday, March 21, 2013
A TRIUMPHANT TRAINWRECK If you’ve never applauded a trainwreck, be prepared to do so when you see Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow. I am not talking about the gossip-driven, hardly rev…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:06AMTuesday, October 30, 2012
FORGET YOUR TROUBLES. COME ON, GET HAPPY. When the lights go up on Wild With Happy, we see Colman Domingo, in cool shades and wearing his best Paris-Is-Burning attitude, speak his opening …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:27PMMAXWELL COUNTRY: WHERE HEROES ROAM There is only one Richard Maxwell and, in his extraordinarily textured Neutral Hero, he has gone back to his roots. For those of us who have longed for t…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:03PMThursday, October 25, 2012
WHERE IS DR. STRANGELOVE WHEN YOU NEED HIM? The best thing about Joe Kern’s Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want To Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them is its title. And if it bears a cl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:06PMSOLD: ONE HOUSE. AT A DISAPPOINTING RATE. Since Daniel Fish has been certified a new genius by New York’s avant-garde elite, I am loath to label him a hoax on the basis of having seen ju…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:38PMSaturday, October 20, 2012
SMILE, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS BREAKING Andrea Marcovicci, who reinvented the torch song for a new generation, has looked our depression/recession straight in the face and decided that what she…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:09AMThursday, October 18, 2012
THE JOURNEY HOMEWARD The title character in Simon Stephens’s freshly observed new play, Harper Regan, is at a crossroads in her life, in the midst of what we used to call a midlife crisis.…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:14PMWOE AND BEHOLD When John Kelly descends into the regions of darkness, he does so with a soaring intensity that is intoxicating and never depressing. In his new cabaret act at Joe’s Pub, Ke…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:49PMTuesday, October 16, 2012
“Satire,” as George S. Kaufman once famously said, “is what closes Saturday night.” Though written in jest, it has served as an admonition for playwrights in pursuit of satire. In …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:48PMSunday, July 1, 2012
WHO’LL SAVE THE PLOW HORSE? War Horse is almost critic-proof. It has been garnering all sorts of Best Play awards, but, in truth, there are all sorts of new, unrecognized categories fo…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:01AMFriday, June 29, 2012
THE SIZZLE’S A FIZZLE It is an uncontestable fact that every play August Wilson wrote justifies being looked at again and again. It has been fascinating to see how the moral, political…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:36PMSunday, May 20, 2012
FOLLIES IN HOLLYWOOD Follies has always been a fabulous musical. It may not be Stephen Sondheim‘s greatest musical, but it is the Stephen Sondheim musical that his admirers most desper…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 05:11AMSunday, May 13, 2012
THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TOO WELL-MANNERED David Auburn‘s The Columnist gets the good part over with in the first scene and then proceeds to become exactly the sort of play we might have…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:36AMWednesday, May 9, 2012
Stage and Cinema sent Harvey Perr back to the east coast to catch up on this very busy time of the season in New York City theater, when new shows open one right after the other and Tony fev…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:50PMFriday, April 27, 2012
THEATER OF THE ADVENTUROUS I hadn’t realized how deeply entrenched in my unconsciousness the Peter Pan legend was; that is, until I found myself, in the last minutes of the rousing and mir…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:16PMTuesday, April 24, 2012
BEYOND REALISM The living room and foyer of the modest house on 9th Street in the South Philadelphia of 1986, created by David Meyer, is as dank and dreary as social realism will allow. An…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:07PMSaturday, April 21, 2012
YOU’RE GONNA STAND UP… Sometimes in the theater, all you need are four chairs and four actors and a director who knows how to move them around so that everything they do is as natura…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:36PMBLOODY MASSACRE, DULL SONG As they march through (or are flung through) the doors of an abandoned slaughterhouse, their bodies bloodied, one wonders what battle zone of what war they have co…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:52AMWednesday, April 18, 2012
POLITICS AS USUAL Given the nastiness of the recent Republican primary debates and a sense of even worse nastiness to come with the next election, it is no surprise that thoughts of reviving…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:57AMTuesday, April 10, 2012
A TRIUMPHANT TRAINWRECK If you’ve never applauded a trainwreck, be prepared to do so when you see Peter Quilter’s End of the Rainbow. I am not talking about the gossip-driven, hardly rev…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 04:29PMSunday, April 1, 2012
WHICH AMERICAN IDIOT ARE YOU? If you know and love Green Day’s studio concept album on which it is based, American Idiot is the show for you. If, like me, you are a stranger to the or…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:50AMThursday, March 29, 2012
MEMORIES OF SEAGULLS PAST If you have never seen The Seagull – though I can’t imagine a seasoned theatergoer who hasn’t, can you? – you just might possibly get an inklin…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:11PMFriday, March 23, 2012
THE GODOT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR Samuel Beckett is a great comic playwright. You don’t believe me? Then run, don’t walk, to the Mark Taper Forum and see the blissfully funny an…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:57PMFriday, March 9, 2012
TWO MORE ONE-PERSON PLAYS AT THE SKYLIGHT Burke Byrnes’s The Yellow House (Fridays) and Harry Hart-Browne’s Special Delivery (Saturdays) both possess the virtues and weaknesses…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:45AMSaturday, January 21, 2012
WILL THE REAL MOLLY IVINS PLEASE STAND UP? Molly Ivins was a ballsy Texas-based reporter who became a legend in her own time by calling a spade a spade (or, more succinctly, calling George W…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 11:21PM 
