Sunday, October 10, 2021
More concert than musical, the 80-minute show's libretto adds little to its cast album, with the lyrics of each queen's autobiographical song also pruning their individual histories to a poi…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 09:07PMWednesday, August 11, 2021
Since it's difficult to make fun of something that was never meant to be taken seriously in the first place, Hogue and director Nick Flatto are often left to spin their wheels by simply reha…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:51PMThursday, March 5, 2020
To review dramatist/lyricist/composer Ethan Lipton's "Tumacho" almost feels like missing the point of this endearingly oddball "play with songs," a comic pastiche of Western and horror trope…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:46PMThursday, February 20, 2020
It might be about 90 years too late, but writer/director Ciarán O'Reilly is throwing a good old-fashioned Irish wake, with poems, songs, and a slice of barmbrack (Irish sweet bread) or each…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:29AMMonday, February 10, 2020
Bess Wohl's "Grand Horizons" opens with a pas de deux of marital inertia as Nancy (Jane Alexander) and Bill (James Cromwell), two near-octogenarians wasting their twilight days in a so-calle…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:40PMWednesday, January 15, 2020
Created and first performed during the run-up to the 2018 national referendum that eventually led to the amendment's repeal, Maz and Bricks, a part of the Origin Theater Company’s 1st Iris…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:16PMSunday, December 15, 2019
Given the personal nature of Morissette's artistic output, it might be surprising to learn that the Broadway version of Jagged Little Pill doesn't take the easy biographical route for its bo…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 04:05PMTuesday, November 26, 2019
Campbell Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge and Dashiell Eaves as Bob Cratchit in a scene from Jack Thorne’s new adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre (Photo credit: …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:50AMWednesday, November 20, 2019
Told as a series of alternating, interlocking monologues, there is a "Rashomon"-esque quality to "Pumpgirl" that grows more obvious as the play's story comes into focus. Not only do the rela…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:10PMThursday, October 31, 2019
Like a great many history plays, Harvey Fierstein's "Bella Bella" is as much about the present as the past, paralleling everything that's gone wrong now with what went wrong then. Unsurprisi…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:08AMMonday, October 28, 2019
To be sure, Serafina and Alvaro's romance is less than credible, but director Trip Cullman wisely commits to it completely, recognizing that Williams really hasn't given him any other choice…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:27PMThursday, September 26, 2019
The first act of Anna Moench's "Mothers" concludes with a genuine shock as the playwright startlingly upends all of our expectations. Visually punctuated by Wilson Chin's suddenly not-so-sta…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:19PMMonday, September 16, 2019
As John, Christopher Sears is an enjoyable pill, perfectly offset by Tommy Crawford's Paul whose amiable placidity is almost Buddha-like. More importantly, both actors have impressive musica…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:07PMTuesday, July 30, 2019
Halley Feiffer's new comedy, the obsessively titled "Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow," is an intermittently funny ten-minute parody of Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters." Unfortunatel…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:59PMTuesday, May 7, 2019
The Irish Repertory Theatre ends its thirtieth season by going back to the beginning, with a sturdy revival of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars." An historical prequel to the other t…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 06:18PMTuesday, April 30, 2019
One of the theater's most skilled 19th-century melodramatists, Boucicault was uninterested in the finer points of history, character development, or narrative objectivity which, of course, i…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:58PMFriday, April 12, 2019
From this group of familiar faces, O'Reilly and Keating are particularly strong in their second go-around, finding notes in Jack and Joxer's codependent relationship that are both hilarious …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:20AMThursday, February 21, 2019
Director Ciarán O’Reilly handles O'Casey's abrupt tonal shifts well, transitioning from laughter to tears to horror with barely a hint of contrivance. A top-notch production team greatly …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:59PMThursday, January 17, 2019
Breen's script, a succession of rapid-fire vignettes divided in half by an unnecessary intermission, tries to compensate for its lack of depth with imagined multitudes. According to a promot…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:31PMTuesday, December 4, 2018
Although Chua is less interested in beauty for beauty's sake than Andersen, the look and sound of "The Emperor's Nightingale" is still stunning, drawing on a wealth of traditional Chinese ar…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:37AMTuesday, November 6, 2018
Many comic artists have noted that great humor often comes from great tragedy, though, inevitably, sometimes the latter overwhelms the former, and all you’re left with is a lot of indignat…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:09AMMonday, October 29, 2018
In Kate Tarker's satiric "Thunderbodies," America is a relentlessly strange place, where people spout nonsense, act without reason, and are led by the narcissistic man-baby they've elected p…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 08:52PMThursday, October 18, 2018
Along with excerpts from Godot and a couple of Beckett's novels, Irwin relies heavily on several "arcane" prose pieces from a collection Beckett dubbed "Texts for Nothing." Irwin was first i…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:30PMMonday, October 8, 2018
What our mothers owe us - and what we owe them - is at the heart of Leenya Rideout's one-woman autobiographical show, "Wild Abandon." In it, the prodigiously accomplished singer, songwriter,…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 11:22PMWednesday, September 26, 2018
In Craig Lucas’s "I Was Most Alive with You," two down-on-their-luck television writers mine recent personal tragedy for their latest project, hoping, with the Book of Job as their inspira…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 04:09PMSunday, September 16, 2018
Unfortunately, Worsham’s efforts just confirm the play’s central problem: only the relationship between June and Charlie has any real depth. As for the rest of the characters, although M…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:25PMMonday, July 30, 2018
In telling the rest of this shattering story, the creators of Comfort Women, inexplicably, rely heavily on musical theater conventions that result in wrongheaded, if not downright offensive,…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 03:04PMWednesday, July 25, 2018
But when things slow down a bit, especially during the musical interludes and longer dramatic pieces, Petosa’s eight performers -- four lead (Christine Hamel; Jake Murphy; Harrison Bryan; …
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 04:15PMThursday, June 14, 2018
Shakespearean spoofs are almost as old as Shakespeare himself, dating back to at least the Restoration period. Although the vast majority has faded into history, there are still some real st…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 01:01AMTuesday, June 5, 2018
Unfortunately, O'Reilly’s heavy reliance on the production team is also indicative of a significant problem: the play is repetitive. Despite finding new, and often lovely, poetic ways to c…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 12:19AMMonday, May 14, 2018
There’s a brilliant play buried somewhere in Caryl Churchill’s "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire," a bottom-up historical epic about the English Civil War that the acclaimed British writ…
SOURCE: www.theaterscene.net at 10:42AM 
