Wednesday, October 28, 2020
In the past couple of decades, Caryl Churchill has perfected the oblique and concentrated one-act play, somehow providing the intellectual challenge and emotional punch of the best of ful…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:32AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 20, 2020
I saw a very early performance of Coal Country, so this is a brief report rather than a review.
Coal Country is a documentary theatre performance developed by Jessica Blank and Erik Jense…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:42PM[SHARE]Saturday, February 1, 2020
One of the many joys of theatre is getting to experience how another person's brain and imagination work. Last night at La Mama, the brain and imagination belonged to Theodora Skipitares,…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:32PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 21, 2020
I was going to do a "best-of" for 2019 plus a "looking forward" for 2020, when I realized that their focus would be much the same: the treasure that is non-Broadway theatre.I'm not denying t…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:42PM[SHARE]Sunday, November 24, 2019
The narration for the MasterVoices production of the Gershwins' Let 'Em Eat Cake mentions that (1) it was the very first musical sequel (to Of Thee I Sing), and (2) it set the preceden…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:36PM[SHARE]Saturday, November 9, 2019
In the excellent Voyage Theater Company production of The Hope Hypothesis, running through November 15 at the Sheen Center, playwright-director Cat Miller deftly shows how easily innocence c…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:24PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 31, 2019
What is a play? There are many definitions, of which this one (from the Merriam-Webster website) is a representative example:
A composition in verse or prose intended to portray life or char…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:48PM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Panama Hattie, the third show in the York Theatre Company's Cole Porter-a-thon, is a mixed bag that is ultimately great fun.
Simon Jones, Kylie Kuioka, Stephen Bogardus, Klea Blackhurst, An…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:18PM[SHARE]Tired of the news? Depressed by the weird meanness of humans? Maybe you need a mini-vacation. Maybe you need to bask in the weird wonder of humans.
Jayson Dominguez and the Wheel of Deat…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:18AM[SHARE]Monday, October 28, 2019
The production of Macbeth at the Classic Stage Company (CSC), directed and designed by John Doyle, is a streamlined affair. It runs 1:40 without an intermission; it has a cast of only nin…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:33AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Once upon a time, Broadway was full of larger-than-life stars (often women) easily identified by their distinctive voices and mannerisms. Gwen Verdon. Carol Channing. Ethel Merman. Elaine St…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:03PM[SHARE]When a set of twins (Eve and Evan) press the wrong doorbell on Halloween, they are forced to fight for their lives against a manipulative, mean, and hungry witch. Can they save themselves? C…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:24AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 16, 2019
I bought my first Ben Bagley record, Irving Berlin Revisited, for 69 cents at a flea market in New Jersey a million years ago. Albums those days cost around four dollars, so it was quite …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:48PM[SHARE]Saturday, September 14, 2019
Laughing Liberally: Make America Laugh Again, an evening of left-leaning stand-up comedy, provides a bubble of shared beliefs, politically correct (and occasionally incorrect) commenta…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:03AM[SHARE]Monday, September 9, 2019
When Keith Hamilton Cobb first took an acting class, he wanted to play Titania from A Midsummer Night's Dream. His acting teacher said no. Cobb continued to make creative suggestions; his…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:48AM[SHARE]Monday, August 19, 2019
My latest essay is up at Art Times:The holy grail of New York theater is a rave review in the New York Times. It doesn't guarantee success (and a pan doesn't guarantee failure), but a …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:42PM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, I watched certain political plays with a sense of distance, deeply sympathetic to the characters and deeply grateful that those awful things weren't …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:12PM[SHARE]Monday, July 29, 2019
In Series A, the first part of Summer Shorts at 59E59, all three plays circle around death. This is a lot for a 90-minute evening.The first show, Interior, is the most fully realize…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:12AM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Ya gotta love Annie Golden. She has a sweetness to her, with a wild voice and a slightly goofy vibe. For a creative team to decide to shape a musical around her--even going so far as to name…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:36PM[SHARE]Friday, July 19, 2019
Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth plays with language and slapstick, presents fascinating mini-versions of two of Shakespeare's masterpieces, vividly depicts the importance o…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:36PM[SHARE]Monday, July 15, 2019
Ladyship, the new show by twins Laura Good and Linda Good, exemplifies how difficult it is to write a good musical. There is so much here to like: some beautiful songs, an original story, an…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:42AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 13, 2019
It's hard to know what to write about Illuminati Lizards From Outer Space since I was unable to hear ~70% of the lyrics (100% if more than one person was singing). I don't know if it was …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:12PM[SHARE]Monday, June 17, 2019
This isn't exactly a review because I wasn't able to see the whole show. But here are some thoughts based on what I saw.
The rhythms of African-American casual conversation fit beautifully …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:54PM[SHARE]Monday, June 10, 2019
Well, two of us did okay: Liz and Sandra each had 17 correct predictions. I had decided to be iconoclastic, which was a bad idea: 11 correct predictions.
THE WINNERS
Liz
Sandra…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:03AM[SHARE]Sunday, May 26, 2019
I have seen enough mediocre-to-bad high-concept productions of Shakespeare's plays to shudder at the very idea of "high-concept." Then along comes Mac Beth, the amazing Red Bull Productio…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:06PM[SHARE]I suspect that there is a good play inside Jesse Eisenberg's Happy Talk, currently at The New Group at the Signature Center. The ideas and the situation are intriguing, and there is humo…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:04AM[SHARE]Friday, May 24, 2019
Best MusicalAin't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Beetlejuice
Hadestown
The PromTootsie
Liz Wollman: Hadestown. Seriously, can we please celebrate a creative…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:24PM[SHARE]Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Trisha Lee works as a cleaner in a hospital in Sparkton, Texas. She is a church-going Christian. She adored her late husband. The focus of her life is her 14-year-old daughter Jolene. Or is …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:12PM[SHARE]Saturday, May 11, 2019
One of the themes of the gorgeous and heart-breaking Caroline, or Change, the story of an African-American maid working for a Jewish family in the 1960s South, is that "change come fast, …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:54PM[SHARE]Monday, April 29, 2019
What an odd show is Lady in the Dark. Consisting largely of three dream sequences, it lacks forward propulsion and is frequently overdone and/or pointless and/or flabby, particularly in the …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:42PM[SHARE]Monday, April 22, 2019
As you probably already know, in the old days theatre critics wrote their reviews right after seeing the performances. In fact, as the shows ended, the critics ran up the aisles to maximize …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:25PM[SHARE] 
