Friday, January 31, 2014
It's the moment. The lonely Italian-born Iowan housewife and the dashing photographer dance. And the audience's focus is pulled onto a neighbor, singing.It's another moment. Their love is gr…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:26PMMonday, January 27, 2014
Hannah CabellPhoto: Rob StrongThe Pilot's name doesn't matter because being a pilot is absolutely what she is, over all other forms of identification. She lives to fly "My Tiger/My gal who c…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:40PMSunday, January 19, 2014
One of the risks of writing cutting-edge theatre is that time can wear down sharp edges into blunt instruments. It is the classics that rise above their time and place. Joe Orton's farce Loo…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:20PMInside John Patrick Shanley's 105-minute Outside Mullingar is a potentially wonderful 85-minute play. As it stands (or stood at the preview I saw), it meanders too much and takes too long to…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:11PMTuesday, January 7, 2014
The brilliant revival of Machinal, Sophie Treadwell's expressionistic 1928 dissection of a woman's life, climbs off the stage and under your skin. This nerve-rattling production is directed …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:00PMFriday, January 3, 2014
Simple Dreams is Linda Ronstadt's "musical memoir," and in it, she discusses her forays into light opera (The Pirates of Penzance) and opera (La Boheme). Ronstadt is remarkably modest for so…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:00PMWednesday, January 1, 2014
Madeleine George's latest play, The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence is by turns breathtaking, annoying, beautiful, overwritten, and gorgeous. A mash-up riff on three Watsons--the J…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:50AMSaturday, December 21, 2013
Disappointing shows, in alphabetical order:The Big Knife: A waste of an excellent cast. And while Richard Kind was fine, I don't know why everyone made such a big deal of his being able to p…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:36PMThursday, December 19, 2013
Whew! Another year has jetted by with astonishing speed, leaving me some 80 shows in its wake. While reviewing the year as a whole, it strikes me that the lesson of 2013, as of the past few …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:50PMTuesday, December 10, 2013
Beautiful, the Carole King biomusical, is stuffed with one incredible song after another. The result is an entertaining and enjoyable evening. Would it be too much to wish it were also good?…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:34AMSunday, December 8, 2013
The Pigeoning is 70 minutes of pure delight. This brilliant piece of puppet theatre is the story of Frank, an office worker who cannot function unless everything on his desk is aligned perfe…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:20PMFriday, December 6, 2013
Kudos to Craig Zadan and Neil Meron for producing a live TV version of The Sound of Music. There's something incomparably sparkling, vivid, and delightful about live performances. In the act…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:13PMThursday, November 28, 2013
Charles Fuller's drama One Night, the story of a veteran suffering from PTSD, presents the audience with a bizarrely conflicted experience. The inarguable horrors of rape, war…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:31PMSaturday, November 23, 2013
After Beth Henley's interminable and unpleasant new play, The Jacksonian, finally ended, an audience member turned to me and said, "What was that?"Excellent question.The story of a divorcing…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:35PMSunday, November 17, 2013
Frances Tannehill, actress and lifelong Manhattan resident, died after a brief illness in Upper Manhattan on August 5th.Known for her stunning looks in addition to her talents as a dramatic …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:39PMWednesday, November 13, 2013
Bottom line: If you love to laugh and have silly fun; if you enjoy being entertained by top-notch performers with excellent timing and beautiful voices; if you've even heard of such movies a…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:11PMSunday, November 3, 2013
Julie Taymor's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is full of wonders, yet it is not quite wonderful. Actually, there are two shows here. The first, the one by Taymor and her creativ…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:08AMSunday, October 27, 2013
Based on Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic memoir, the equally brilliant musical Fun Home tells the story of Alison (depicted at three ages by three different performers); her father, a not…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:52PMMonday, October 21, 2013
David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette, directed by Rebecca Taichman, clearly finds itself hip, snarky, insightful, and significant, but it's merely an olio of unoriginal ideas tossed together wit…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:43PMThursday, October 10, 2013
The Landing, John Kander and Greg Pierce's musical triptych at the Vineyard, is theoretically about love, loss, betrayal, fantasy, and death. And yet it is not about much of anything, really…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:20PMWhat does an all-female Julius Caesar teach us that we don't already know about Shakespeare's tale of betrayal, ambition, and male stupidity? Not that much, really--but it does make the thin…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:56PMSunday, October 6, 2013
Jon Robin Baitz's 1988 play The Film Society, which takes place in South Africa in the 1970s, explores racism, compromise, the closet, friendship, and many other interesting themes. Unfortun…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:43PMThe glorious Tamar of the River, running through October 20 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, is a must-see for anyone interested in nontraditional, engaging, and accessible musical thea…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:24PMTuesday, September 24, 2013
In her sweet mash-up Shakespeare's Sister, director/adaptor Irina Brook serves the audience Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and actual soup.As the audience enters, five women are already o…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:18PMGeorge Kelly's Philip Goes Forth at the Mint is an uneven production of an uneven play that nevertheless entertains and satisfies. Written in 1931, Philip Goes Forth treads familiar ground w…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:09PMSunday, September 15, 2013
I went to see Ethan Coen's Women or Nothing with some misgivings due to its tagline: "Women or Nothing is a play about two women so desperate to have a child that one of them will even sleep…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:42PMSaturday, September 14, 2013
Watching the delightful production of George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell being presented by the Pearl Theatre Company and the Gingold Theatrical Group, I had to periodically remind mys…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:03PMFriday, September 13, 2013
While watching Lee Blessing's mediocre A User's Guide to Hell Featuring Bernard Madoff, I found myself writing Caster's Rules of Satire.General Rules Rule 1: A satire should be entertaining.…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:06PMWhat does a playwright owe a living person on whom he or she bases a character? What does a playwright owe the audience who comes to see a play "based on actual events"? Some people argue th…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:12PMSunday, August 25, 2013
The real-life siblings Mary and Charles Lamb lived in the 1800s in London and wrote together. The fictional (but-somewhat-based-on-Vivien-Leigh-and-Laurence-Olivier) Lee and Oliver are forme…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:37PMSunday, July 28, 2013
Rory O'Malley, Bryan Fenkhart, Autumn Hurlbert, Lauren Molina, Roe Hartrampf, Heath CalvertIf you are looking for an entertaining piece of fluff, the musical Nobody Loves You at the Second S…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:37PM 
