Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Part sketch comedy, part minimalist drama(s), Caryl Churchill's Love and Information is unlike any show I've seen. Consisting of dozens of playlets, some barely a minute long, Love and Infor…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:56PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 13, 2014
A door opens and closes, and two people walk into an expensive but messy apartment. The man, Philip (Thomas Jay Ryan), is in his 50s, white, well-off--the owner of the apartment. The woman, …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:56PM[SHARE]Monday, February 10, 2014
Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's A Little Night Music is perfect. Its romance, cynicism, earnestness, silliness, wry humor, brilliant lyrics, and scrumptious music add up to two and a hal…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:27PM[SHARE]If you are a fan of musical theatre, you will greatly enjoy Nothing Like a Dame, Eddie Shapiro's collection of long, thoughtful interviews with many of the most brilliant women doing musical…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:52PM[SHARE]Monday, February 3, 2014
I guess Thomas Bradshaw was aiming for satire when he wrote the dreadful and stupid Intimacy, but satire requires a point of view, intelligence, and more discernment than shown by, say, a bu…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:03PM[SHARE]Jessica Dickey's Row After Row sneaks up on you. The story seems simple: three Civil War re-enactors share a table in a bar following a re-creation of the battle of Gettysburg. Tom and Cal a…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:31PM[SHARE]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 12:26PM[SHARE]Monday, 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 05:40PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 06:20PM[SHARE]Inside 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 12:11PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 01:00PM[SHARE]Friday, 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 04:00PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 11:50AM[SHARE]Saturday, 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 03:36PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 11:50PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 11:34AM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 09:20PM[SHARE]Friday, 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 05:13PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 12:31PM[SHARE]Saturday, 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 12:35PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 07:39PM[SHARE]Wednesday, 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 10:11PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 12:08AM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 04:52PM[SHARE]Monday, 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 with …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:43PM[SHARE]Thursday, 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 09:20PM[SHARE]What 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 08:56PM[SHARE]Sunday, 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 08:43PM[SHARE]The 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 08:24PM[SHARE]Tuesday, 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 04:18PM[SHARE]George 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 03:09PM[SHARE] 
