Sunday, February 6, 2011
Theodora Skipitares has directed a new version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, featuring performers wearing Skipitares' masks or life-sized puppets. (The other puppet designers are Jane Catheri…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:20PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 3, 2011
Theatrical satires of theatrical performances have many things in common: enthusiastic but oblivious participants, extreme versions of theatrical clichés, and happy endings where the final …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:00PM[SHARE]Saturday, January 29, 2011
Photo: B. DocktorYears ago I took a friend to see his first evening of dance. Afterward, I asked him what he thought. He said, "Beautiful people doing beautiful things with their beautiful …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:08PM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Photo © Susan B. GlattsteinI have decided to start specifying where I sat--and how much I paid to sit there--at the end of every review I write. And here's why:Have you ever gone to see a…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Terri White does not identify a theme to her show at Feinstein's at the Regency, but it is nevertheless clear: the theme is joy. Not that White doesn't sing a sad song or two, and act them n…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:23PM[SHARE]Sunday, January 16, 2011
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. The Mild Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore is far from Tennessee Williams' best work. However, it is involving, funny, sexy, and sad. The situation is…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:59PM[SHARE]Photo: Monique CarboniIs there anything left to be said about dysfunctional families? If so, Tommy Nohilly hasn't found it. His debut play, Blood From a Stone, with its echoes of Sam Shepard…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:20PM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Photo: Joseph AlfordIn a 1915 poem by TS Eliot called "Hysteria," the anxious narrator becomes disturbed by his date's raucous laughter. The show Hysteria, created and performed by the group…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:41PM[SHARE]Sunday, December 12, 2010
My knowledge of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit was limited to the line, "Hell is other people," so I grabbed the opportunity to see the Invisible City Theater Company's production of John Bowles…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:20PM[SHARE]Tom Stoppard is a brilliant playwright, but sometimes he can't tell the difference between a play and a lecture. Hapgood's ratio of physics versus theatre is unfortunately skewed toward the…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:15PM[SHARE]Photo: Jonathan KeenanSometimes ambiguity adds suspense and atmosphere to a production. Sometimes it is just confusing. At the beginning of Edna O'Brien's Haunted, part of the Brits Off Broa…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:42PM[SHARE]Monday, November 29, 2010
Nyack High School presented an excellent production of The Laramie Project for two performances this month. The pacing could have been quicker, but many of the performances were top-notch, a…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:36PM[SHARE]Friday, November 19, 2010
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is a choleric, cynical play.First, of course, there is the ugly anti-Semitism. Shylock, more frequently known as "The Jew," has spent his life being called "…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:12PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Wow!Last March a few thousand people were lucky enough to experience the truly staggering Sondheim birthday celebration at the New York Philharmonic. Many who saw it (most?) judged it one of…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:08PM[SHARE]Photo: Holly CasterJoan Collins is a force to be reckoned with. She turned down Darryl Zanuck's (staggeringly coarse) sexual advances, even though she knew she might be risking her career. S…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:16PM[SHARE]The Broadway Close Up series at Merkin Hall presented a lovely evening of Jerome Kern songs last Monday. There was no patter--just luscious singing. Director Denis Jones set up some of the s…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:45AM[SHARE]Sunday, November 14, 2010
Photo: Annie ParisseAs The Amoralists' production of Ghosts in the Cottonwoods begins, we see Bean Scully sucking venom out of her son Pointer's leech bites. He is 18 years old and nude, and…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:27PM[SHARE]Photo: Michael BrosilowIt is a theatre season of prodigious feats of memory. Mark Rylance in La Bete. Belle Caplis is Balm in Gilead. Bill Camp in Notes From Underground. And now Michael Sha…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:05PM[SHARE]Photo: Joan Marcus"I am a sick man. I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts." With these classic opening lines of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, actor and co-ada…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:10PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 11, 2010
Elling. Elling is a little play. A very little play. A teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy play. Brendan Fraser and Denis O'Hare play odd-couple roommates, both recently out of a psychiatric hospital. Ev…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:17PM[SHARE]I've read the reviews, and it's hard to argue with them. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is indeed sloppy, uneven, and unfocused. The score by David Yazbek is only amiable. The boo…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:42PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Photo Credit: Torso XXI by Colm McCarthyThe people at the T. Schreiber Theatre are doing something amazing over on 26th Street. In their production of Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead, on the…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:49AM[SHARE] 
