Theater Review | 'Middletown': Word-Woozy Roundelay in Average Town Ruled by Singular Sadness by Charles Isherwood

Amid the homey detail in Will Eno’s play “Middletown” is a prickly awareness of the awesome mystery of existence.

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Critic’s Notebook: Does Fashion Make Good Theater? by Charles Isherwood

Drama of a kind is not hard to find, but are the shows good theater?

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Theater Talkback: Stop Talking To Me by Charles Isherwood

Why too much direct address is hurting today's plays.

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Theater Review | 'Beautiful Burnout': Hoping to Punch a Path to Glory by Charles Isherwood

In Bryony Lavery’s play “Beautiful Burnout,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, amateur boxers have dreams of bigger things.

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Theater Review | 'Timon of Athens': A Dinner of Water and Stones for Those Friends Who Don’t Come Through by Charles Isherwood

The Public Theater’s new production of “Timon of Athens,” the inaugural Shakespeare Lab presentation from the company, stars Richard Thomas.

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Theater Review | 'Persephone'': The Opulence of the Underworld by Charles Isherwood

Julia Stiles plays a 19-century actress playing the role of Persephone in the multimedia Ridge Theater production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

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Here They Go Again: Head-Banging Anthems of Their Youth by Charles Isherwood

The Off Broadway musical Power Balladz is a loving tribute to the heyday of the hair band, when Aqua Net ruled and MTV played videos.

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Theater Talkback: A New Marquee by Charles Isherwood

A look at recent trends in Broadway theater re-christening, with the good news that Stephen Sondheim has gotten his due.

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Theater Review | 'Haunted': A Longtime Marriage, Threatened Inside and Out by Charles Isherwood

Brenda Blethyn and Niall Buggy portray a long-married couple whose troubled ties are shaken by a young woman, in Edna O’Brien’s play “Haunted.”

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Theater Review: The Family That Votes Together ... by Charles Isherwood

Richard Nelson’s new play, at the Public Theater, concerns an election-night family dinner in which siblings confess to shifts in their political disposition.

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Theater Review | 'Tigers Be Still': Escaped Predator? What Else Is New? by Charles Isherwood

Natasha Lyonne and Halley Feiffer star in Kim Rosenstock’s comedy about a big cat escaped from the zoo and other depressing variables of life.

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Theater Review | 'Hotel Savoy': The Porter Will Kindly Show You to Your Doom by Charles Isherwood

“Hotel Savoy,” a site-specific theater piece by Dominic Huber, presents a host of unsettling tableaus, very loosely based on Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel.

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ArtsBeat: Theater Talkback: Giving Thanks in a Thankless Season by Charles Isherwood

I have decided to celebrate all the good tidings of the season so far, with the occasional backhanded swipe at the trials I’ve endured.

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Theater Review | 'The How and the Why': Student Meets a Mentor She Has Met Before by Charles Isherwood

Biology is destiny, and destiny is biology in “The How and the Why,” a new play by Sarah Treem at the McCarter Theater.

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Theater Review | 'The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore': Reaper Arrives? Grab a Kimono by Charles Isherwood

Olympia Dukakis stars in this Roundabout Theater Company revival of Tennessee Williams’s fitfully moving but often preposterous 1963 play “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop He…

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Theater Review | ‘Lombardi’: On Further Review, the Coach Stands by Charles Isherwood

“Lombardi,” the new play based on a biography of the legendary football coach, suffers from a lack of a strong focus on its central character.

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Theater Review | 'Long Story Short': Back to the Ancient Days of Angst and Irritability by Charles Isherwood

“Long Story Short” is a snappy recap of human civilization as seen through the skeptical eyes of a standup comic, Colin Quinn.

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Critic’s Notebook: ‘Idiot’ Welcomes Back a Bad Influence by Charles Isherwood

Billie Joe Armstrong, the Green Day frontman, brings a jolt of rock-god electricity to the Broadway musical “American Idiot.”

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Theater Review | 'When I Come to Die': When the Final Curtain Doesn’t Fall by Charles Isherwood

Nathan Louis Jackson’s drama “When I Come to Die,” about a prisoner who doesn’t die from his lethal injections, is remarkably free of sensation and sentimentality.

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Theater Review | 'Interviewing the Audience': If You Go to the Show, You May Just Land a Role by Charles Isherwood

In “Interviewing the Audience,” Zach Helm selects theatergoers to share some personal details with the audience.

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Theater Review | 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle': American Gothic Tale With a Ray of Sunshine by Charles Isherwood

There’s nothing wrong in the new musical “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” at the Yale Repertory Theater, and that’s exactly the problem.

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A Famous Big Cat, and Stars on the Rise by Charles Isherwood

On the theater schedule: a “Born Yesterday” revival, “Bengal Tiger” and Derek Jacobi’s Lear.

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Theater Review | 'The Marriage of Maria Braun': A Postwar Woman Foiled by Men by Charles Isherwood

Thomas Ostermeier’s stage version of “The Marriage of Maria Braun,” at the Next Wave Festival, is essentially a line-by-line re-enactment of the screenplay.

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Theater Review | 'Donny & Marie: A Broadway Christmas': She’s a Little Country, He’s a Little Rock, and They’re Both a Little Bit of Everything by Charles Isherwood

“Donny & Marie: A Broadway Christmas,” reuniting the Osmond siblings, continues through Jan. 2.

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Theater Review | 'Beautiful Burnout': Hoping to Punch a Path to Glory by Charles Isherwood

In Bryony Lavery’s play “Beautiful Burnout,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, amateur boxers have dreams of bigger things.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 5:58pm on May 25, 2015☆⚑