THE PRODUCTION RUNS LIKE CLOCKWORK, BUT SOME MAY SEE IT AS A WASTE OF TIME Much mastery of theatrical craft is on display in Alan Ayckbourn's staging of his play Time of My Life, which is pa…
HALF AND HALF Kim Wall delivers a brilliant performance as Barry, an aging municipal employee, in Alan Ayckbourn's Arrivals and Departures, part of the Brits Off-Broadway Festival at 59E59 T…
BORED TO DEATH In Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair's ill-conceived two-hander musical comedy Murder for Two, lively performances and Scott Schwartz's energetic direction are not enough to overc…
NOW THIS IS HOW YOU ADAPT A PLAY In 1859 Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon opened in New York City to much acclaim. The plot of this suspenseful melodrama centers on George, a young man of Sout…
NOW SHOW ME HOW TO CHEW IT As a critic I have a confession to make: when reading a play for fun I usually skim over the stage directions. I generally don't care how many chairs are in a room…
STRINDBERG ON PROZAC Throughout my tenure with Stage and Cinema I have criticized a number of productions for staging foreign plays too literally, insisting that it is misguided for director…
SOME ARE TKO’S, SOME SHOULD BE BRIEFER The first play featured in this annual showcase of ten-minute plays by emerging writers, An Eclectic Evening of Shorts VII: Boxers and Briefs,…
BOOZE AND BARD In ShakesBEER, NYC's Original Shakespearean Pub Crawl, New York Shakespeare Exchange members perform ten-minute scenes from four Shakespeare plays in as many bars over the cou…
MAC THE DULL KNIFE Under Charlie Polinger's unremarkable direction, the often charming cast of Sean Patrick Monahan and James Presson's vacuous tongue-in-cheek musical comedy Little Mac, Lit…
BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED In a way shows that are pure spectacle " acrobat, dance, magic " must achieve a higher level of virtuosity to be successful than, say, theatrical plays. E…
LOVE, FAMILY AND ALIENATION One of the questions at the center of Terrence McNally's insightful and moving drama Mothers and Sons is, Why is it so difficult for a mother to love her son for …
THE HUMAN WHISPERER Most theatrical performances feel a little awkward at the beginning; even in good shows it usually takes the actors a few minutes to settle into their characters and to f…
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER THE THEATER As staged by Linda Ames Key, Paul Bowles' adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit, a play that imagines three individuals' hell as being trapped in…
A FINE INTRODUCTION TO SHAKESPEARE It takes a few minutes to get going but once it does Ryan Lee's staging of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale becomes dynamic entertainment; Mr. Lee and his f…
SQUASHED HOPES MAKE FOR BRILLIANT THEATER What a relief it is, what a glorious pleasure for a viewer, after sitting through so much unnecessary theater, to find oneself finally in the hands …
THE FRUSTRATED AND THE BORED Watching The Cake Shop Theater Company perform Martin Crimp's brisk new translation of Ferdinand Bruckner's sharp 1926 play Pains of Youth, about a group of medi…
A STUMP Sitting through Erin Mallon's 90-minute play Branched, A Comedy with Consequences, I found myself envying the gentleman who, silently and with the upmost discretion, managed to sneak…
LES MS. Conceived, written and choreographed by Ruthe Ponturo, Til Divorce Do Us Part is a collection of musical numbers, each illustrating different aspects of divorce from the point of vie…
MASTURBATING IN THE SUBURBS As directed by Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw's ironically titled new comedy Intimacy is not for the squeamish. A male character literally masturbates to internet…
A DANCE OF LIGHT IN DARKNESS A delight for both kids and adults, the clever and inventive entertainment iLuminate brings to mind the image of dancing graffiti. Wearing black body suits equip…
BROTHERS' BOND Josh Hecht does an outstanding job directing Jake Jeppson's effective new play The Clearing, about two brothers who suffer from a dark secret they've shared for the past 17 ye…
LEAR, BECAUSE IT'S THERE A friend commented to me once that as hard to take as Orthodox Jews might seem to us secular ones, it is largely thanks to them and their stubborn adherence to the o…
A WIND OF DISAPPOINTMENT Having seen some months ago Paul Takacs's outstanding staging of a two-character play called Tender Napalm, I was very much looking forward to watching his imagining…
DIARY OF A PRETENTIOUS NITWIT The Woman in the one-woman show The Surrender, adapted for the stage by Isabelle Stoffel and Toni Bentley from Ms. Bentley's book The Surrender, An Erotic Memoi…
THEATRICALIZING AN ARTIST'S WORLD The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, a biography or perhaps an imagined eulogy of performance artist Marina Abramović, the show's still living co…