278 stories by "Erik Haagensen"
Ultimately, this "Bells" is a pleasant-enough serving of a rather ramshackle yet endearing Jule Styne-Betty Comden-Adolph Green mid-career musical comedy.
Richly dramatic and keenly observant, Jon Robin Baitz's new play is a hugely satisfying mixture of the political and the personal, grandly acted by a brilliant ensemble of five under Joe Man…
Epic in scope yet intimate in characterization, this 7-hour collection of 12 one-acts is smart, absorbing, and deeply affecting. It's also easy to follow and full of impressively versatile a…
Unwilling to be an opera and afraid to be a musical, Adam Bock and Todd Almond's adaptation of this classic Shirley Jackson novel never gathers sufficient force.
Kiran Rikhye's "Stage Kiss," a gender-bending "love letter to Charles Ludlam" inspired by John Lyly's 1588 play "Gallathea," was apparently a hit for Stolen Chair in its premiere production …
Work as imaginative and wholly successful as "Brief Encounter" doesn't come along every day. It was an exhilarating reminder of why I fell in love with the theater in the first place.
Though adapter-performer Brian Foyster's work in the one-man stage adaptation of John Knowles' 1960 novel is never less than intelligent and always tasteful, the end result diminishes its so…
Once Cheryl Howard the writer catches up to Cheryl Howard the actor, this one-woman musical bio of Josephine Baker is almost certain to be special.
Teresa Deevy's long-lost play is a worthy addition to Ireland's dramatic literature and shows Deevy to have had a singular, perceptive ear for the dialogue of ordinary people.
Trying to refashion a flop musical into something that works is a dicey business at best. One thing is essential: The material, however flawed, must have intrinsic quality. "Platinum," at it…
Though hardly a musical for the ages, this dated but dizzy satire of President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal still scores points.
Lee Hall's "The Pitmen Painters" is a bit like the art made by its characters: Whatever it lacks in technique it more than makes up for in expression.
The estimable Mint Theatre Company comes a-cropper with this ill-judged production of Arnold Bennett's musty 1909 play about London tabloid journalism.
Cody Daigle's ambitious and well-meaning new play "A Home Across the Ocean" has talent and a fresh story, but it is ultimately undone by predictability, naiveté, and sentimentality.
When you find yourself repeatedly checking your watch during a 75-minute intermissionless show, something's not working.
It seemed like such a good idea on paper: Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in "Driving Miss Daisy." Plenty of laughs are landed, but the primal power of this intimate meditation on race…
"Office Hours" is by turns amusing and pointed and yet also forced and thin. The play is a too-gentle lament for the loss of classics-based education.
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's searing musical tragedy about apartheid in South Africa falls hopelessly flat in this uncomprehending concert version from Encores!
A 10-ton pudding of Irish whimsy laced with sticky-sweet operetta romance, "Three Wishes for Jamie" nevertheless gets loving care from Musicals Tonight!
Peter Nichols' latest play is a deceptively sedate, neo-Chekhovian character study that ends up delivering a surprise haymaker that proves the veteran author is still in top form.
This expansive musical tribute to Judy Garland by her daughter suffers from being truncated and crammed into a room that's too small, but it succeeds in communicating the love they shared.
Carl Caulfield's 55-minute one-man play about Peter Sellers is short on character insight and so self-referential that it can border on opacity.
This embarrassingly amateurish collection of three one-acts does violence to the reputation of its author, Renaissance man John Gruen.
Trista Baldwin's new play "American Sexy," now in the tiny downstairs space at the Flea Theater, is rarely surprising in its look at four randy college students on a joyride to Vegas.
Amy Herzog's play may not break new ground, but it crackles with intelligence and is laced with welcome wit. I was thoroughly captivated throughout.
