1,122 stories by "Frank Scheck"
Jesse Eisenberg certainly hasn’t written an attractive part for himself in his debuting playwriting effort, now being presented by the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. In his dark come…
I don’t envy actress-turned-emerging-playwright Zoe Kazan; it’s hard to write a family play that steers clear of the usual tropes of long-simmering resentment and buried history.…
Titling your play "A Charity Case" is just asking for it, and Australian playwright Wendy Beckett doesn't make it any easier to resist. This play about adoption "from the adoptee's point of …
Cellphones ring incessantly during "Milk Like Sugar," but don't bother to check whether you've left yours on. They belong to the teenage girls at the heart of Kirsten Greenidge's evocative p…
John Cheever was exploring the mores of the American WASP long before A.R. Gurney wrote his first play. So it's fitting that the playwright's debut effort, 1974's "Children," now being reviv…
Miscommunication—of the linguistic, cultural and relationship kind—is the subject of David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish. Receiving its Broadway premiere after an acclaimed run e…
The Reduced Shakespeare Company has managed to distill and find the funny in Shakespeare, the Bible and the history of America. But it seems to have fumbled with "The Complete World of Sport…
There have been plays about ambitious interns scheming their way to the top ever since there've been interns. But John Morogiello's comedy "Blame It on Beckett" puts a knowing theatrical spi…
Relatively Speaking, the new evening of comic one-acts by Woody Allen, Elaine May and Ethan Coen, has just opened on Broadway, and all I can say is…oy! That this level of writing talen…
The recent death of Steve Jobs provides a fascinating conundrum for Mike Daisey, the writer/performer of the solo piece The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. On the one hand, it provides an a…
It's hard to get anything done when the Internet beckons -- with yet another friend request, Twitter updates and the latest YouTube video of a dancing cat. It's even harder when your compute…
For the next month at Ars Nova, every night is opening night.
That's because the Upper West Side theater is outdoing itself with its showcase for emerging artists. ANT Fest 2011 -- it stand…
One of history’s greatest ironies is that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his soaring “I’ve have been to the mountaintop” speech on the very night before his death.…
'Any Given Monday" is a dark comedy so offensive, so amoral and so generally unpleasant that you'll hate yourself for laughing at it.
The problem is, you'll hate yourself a lot.
The play by …
The popular singer's new show at the Cafe Carlyle proves to be a fitting and extremely entertaining tribute to the late, great performer.
Contemporary playwrights seem forever bent on proving Tolstoy’s line that “all families are unhappy in their own way.” The latest example is Nicky Silvers, who has mined su…
For a mime, Bill Bowers has a lot to say.
And that's all to the good. In his new one-man show "Bill Bowers Beyond Words" -- a mix of mime and spoken vignettes -- he presents a portrait of s…
Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy was written in the 1960s and is set in the 1930s, but it would unfortunately resonate in any decade. This portrait of a desperate business tycoon was ins…
As touching as it is idiosyncratic, "Southern Comfort" effectively redefines the term "family musical." Based on a 2001 Sundance award-winning documentary about transgender people in rural G…
Even the most ardent musical-theater lovers would be hard-pressed to catch all 25 shows at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, running though Oct. 16. Here are a few of the more intriguin…
Playwright Jeff Talbott clearly knows the territory that he explores in The Submission. Having had his previous efforts presented at numerous theater festivals, he’s well in a position…
New York's streets teem with such chaotic vitality that stepping into a theater can seem anticlimactic. So it's exciting to enter 3LD and encounter floor-to-ceiling windows exposing lower Gr…
With some exceptions, absurdism doesn’t age particularly well. The impact of what was shocking and avant-garde decades ago is reduced by the endless mediocre imitations that have follo…
Last season, the Play Company’s production of Invasion! at Soho Rep left made quite an impact, garnering an OBIE award for playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri, in his debut as a playwright…
It's a hard-knock life for the newsboys in "Newsies," the stage adaptation of the flop 1992 Disney musical film that's become a cult favorite. When this ragtag group of orphans and runaways …
