1,113 stories by "Victor Gluck, Editor-In-Chief"
On April 10, 2024, Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center presented a tantalizing teaser of a musical evening with the world premiere workshop of only the first act of 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winni…
Aside from its attempt to cover too much at one time (drug addiction, pregnancy, incarceration, high school dropouts, gun violence, lack of health care, underfunded ghetto schools), "Fish" d…
Playwright/bookwriter Rick Elice has written the greatest jukebox musical (so far) in his 2005 Jersey Boys. In his adaptation of Sara Gruen's bestselling novel Water for Elephants, he may ju…
While the characters age, the use of diversity here has them switch races, so that while one couple has a Black Allie and a white Noah, another has a white Allie and a Black Noah, as well as…
The concept of alternate facts was not created under the Trump Administration. In 1882 Henrik Ibsen wrote "An Enemy of the People" in which a medical report that a town's new spa is polluted…
In this tour de force, Izzard has come up with a different voice and stance for each character: King Claudius is a baritone, Lord Polonius has a limp, Lady Ophelia has a somewhat breathy spe…
Playwright J.T. Rogers ("Oslo", 2017 Tony Award for Best Play) specializes in dramatizing the backstories to true scandals of which the real details behind the facts never made the news. His…
While "Illinoise" does not seem bigger than its individual parts nor transcend them, it is both satisfying and moving. Peck's inventive and derivative choreography at the same time seems to …
Soutra Gilmour's setting is a sort of empty runway with the audience sitting on either side. The other props are two black chairs at either end for the two doctors. Scenes are created entire…
The play is treated like a rehearsal (a conceit also used by Bedlam in their incomprehensible and lame "Henry IV" workshop in Brooklyn in 2023) with the director (Andrew Rothenberg who also …
Itamar Moses' 'The Ally" is a play of ideas not only torn from today's headlines but tomorrow's as well. Ostensibly dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian question on college campuses today, i…
John Patrick Shanley has become our poet of lonely, desperate working class people trying to make a connection despite their inadequacies and hang-ups in such plays as "Danny and the Deep Bl…
Playwright Joyce Griffen's idea of farce in her new play "The Script in the Closet" is a series of 48, mostly very short scenes in which to keep the plot going she continually introduces new…
While "The Seven Year Disappear" may challenge and confuse many theatergoers, people used to performance art may get the in-jokes. Jordan Seavey whose play "Homos, or Everyone in America" wa…
While we could use a good murder mystery stage play, "Deadly Stages" is too derivative to suit the bill. The cast work hard mostly playing multiple roles, but the play seems to have attempte…
When she arrives dressed in a white pant suit, Labeija steals the stage with Hillary's number "Miss Me Now" which trumps them all with a series of Broadway parodies paying tribute to Clinton…
At the performance under review, part of the audience found the show hilariously funny, while others proverbially sat on their hands. The show makes use of history, parody, satire, burlesque…
Inspired by 20th century film and video games based on the classic Chinese novel of the 15th century, 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms," Damon Chua's delightful and engrossing "Warrior Sisters…
Unfortunately, at 70 minutes the play seems skimpy. Structured in a great many short scenes, only one thing happens in each, so that there is a sameness to it all. Basically a two character …
Like its unwieldy title, Corinne Jaber's "Munich Medea: Happy Family" takes its time getting where it is going but is ultimately powerful and revealing in its almost unspeakable tale. It dea…
Sarah Gancher's "Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy" is seemingly torn from the headlines - if this were the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election which pitted Hillary Clinton a…
Although written and directed by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone of 600 Highwaymen, "The Following Evening" is a tribute and a summing up of the 50 year career and marriage of experim…
The play is best at its mysteries which are only slowly revealed. However, audience members may be confused part of the time as to the sequence of events and the relationships. A great deal …
The title of Michael Aguirre's "The Greatest Hits Down Route 66," the story of the Franco family's road trip during the summer of 1999, refers to Carl Sandburg's 1927 "The American Songbag,'…
Tadeusz Slobodzianek's "Our Class" is epic in its storytelling and shocking in its specifics. At three hours, the play is never long or boring as every line of dialogue offers new details to…
