6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne's other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne's usual assortment of short scenes and…
TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I'm not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an al…
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means "without law" and the latter means "without form." This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to ma…
DIVIDED AND CONQUERED If the American dream needs an obituary, Lynn Nottage's 2017 Pulitzer winner is it. If Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty celebrated the power and promise of labor un…
A SMALL STEP There is a stillness in B.D. Wong that is the embodiment of grace. In his exquisitely calibrated portrayal of Wen Chang, a Chinese party loyalist, Wong walks a delicate line bet…
TOO BAD THEY DIDN'T RAISE THE RENT Rent has a romantic history: Jonathan Larson, its author and composer, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birthd…
KITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from "Now and Forever" to "Not Now, Not Ever." Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the early 90s, I…
HARRY POTTER AND THE RECYCLED RECORDING ENGINEER Jack Thorne's immensely popular two-part play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has taken up residence in London, New York, and Melbourne, …
A YES AND NO NANETTE When the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette was revised and remounted in 1971, it was predicted to be a flop by folks in the Biz, but it was the buzz of the season with nostal…
MAYOR DREAMS COME TRUE SOME OTHER TIME The 42nd Street Moon production of Fiorello is just fine, if you allow for the looseness of staging, the clumsy choreography, and the overall sensation…
A BRONX CHEER Unpretentious and unpreaching in its streetwise survival lore, the gangster fable A Bronx Tale is, as the name implies, just one of many small sagas from the lesser borough.…
IN PRAISE OF THE PUB There's no need for a plot, three-dimensional characters, or conflicts pending resolution " no, not when the setting and its songs sell themselves from the start. That f…
WE'RE STILL WAITING You're watching a play but you have no idea what's happening. There is no plot, the dialogue is gobbledygook, and characters are filled with despair, yet you are told tha…
THE BOYS IN THE BLAND "Every day a little death/In the parlor, in the bed." Thus spake Stephen Sondheim in his waltz time operetta A Little Night Music. And it is not totally frivolous to st…
THE HORROR…THE HORROR… THE FUN…THE FUN… You can see it as a modern parable of how the neglect that created Skid Row and its plethora of poverty brings its own revenge: A literally bl…
LOVE CONQUERS COMMON SENSE My takeaway about Oscar Wilde in David Hare's intellectually stimulating but overly static play of ideas, The Judas Kiss, now at Boston Court, is this: The literar…
CARRYING BAGGAGE Although it is written with an almost childlike simplicity, Mfoniso Udofia's Her Portmanteau tells a wrenching tale of the profound effect that separation creates when a wom…
TRANS-CENDENT Rather than dwell on the similitude of roses, Gertrude Stein might better have said love is love is love. It certainly is in one particular North Side storefront: A 2016 blue-g…
TOO MANY CHOICES If Chekov's characters could be said to be trapped by society, circumstance, and their own neuroses, the characters in playwright Nicky Silver's Too Much Sun, now at the Ody…
TENSION, HUMOR, AND INTRIGUE IN BEGUILING WWII DRAMEDY There would be much better places to live in 1943 than on the German-occupied British island of Guernsey, especially if you are shelter…
HANDEL WITH CARE It's hard to believe that, following its Covent Garden debut in 1735, this glorious opera seria endured 191 years of neglect. It returned to the boards in 1926, even m…
CRIPPLE THE FUN Funny and heartbreaking, Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan is nothing less than a slalom run of emotional ups and downs and plot twists and turns. Antaeus Theatre's …
HYPER-ACTIVISM A promising hip-hop group formed by two childhood friends " a white writer and a black hype man " is thrown off its beat by racial tensions in the West Coast premiere of a pow…
WITNESSING UGANDA IS AMAZING, EVEN THOUGH THE SHOW NEEDS WORK Griffin is a young black New York actor in search of more than a career. When he is kicked out of his church choir because he's …
IF IT'S THURSDAY, IT MUST BE LIFELINE Deemed a "metaphysical thriller," The Man Who Was Thursday is religious writer G.K. Chesterton's celebrated satire from 1908. Intentionally confou…
