CONSIDER CREATION CAUGHT IN THIS SEMINAL WORLD PREMIERE It's a tour-de-force to take home and reverently recall: A Goodman Theatre world premiere, How To Catch Creation lives up to a l…
IT COULD HAVE BEEN MURDER Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a musical that never fails to impress, no matter how many times it’s been seen. It …
SAINT BERNADETTE Now that she’s hung up her late-Victorian hat after taking over for Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway last year, the inimitable Bernadette Peters has embarked …
OUT OF THE BLOOD OF BABES It's a probably thankless and certainly unsettling undertaking: Us/Them is an hour-long performance piece by two young members of the Belgian troupe BRONKS. I…
MAKE A CALL ON THIS INSPECTOR In Stephen Daldry’s architectually inspired revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an astute mixture of comedy of manners/tragedy of class/…
CRUEL INTENTIONS Now at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Hir had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizon in 2015, engendering a rave in the The New York Times and going on to play internation…
IS IT TOO REALISTIC, OR NOT REALISTIC ENOUGH? Is it smoke and mirrors or a trick of the light? No matter — the fact that nothing urgent is at stake in the 100 minutes of Will Leno'sÂ�…
RAGING AGAINST THE DYING LIGHT Elderly parents losing their independence is more significant demographically in America now than at any time in our history. Most still-living Greatest Genera…
SOMETHING SWELL FOR MUSICAL LOVERS A studio recording of Cole Porter’s 1943 boisterously farcical musical Something for the Boys has just been released, and producer and PS Class…
BRINGING DEAD TO LIFE An import from our neighbor to the north that's almost as inebriating as Canadian Club, Evil Dead The Musical is a blood-splattering, silly-ass, ham-acting confec…
PANNING FOR GOLDSTEIN You have to glean the plot from the songs, because the synopsis for Charlie Schulman’s libretto for Goldstein, an Off-Broadway musical that closed in July, 2018, …
FRIENDS WITH CHILDREN Gay parents — for centuries that seemed a contradiction in terms. How could promiscuity engender anything beyond itself? But, if, as Delmore Schwartz said, "With …
BEAUTIFUL HONESTY The title of Tracy Letts' play Linda Vista, Steppenwolf Theatre's production now at the Mark Taper Forum, translates as "Beautiful View." In a literal sense, it refers to a…
THEATER AND RECONCILIATION Love never seems greater than when hate sets it off. Then, as if to prove its power, it finds so much to rise above. A huge hit at the 2016 Humana Festival of New …
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION? How remarkable to have been a fly on the wall when the creators of 1776, the 1969 musical receiving a terrific La Mirada Theatre/McCoy Rigby revival, were d…
#ME TOO, 15th-CENTURY STYLE If it didn't actually happen, this play would not be believed. Its climax soars as, tortured by the Inquisition to reveal the murderer of the evil-doing Commander…
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VS. AUTHENTIC EMOTION Brian Letscher's new play, now at Pacific Resident Theatre, is pitched as a cutting-edge take on how our species might be affected by new develo…
GREAT CHORUS, GREAT BRIDGE, GREAT INTRO WONKY SUPERSTRUCTURE A middle 8 is a section in song structure — usually in the middle and consisting of eight bars — that is used to a…
LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE, OR AN EMPOWER SHORTAGE? Holy Hades! It's an all-purpose victim's ur-dream of getting even: Every misunderstood teenager secretly imagines he was born better than life …
NOTHING TRAFE HERE What I found most amazing about Forever Brooklyn! A Kosher Musical Comedy is that the writer/director Mark Wesley Curran is not from Brooklyn nor is he Jewish or eve…
HITS THE SPOT As someone who has logged many hours crawling up 10th Avenue in a Megabus, the bright purple-and-white Y2K-esque signage of Yotel has always been intriguing landmark. Since I a…
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY CLONES It's hard to react to the details of this show with anything but resigned bemusement. So, while some of what I'm about to say may sound like I hated Wicked C…
SOCIETY UNDER CLOSE INSPECTION An Inspector Calls was first performed in 1945 at a time of great change — both World Wars were fresh in the minds of the people, women had become mor…
A RUTA WAKENING A play can be a cry for help — against a persistent peril, a former and future danger, a mindset that makes heartbreak. La Ruta, a Steppenwolf Theatre world premiere…
AS RELEVANT AND CELEBRATORY AS EVER, FIDDLER GETS A POWERFUL REVIVAL It takes a musical to make a village: At nearly three hours, this very replete revival, which plays the Cadillac Palace T…