8,501 stories from Backstage
Justin Bond's latest show keeps him in his comfort zone as a consummate cabaret entertainer.
While mercifully avoiding sentimentality, composer Joshua Schmidt and his co-librettist Jason Loewith rarely add anything to the mix in adapting Elmer Rice's drama. They seem content merely …
Playwright Michael Domitrovich casts an ambivalent eye on his firsthand experience growing up among the offspring of downtown celebrity artists, but the play never transcends its own styliza…
Michael Weller's 1986 play is creaky, to say the least, and replete with characters stuck in a perpetually dyspeptic mode as they wrestle with the disappointments and torpor of middle age.
Untitled Theater Company 61's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel is subtitled "a calypso musical," but that's not quite accurate. This ingenious production, adapted and directed by Edw…
This well-constructed drama would be a nifty play if only its writer, Levy Lee Simon, would eliminate the overextended, banal political speeches about racial relations and American arrogance.
Playwright Ian McWethy knows actors--the good, the bad, and the excessively ambitious--and in this self-referential comedy, McWethy shows it all, with a preference for the ugly side.
Aaron Landsman's site-specific "Open House" is an attempt at combining current real-estate angst with a dystopian view of New York City, but it seems to be so steeped in half-formed notions …
As farce, most of "Gray Area" works well; as history and balanced argument, however, it's less successful.
Oliver Gooch's spirited conducting coaxes as much variety out of Conrad Susa's score as anyone could, and the singers' diction is so clear that the supertitles are superfluous, but emotional…
In "Mark Twain's Blues," a promising premise proves less compelling than it must have seemed on paper.
Written by and starring Carla Cantrelle, "Looking Up" has the sort of "Sex and the City"-lite feel that so many plays get when their author is more interested in sitcoms than in theatre.
Thanks to Sam Buntrock's minimalist yet elegant staging and passionate leading performances from Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's dissertation on the creat…
More a reading than a traditional drama, "Vita & Virginia" makes up for its lack of movement with the fineness of its language and the considerable pleasures of watching the elegant Patricia…
Charming and bemusing by turns, "Imminence" features venerable experimental troupe the Talking Band in a performance that tackles the concepts of time, death, and eternity.
Warm as the spring sun throughout, Maureen McGovern has come up with her best and most important show.
While Brett C. Leonard is of the shock-jock school of playwriting, his talent for characterization and storytelling cannot be denied, and while his vision may be bleak, bleak, bleak, it stil…
At the very least, the Brick Theater's adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1864 novella, first presented at the 1999 Fringe Festival, gets points for atmosphere.
Blue Coyote Theater Group asked nine playwrights "for their take on the sex-worker industry." The entertaining result presents nine short pieces of great variety, all of which in some measur…
The world may not have needed another look at the leaders of the Lost Generation, but Allan Knee's new play does so with a fair amount of style.
Whatever his intellectual or artistic reasons for choosing to revive, reinvent, and reinterpret Antonin Artaud's famously failed play, John Jahnke has his own aesthetic lesson to teach all t…
In what is essentially a series of monologues, Carmen Peláez morphs into six colorful women who embody the Cuban spirit.
In Roundabout Theatre Company's lovely revival of Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, staged by actor-turned-director Kathleen Turner, those merrily melancholy hooligans, the Magrath …
The Scottish play has often been reset in modern times, but I've never seen a more effective placement of Shakespeare's tale of supernatural destiny and vaunting ambition than Rupert Goold's…
Have you ever loved a person who didn't love him- or herself? It's a humbling, Sisyphean experience, suffered in the self-destructive Next to Normal by a family ravaged and raw from bipolar disorder—and passed on to an audience made to suffer for its own compassion.
