8,501 stories from Backstage
Over in the Oak Room at the Algonquin, where Tierney Sutton was invited back for a just-concluded four-day layover, it was a case of third time lucky.
The middle of Brooke Berman's 90-minute one-act play, which is directed by Leigh Silverman, noticeably sags. You start succumbing to the same pall of aimlessness and lethargy suffered by the…
For much of its length, Jeff Daniels' "Apartment 3A" feels like an updated episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
Sheila Dabney is hypnotic in this one-woman folk opera.
Thanks to Jim Simpson's rhythmic and crackerjack direction and a 22-strong cast of Bats (the Flea's resident company), who morph between gleeful, sarcastic, menacing, and meditative in a fla…
Cute inspiration, gimmicks, and staging can't quite camouflage that this is a musical made of unremarkable music. Still, flaxen-haired ingénue Patti Murin is a sensational young actor…
David Hay's play about the storied reporter Martha Gellhorn is rather like Gellhorn herself: slim, elegant, and -- that most devalued of adjectives -- interesting. For some audience members,…
Paul Stroili's glib almost-autobiographical solo piece just doesn't wash.
The libretto of "The Great Nebula in Orion" is taken from a little-produced one-act by Lanford Wilson. But with the addition of composer Kenneth Fuchs' thin, syrupy music for the voice and p…
"Jerry Springer: The Opera" is very ambitious and very slight. There's plenty here to offend delicate sensibilities: Act 2 is why ultraconservative extremists stood protesting outside Carneg…
Any theme can work if creatively developed, of course. That's not the case with Kate Loitz's cabaret show "Vagabond!," though.
Just about everything Stewart and Charlap do is perfect - to the extent that even their imperfections are perfect.
Russell Barr's unsatisfying solo show is a graphic collection of well-worn clichés about masochistic gays, cycles of abuse, and the darker side of queer life.
Despite their obvious affection for Dylan Thomas' humanist portraits, Intimation Theatre Company's members, under the direction of Michelle Dean, lack the ability to get under the skins of t…
Numerous plays during the 1980s and '90s dealt with homosexuality and the AIDS crisis, but nowadays it is unusual to see revivals of them, as so much has changed in social attitudes and avai…
The contrived and wooden story of seven characters seeking human contact is less like "Crash" than a blend of "Sex and the City," "Shopping and Fucking," and "One Life to Live" -- minus the …
Neither the cast nor director manages to lift these characters out of their self-absorption long enough to invest them with charm in Howard Korder's inexplicably acclaimed 1988 comedy.
Richard Abrons' limp examination of three Western travelers who come seeking enlightenment from a famous Indian guru begins perkily with some satirical touches but quickly devolves into a Ps…
By staging the play straightforwardly, without attempting to wink at the material or bring it up to date, director Michael Pressman allows William Inge's insightful portrait of these ordinar…
There's a lot of childlike whimsy in "Fabrik," but don't let Kirjan Waage's puppetsfool you. This show is hardly kiddie theatre. It's a must-see feat of theatricality.
The tugging and pinching of family ties are sensitively demonstrated in Chad Beckim's affecting home-for-the-holidays drama.
"Wanda's World," an entertaining concoction aimed at that profitable audience of prepubescent girls known as "tweens," fits neatly into the groove cunningly carved by Disney with "High Schoo…
Nicole Golden, inasmuch as anyone can, makes Lisa Kron's solo autobiographical play her own.
