1,091 stories from Show Showdown
Inside John Patrick Shanley's 105-minute Outside Mullingar is a potentially wonderful 85-minute play. As it stands (or stood at the preview I saw), it meanders too much and takes too long to…
Hi, all:I thought I'd tip you off, if you are interested, to a lively, interesting, and occasionally maddening discussion that was sparked a few weeks ago by an essay titled "Critical Genero…
The brilliant revival of Machinal, Sophie Treadwell's expressionistic 1928 dissection of a woman's life, climbs off the stage and under your skin. This nerve-rattling production is directed …
Photo: Gerry GoodsteinWhen I was a kid, my parents took my sister and me to a lot of theater in our hometown of Pittsburgh, which has a much stronger arts scene than I think most people assu…
Simple Dreams is Linda Ronstadt's "musical memoir," and in it, she discusses her forays into light opera (The Pirates of Penzance) and opera (La Boheme). Ronstadt is remarkably modest for so…
Madeleine George's latest play, The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence is by turns breathtaking, annoying, beautiful, overwritten, and gorgeous. A mash-up riff on three Watsons--the J…
Joan MarcusThe composer Jeanine Tesori has a knack for capturing, in her scores, the ebbs and flows of complex, imbalanced relationships. Through recurring motifs, overlapping melodic lines,…
Disappointing shows, in alphabetical order:The Big Knife: A waste of an excellent cast. And while Richard Kind was fine, I don't know why everyone made such a big deal of his being able to p…
Whew! Another year has jetted by with astonishing speed, leaving me some 80 shows in its wake. While reviewing the year as a whole, it strikes me that the lesson of 2013, as of the past few …
Though Big Fish will be closing on December 29, I figured that it was worth a review because its feel-good quality may be the sort of diversion people are looking for during the holiday seas…
The cast of Blessed Unrest's A Christmas Carol. Photo by Alan Roche 'Tis the season when perennial favorites, such as A Christmas Carol, come to visit. Just as Scrooge's three spirits s…
Beautiful, the Carole King biomusical, is stuffed with one incredible song after another. The result is an entertaining and enjoyable evening. Would it be too much to wish it were also good?…
The Pigeoning is 70 minutes of pure delight. This brilliant piece of puppet theatre is the story of Frank, an office worker who cannot function unless everything on his desk is aligned perfe…
Hi, all. It's been a very long semester and I've seen very little theater, and I've missed blogging a bunch. I plan to rectify that starting....now:Last night, along with, um, everyone, I go…
Kudos to Craig Zadan and Neil Meron for producing a live TV version of The Sound of Music. There's something incomparably sparkling, vivid, and delightful about live performances. In the act…
I'm always late to the party"so it is predictable for me to see a show days before its closing. But Romeo and Juliet, which ends on Sunday, deserves an audience. The first Broadway revival o…
Charles Fuller's drama One Night, the story of a veteran suffering from PTSD, presents the audience with a bizarrely conflicted experience. The inarguable horrors of rape, war…
Hello, gentle readers,My name is Aya, and I am honored to be joining Show Showdown as a contributor/reviewer. Thought I would write a few introductory words...Who am I? …
After Beth Henley's interminable and unpleasant new play, The Jacksonian, finally ended, an audience member turned to me and said, "What was that?"Excellent question.The story of a divorcing…
Frances Tannehill, actress and lifelong Manhattan resident, died after a brief illness in Upper Manhattan on August 5th.Known for her stunning looks in addition to her talents as a dramatic …
Bottom line: If you love to laugh and have silly fun; if you enjoy being entertained by top-notch performers with excellent timing and beautiful voices; if you've even heard of such movies a…
Julie Taymor's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is full of wonders, yet it is not quite wonderful. Actually, there are two shows here. The first, the one by Taymor and her creativ…
Based on Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic memoir, the equally brilliant musical Fun Home tells the story of Alison (depicted at three ages by three different performers); her father, a not…
David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette, directed by Rebecca Taichman, clearly finds itself hip, snarky, insightful, and significant, but it's merely an olio of unoriginal ideas tossed together with …
The Landing, John Kander and Greg Pierce's musical triptych at the Vineyard, is theoretically about love, loss, betrayal, fantasy, and death. And yet it is not about much of anything, really…
