Nobody could mistake Mamma Mia! for high art. Cardboard-cutout characters vamp through a ridiculous romantic plot, while beloved disco-era ABBA hits are shoehorned in often as clumsily as Ci…
It's easy to see why Elizabeth McGovern might have been drawn to the story of Ava Gardner, another American actress who found Hollywood fame in her 20s and 30s and then moved to London as th…
Quincy Tyler Bernstine, one of the finest actors of her generation, is the heart and soul of Bubba Weiler's transcendent new drama Well, I'll Let You Go, which opened Thursday in a magnifice…
Frank Maya was a true pioneer, arguably one of the first out gay American comics to reach a mainstream audience. In the early '90s, he appeared on MTV and landed a half-hour special on Comed…
Parody is a tricky art form. Off Broadway iterations like Ginger Twinsies, an unauthorized sendup of the 1998 Nancy Meyers family comedy The Parent Trap, seem to thrive on inside jokes but n…
Rolling Thunder, which opened Thursday at New World Stages, is a curious exercise in boomer nostalgia " a jarring blend of jukebox musical and tribute-band concert that evokes the Vietnam er…
We're in a wonderful moment when the stand-up set as a form is open to radical reinterpretation by talents as diverse as Hannah Gadsby, Tig Notaro, James Acaster, and more. The latest innova…
The opening number of Joy, a new bio-musical about the QVC-famous Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano, is a marvel of narrative concision. In short strokes set to composer-lyricist Annmarie Mil…
Ever since its 1997 debut in London (followed by a successful Broadway run two years later), Conor McPherson's intimate drama The Weir has been hailed as a modern masterpiece. And rightly so…
The outdoor amphitheater at Little Island near the Chelsea piers is an apt setting for the exuberant new revival of The Gospel at Colonus, a blend of Greek tragedy and gospel music that prem…
When Heathers The Musical first opened at New World Stages in 2014, you could feel the creators struggling to adapt the caustic 1989 dark comedy that launched the careers of Christian Slater…
There's a beguiling quality to the latest immersive theater piece from the Punchdrunk company that brought us Sleep No More. Viola's Room, which just opened at The Shed, invites groups of up…
There are some provocative ideas in play during Emmanuelle Mattana's brief and quick-paced new dramedy Trophy Boys, starting with the decision to cast women and nonbinary actors as the four …
Jay Ellis (Insecure) and Stephanie Nur (Lioness), two rising stars on film and TV, spark with a sizzling onstage chemistry in Charles Randolph-Wright ripped-from-the-headlines romantic drama…
What does a monster look like? In Angry Alan, now playing at Off Broadway's newly rechristened Studio Seaview (formerly the home of the Second Stage Theater), he bears a striking resemblance…
The provocation in Jordan Tannahill's explosive and explosively entertaining new play starts with the title: Prince Faggot. The show begins with a prologue in which all six cast members sit …
The 7 Fingers is a Montreal-based circus troupe built in the shadow of Cirque du Soleil, but the similarities only go so far. While Cirque du Soleil is now a Hollywood-scale behemoth owned b…
After a quarter-century absence, Jean Smart makes a welcome return to Broadway in the one-woman show Call Me Izzy, a glorified Lifetime movie about a middle-aged Louisiana woman who endures …
Old Macheath is back, this time flashing his pearly whites as a thief in 1850s New York City in an updated version of John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch's 1728 classic The Beggar's Opera …
There is something about ancient Greek stories that continues to resonate with us millennia later. Nearly a quarter century ago, a young playwright named Sarah Ruhl decided to tackle the leg…
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha, now playing at the Public Theater after successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Soho Playhouse, is the kind of sui generis solo performance that will have you d…
Nazareth Hassan's play Bowl EP, now playing at the Vineyard Theatre in a coproduction with the National Black Theater and the New Group, pulses with the inventiveness and infectious energy o…
"What is human? What is divine?" Those are the opening lines of the recognizably human and borderline divine new musical Goddess, which opened Tuesday at the Public Theater. They're spoken b…
Lights Out: Nat King Cole, a weirdly structured biomusical about the late, great jazz singer that opened Tuesday at the New York Theatre Workshop, is a curious exercise in polarities. The br…
Love is never quite as it seems " and lovers can be just as elusive when you try to pin down their desires. That's a truism that is reinforced in August Strindberg's Creditors, which is gett…