If you took On the Town, stripped it down, and gave it a lobotomy, it might end up very like No Singing in the Navy, now cavorting upstairs at Playwrights Horizons. The entertainment, "writt…
"My joy is heavy." What the heck does that mean? Well, you'll find out at My Joy Is Heavy, the autobiographical musical by the Bergsons at New York Theatre Workshop, detailing a painful time…
With a title like Chinese Republicans, you're bound to wonder what the heck you're in for. But Alex Lin's new play at the Roundabout's Laura Pels is, in fact, about Chinese Republicans, a ve…
First of all: Jacob Perkins can really write for women. The women in The Dinosaurs, his new drama at Playwrights Horizons, argue, confront, and support one another with great believability a…
Attention, baby boomers: Get out your miniskirts and bell bottoms! Going Bacharach: The Songs of an Icon, a musical retrospective of Burt Bacharach and (mostly) Hal David, summons up the mid…
The press rep at Irish Repertory Theatre, always helpful and cheery, seemed even more effusive than usual, as if she were about to hand out tickets to a winner. She wasn't wrong. The Honey T…
Full disclosure: It's a Wonderful Life is probably my favorite movie. As a movie-addled teenager I wrote Frank Capra a fan letter about it, and he responded, in part: "In thanking me so sinc…
Leaving/speaking. People/evil. Moment/torment. It's evident from the outset that with Tartuffe, his adaptation of Molière's 1664 classic, Lucas Hnath is attempting rhymed verse, as Richard …
A noble institution, the American Dance Machine. Founded in 1978 by Lee Theodore, an ex-Broadway hoofer (West Side Story, Tenderloin, on and on) turned choreographer (Baker Street, Flora, th…
Rarely have I had to review a play whose meaning is as utterly elusive as that of Practice, Nazareth Hassan's comedy-drama-whatsit now being unveiled at Playwrights Horizons. Practice, the p…
Isn't it annoying when a pair of characters onstage start jabbering back and forth in a language you don't know, furthering the plot in ways you'll never understand? It happens at least twic…
Sandwiches. A strange commodity on which to hang a plotline, but they're a persistent leitmotif in Archduke, Rajiv Joseph's speculative history of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Jos…
You have to suspend a lot of disbelief"really, shouldn't the phrase be "suspend belief?""to get the most out of Oh Happy Day!, Jordan E. Cooper's uncategorizable comedy-drama-musical-specula…
Mellow jazz is playing, and the Playwrights Horizons stage is plainly dressed: Emmie Finckel's set design consists of two folding chairs, a small table in between with two coffee cups and a …
So, Eric Krebs, who runs a theater on far West 42nd, treks to work one morning and is greeted by a large manila envelope resting by the door. Intrigued, he opens it to find a script and a no…
The 2017 indie film Saturday Church is a musical, of sorts. But all of the songs are happening in the head of its protagonist, Ulysses, a troubled Black teen in some vaguely defined New York…
On the morning of January 13, 2018, Hawaii's Emergency Alert System issued a warning of an impending ballistic missile attack, widely believed to have emanated from North Korea and plunging …
Irish Repertory Theatre really loves The Weir. They've done Conor McPherson's drama three times since 2013, most recently a digital staging during early pandemic days. Their affection for th…
It hasn't even opened as I write this, but Prince F*ggot, a joint production of Soho Rep and Playwrights Horizons, has already generated plenty of social media vitriol, mostly of the "how da…
I'm no Molière authority, so I can't say how many liberties Jeffrey Hatcher has taken in his adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid, now being presented by Red Bull Theater at New World Stages…
He enters, rising up out of the floor, back to the audience, in a pink spangled blazer, like a gaudier Velma Kelly about to launch into "All That Jazz." But Ryan J. Haddad has other things o…
The Irish Repertory Theatre is in an uncharacteristically jocular mood. Irishtown, Ciara Elizabeth Smyth's comedy, is a slight but merry look at Irish theatre's history, its nature, and let'…
What's most impressive about Becoming Eve"and there's a lot"is its generosity of spirit. Emil Weinstein's play at New York Theatre Workshop's temporary quarters on Grand Street, adapted from…
I'm smiling this morning. Who Is Jimmy Pants?, the second in New2NY's trio of staged readings at the York Theatre Company, is silly and inconsequential, but it's also one big long grin.
Some playwrights we appreciate because we don't know what they're going to come up with next, and some we appreciate because we do. Joshua Harmon surely belongs in the latter category, for a…