164 stories by "Tony Marinelli"
If an audience can willingly get past the contrivance that the distant relative Stevie meets over coffee, a young white man whose family generations ago once owned (and fathered!) slaves in …
Nathan Alan Davis' "The Refuge Plays," if one pays attention, is exactly about refuge: growing up with it (because someone else has lovingly created it for you), seeking it (if you feel you …
To say that Krymov works like no other director is an understatement not to be taken lightly. He is known for his inventive Russian adaptations, but he has also been earning a reputation for…
nicHi douglas' vision is one of evocative beauty, one that gives us stage pictures to treasure for some time. The seated women fanning themselves with beautiful white fans as they watch one …
LaBanca's performance in his own play defies superlatives. Including us in his choir at the beginning of the show says it all. We are relieved that he still finds joy in teaching. As he puts…
Krymov's production is a rapturous love letter to the making of theater. He unearths how we really tell our stories by our emotions, what we hide, as much as what we reveal. He uses his stag…
Sweitzer inhabits over a dozen characters in this play entitled "20 Seconds: A Play with Music," albeit two of them are him when young and him telling us the story now…two people he knows …
Somewhere there are rules for what theatre is supposed to do: it should entertain, it should instruct, it should provoke. To say that Annie Dorsen's "Prometheus Firebringer" checks all the b…
Director Rick Hamilton effectively steers the sad tale away from an endless maudlin saga. After all, the "spoiler" is in the program. Helena Weinrauch is alive and well and in her late 90's,…
Playwright Samantha Hurley does beautiful justice to the life and times (and the inner workings of the mind) of this early teen with not a lot going on but for her own fantasy world and self…
Caswell's dialogue for and wry observation of a family this dysfunctional is quite compelling. Scenes where two of the siblings verbally gang up on the third are fraught with humor as much a…
While the painstaking entry upon entry yearn to be something of import, we can't help but feel it takes a certain steadfastness and desperate commitment to make the banal seem so extraordina…
And the production is loaded with action. Except for the tender love scenes, the play moves at almost breakneck speed. Where most modern productions of Shakespeare tend toward languor, this …
From the moment he walks out with a stuffed "Disneyfied" dragon to tell us a fairy tale his mother told him when he was little, we are enraptured by Pinky, an 11-year-old Chinese boy growing…
Heartbeat Opera seems to have found the way to separate themselves from the rest of the pack of alternative opera companies here in New York. Their way is to inject the standard repertory of…
Just when you think you've seen an opera so many times you can't imagine it being told anew along comes Heartbeat Opera with a riveting take on Puccini's "Tosca."  Director Shadi G. se…
Bossert directs his own work here, thereby unfortunately removing any crucial distance from the material. Where the story of the play and the relationships we see are engaging, the play-…
For the audience, there is an ease of losing sight of the fact that what we are watching is a piece of theatre. Campbell is direct and warm and instructing and sensitive in this piece that h…
Composer/librettists O-Lan Jones and Emmett Tinley have created what they refer to as "a re-Creation Myth" in this fascinating interdisciplinary opera theater work entitled "Iceland."Â It…
Some critics would say Eric Bogosian's "Drinking in America" is dated, but that's very much up for argument. The script given to critics for the new production at the Minetta Lane Theatre is…
Director David Herskovits must have looked at this as a true labor of love, but not all of the touches support the hard work of the actors. In some of the early ensemble scenes, the actors p…
While it may have appeared a huge gamble to mount this 'Cat" again, the results are so well worth it. While other productions of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" have been mounted as star vehicles fo…
When a tall, lanky Max Ritvo entered Sarah Ruhl's playwrighting class at Yale, she knew this was no ordinary 20-year-old student. Self-described as a poet with a sense of humor, he managed t…
Denise Manning as Amani is totally believable as a 9-year-old who has had to grow up quickly without parents and her naiveté about love as she maneuvers through growing pains is touching. H…
In the most elementary explanation of a play's dramatic structure, the protagonist is the character who drives the action and is the emotional heart of the narrative. Everyone knows how the …
