Category Archives: Off-Broadway
Review: In Masks Outrageous and Austere
I’ve been living in Tennessee Williams land for the last couple of years, directing two of his lesser known plays, The Strangest Kind of Romance and Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws, the latter in its New York premiere. In … Continue reading
Filed under Off-Broadway, play, review, theatre
Review: Carrie
This latest incarnation of the legendarily troubled musical by Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford, is an entertaining mess – not great, but not awful. Its infamous 1988 Broadway run reportedly had some of the worst problems of tone and taste, … Continue reading
Filed under musical, Off-Broadway, review, theatre
Review: Gob Squad’s “Kitchen”
I have a very special relationship to the 1965 Andy Warhol film Kitchen. In the years following Kitchen‘s very limited art house cinema release, Ron Tavel, Warhol’s scenario writer, adapted Kitchen into a stage play called Kitchenette, which in various … Continue reading
Filed under Off-Broadway, play, review, theatre
Review: Rent
When Rent first opened I was freshly transplanted to the East Village from the Midwest. I arrived weeks before it opened, and was mildly curious about this edgy little musical playing at the New York Theatre Workshop. I didn’t go, … Continue reading
Filed under musical, Off-Broadway, review, theatre
Review: Freud’s Last Session
Mark St. Germain’s play imagines a meeting between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis in September 1939 on the eve of WWII – and only two weeks before Freud chose to take his own life to end his battle with oral … Continue reading
Filed under Off-Broadway, play, review, theatre
CD Review: Death Takes A Holiday
Death Takes a Holiday (music and lyrics by Maury Yeston) draws on Albert Casella’s 1924 Italian play La Morte in Vacanza about the Grim Reaper (Kevin Early) taking human form to spend a weekend at a lakeside villa where he … Continue reading
Review: All New People
Zach Braff’s All New People is at its best when it’s a smart, gently poignant sitcom, and seriously strained when it goes for much more than that. Thirty-something Charlie (Justin Bartha, looking surprisingly unsexy in a full beard) is deeply depressed, … Continue reading
Filed under Off-Broadway, play, review, theatre
Review: Zarkana
Cirque du Soleil is at it again, this time taking over the legendary Radio City Music Hall for Zarkana, an acrobatic rock opera. The story follows Zark, a magician who has lost his powers – and the love of his … Continue reading
Filed under musical, Off-Broadway, review, theatre
Review: One Arm
I’m a little surprised that, in this year of Tennessee Williams’s hundredth birthday, we aren’t seeing more productions of his plays in New York City – none of his really big Broadway hits are getting an airing. I’m glad, however, … Continue reading
Filed under Off-Broadway, play, review, theatre
Archive Review: Edward II
From December 2007: Edward the Second is one of the greatest tragedies written by Christopher Marlowe, the only playwright in Shakespeare’s day who could write as well as him (and sometimes better). It is, without a doubt, the most forthright … Continue reading
Filed under From the Archives, Off-Broadway, play, review, theatre
