There is no doubt that “Camp Siegfried” a new play penned by Bess Wohl is extremely relevant given the current social, moral, and political landscape that has evolved in the past few years. The similarities might actually border on being frightening. The title and subject matter refer to a summer camp, one of many throughout the country, where German youth…
You will get sick. It happens. You do not know why. Often you do not want to tell anyone you are sick. Perhaps you might even pay someone to talk to you about your illness. Yet after all that, you still might die. And you are not alone. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner wrote about “When Bad Things Happen to Good…
Playwright Mia Chung intends to raise a rich and enduring question in her play “Catch as Catch Can” currently running at Playwrights Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theater: “What is inherent in our inheritance? What is universal?” Unfortunately, this question is not addressed nor answered in her character-driven play featuring Cindy Cheung, Jon Norman Schneider, and Rob Yang as Irish American…
Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” debuted on Broadway in 1959 and appeared in London’s West End five months later. The musical adaptation “Raisin” won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1973 and the play had two Broadway revivals in 2004 and 2014. This powerful and ground-breaking story of a financially strapped Chicago South Side Black extended family’s…
Marin Gazzaniga’s “The Unbelieving” is based on select interviews from the 2013 book “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind” by Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola. The authors interview clergy from various denominations who have been grappling with their loss of faith in the divine and their fears of being hypocritical by not sharing their unbelief with their congregations/adherents….
Every once in a while, there comes along a little gem of a play that certainly will knock you off your feet, especially if it is a first-rate production and impeccably performed by two remarkable actors. This happens to be the case at hand on the stage of The Irish Repertory Theatre, where Chester Bailey penned by Joseph Dougherty is…
Currently running at Classic Stage Company, “A Man of No Importance” chronicles gay middle-aged bus conductor Alfie Byrnes’s (a gloomy and dispirited Jim Parsons) struggles to claim his agency in 1960s Dublin, Ireland’s repressive homophobic environment. His sexual status defines him as a criminal; however, Alfie self-defines as an ordinary man who secretly loves Robbie Faye (a spirited and generous…
There is too much noise on the set of Victor I. Cazares’s “american (tele)visions” currently running at New York Theatre Workshop (co-produced with Theatre Mitu). Although that noise comes from what is certainly a dynamic and innovative set design by Bretta Gerecke and a clever technical design by Theatre Mitu’s Justin Nestor, Alex Hawthorn, and Kelly Colburn, it unfortunately masks…
Elodie (Francesca Carpanini) and Otto (Uly Schlesinger) reunite in a bedroom after they meet in a town square in Chartres, France in August 1944. Crazy things happened in the square including Elodie having what seems an epileptic seizure. A woman laughed at Elodie, and Otto wanted to spit on her. Before Elodie arrives, she has visited the bombed out Gornall’s…
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the definition of “cycle” is a permutation of a set of ordered elements in which each element takes the place of the next and the last becomes the first. Using that definition, it seems safe to interpret the new musical production “Los Otros,” now playing at A.R.T., a song cycle. Two characters, Lillian (an enthralling…