mother night
Until the time of reviewing this show, I had never been to the People’s Improv Theater during the past year that I’ve spent thus far living in New York. I’d heard many good things, and I’d even considered the possibility of one day taking another improv class (my first since my high school days) at a theater such as the…
After presenting a season that included the engaging “This Day Forward” by Nicky Silver and the soaring “Kid Victory” by Greg Pierce and John Kander, the iconic Vineyard Theatre has chosen to present Gina Gionfriddo’s mostly disappointing “Can You Forgive Her.” Billed as a “ferociously funny story of lost souls grappling with emotional and financial dependence, and the costs of…
Traffic flows continuously around the “island” which is the roundabout better known as the Drawing Room of Lord Kettlewell’s (Brian Protheroe) British country estate. Things are not going well for the financier who has summoned his Etonian secretary Farrington Gurney (Charlie Field) to a rare Saturday business meeting to attempt to stop his Lordship’s substantial business losses. Nor are things…
The 2017 Broadway revival of “Miss Saigon” raises rich and deep enduring questions. Based on Giacomo Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” the mammoth musical has enjoyed decades of success – as has Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s “Les Miserables.” Success aside, the questions remain: What is the “ultimate sacrifice” one human being can make for another? What are the moral parameters involved…
“Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba: William Inge in Repertory” at Transport Group Theatre Company at the Gym at Judson leaves one longing for more William Inge and more Transport Group – perhaps a trifecta that includes the 1955 “Bus Stop.” Inge’s themes of deep angst, “small ambition,” the search for identity and purpose, lost (or abandoned) youth, choices and…
“Forty years ago this place was a fabulously tacky gay bar with a life-sized cardboard cutout of nude Burt Reynolds hanging from the ceiling. It was a church. There was live music and dancing, hustlers, drag queens, even a mother who came with her son. It was a community of people who were funny, and brave, and full of life.”…
“I’m trying, Tara, but some days… it’s not easy being the one left behind. And the last few years, it feels like everything’s going to shit in this country.” – Adam At the beginning of Ken Urban’s “Nibbler,” the world premiere joint production of the Amoralists and Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre currently running at Rattlestick, Adam (James Kautz) and Tara (Rachel…
“In the Name of God, I take you to be my husband/wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.” – From “The Book of Common Prayer” In 1958 Martin…
If the idiom “home is where the heart is” has any veracity, then the characters in Horton Foote’s 1982 “The Roads to Home” are as far from home as anyone might be. Geographically, the main characters – the three women in the first two short plays of the somewhat interconnected trilogy – are refugees from their original homes and have…
Classic Stage Company (Artistic Director John Doyle and Managing Director Jeff Griffin) announced that Jason Sudeikis will star as John Keating in the world premiere of Dead Poets Society, a new play based on the beloved 1989 film. Written by Academy Award winner Tom Schulman, adapted from his screenplay, and directed by John Doyle, Dead Poets Society is set at a…