Anyone with fears that there is a dearth of new musicals on the horizon can stop worrying: the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) has been hard at work since 1989 introducing writers and their new musicals to significant theatre industry leaders. The nine new musicals introduced at this year’s Festival garnered overwhelming support from those leaders who packed Stages…
Anyone attempting to assist students (high school or college) grapple with the multi-layered meanings in William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” ought to be banging down the door of Classic Stage Company’s box office to schedule a performance for their classes before this scintillating and often disturbing production of the Bard’s classic closes on Sunday November 10, 2013. The rest of…
“Downtown Loop” often takes the same “swimming” break (euphemism for a nap) its unnamed tour guide (Greg Carere) indulges in during its often exciting but sometimes boring journey through downtown Manhattan. With his trainee (Sam Soghor), the energetic but somehow jaded tour guide talks his passengers through the streets and canyons of the “demon god” of the city that never…
“There’s a big boat with a long rope and the tide has turned/pull the long rope to stop the big boat/and all that happens is your hands get burned.” – Collin “The Landing” is a smart new musical that frames three short tales. Each – “Andra,” “The Brick,” and “The Landing” – has unique characters with unique conflicts; however, the…
The Boyle family is a wounded family whose vitality has been disarmed by struggles within the family system and a myriad of conflicts without the confines of that system. Perhaps the Boyles’ most significant problem is economic: “Captain” Jack Boyle (Ciarán O’Reilly) abhors work and the mere suggestion of responding to an offer of work sends sharp pains up and…
One cannot pay off the past. Unless it is confronted and dealt with, it just keeps impacting the present and future. Although Donald Margulies’ “The Model Apartment” seems to deal solely with the detritus of Holocaust fallout, the play is about far more and warrants the current Primary Stages revival of this 1995 OBIE Award winning play at 59E59 Theaters….
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer; /Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, /The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” – William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919) All the…
“The ghosts of baseball past serve up a feast for the soul in Eric Simonson’s BRONX BOMBERS!” Reggie Jackson (Francois Battiste) in Eric Simonson’s “Bronx Bombers” is spot on: much of his bombastic rhetoric in the meeting in a hotel room in the Boston Sheraton in 1977 with Yogi Berra, Thuman Munson, and Billy Martin is “a metaphor.” Indeed, Mr….
“Lady Day,” the musical currently playing at the Little Shubert Theatre, opens with the band and Billie Holiday’s manager Robert (David Ayers) waiting for the star’s late arrival for the final rehearsal for that night’s concert at a London Theatre. What is an annoyance for the band becomes a treat for the audience when the quartet decides to rehearse “Rhythm…
“It was the ghost of rationality itself … This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why….