public theater

public theater

Off-Broadway Review: “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf” at The Public Theater’s Martinson Hall

Since its premiere at The Public in 1976 and its subsequent transfer to Broadway later that year, much has happened to continue to impact the lives of the women of color celebrated by Ntozake Shange in her choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf” currently running at The Public Theater’s Martinson Hall. In this incarnation,…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Soft Power” at the Public’s Newman Theater

“Soft Power” – the culture-bending, plot-twisting musical within a play currently running at The Public’s Newman Theater – challenges the notion that the only effective parameters of power are money, race, and sex. These constructs of “hard” power are the hallmarks of greed, systemic racism, and misogyny and, from Xue Xing’s (a sensitive and alluring Conrad Ricamora) point of view,…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Mary Page Marlowe” at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater

Dreams. Daydreams. The dreamers write the scripts casting characters from their lives and casting themselves as the protagonists. The dreamers, write, cast, act in, and direct these phantasmagoric and kaleidoscopic vignettes that are “performed” while they are nestled in REM sleep or daydreaming on public transportation or at work. “Mary Page Marlowe,” currently running at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater,…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Fire in Dreamland” at The Public’s Anspacher Theater

“There have been, and will be again, many destructions of [humankind] arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.” – Plato (“Timaeus”) Rinne Groff has created an engaging extended metaphor based on the 1911 fire that destroyed the iconic Dreamland on Coney…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Teenage Dick” at the Public’s Shiva Theater

Playwright Mike Lew characterizes his play “Teenage Dick” as “vaguely from Richard III.” The protagonist of this engaging and quite dark play is high school junior Richard Gloucester (Gregg Mozgala). Richard has CP and likes to speak with a Shakespearean flair and verbiage. His disability and diction have made him the object of verbal and physical harassment. This Roseland High…

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Off-Broadway Review: “All I Want Is One Night” at 59E59 Theaters

Once again, a stage at 59E59 welcomes the wonderful Jessica Walker to Brits Off Broadway with her new show “All I Want Is One Night,” a somewhat bio-musical about the openly lesbian French chanteuse Suzy Solidor who opened her own nightclub La Vie Parisienne in the 1930s. Solidor’s claim to fame erupted from a publicity stunt to be recognized as…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Miss You Like Hell” Redefines Redemption at the Public’s Newman Theater

After seeing her estranged daughter’s “veiled suicide threat” on her “anonymous” blog, Beatriz (the irrepressible Daphne Rubin-Vega) drives her truck “like a bat out of hell” from California to Philadelphia to take her daughter Olivia (the deeply reflective Gizel Jiménez) on a seven-day road trip. After some mild mid-adolescent protestations, Olivia – sixteen – agrees to the trip hoping, perhaps,…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Admissions” Dissects Belief Systems at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

When a speaker raises alternate views of a significant problem and seems at one point to take “one side” and then “the other side,” and then advocates for the purity of moral ambiguity – presenting profound rhetorical arguments for each of those points of view – the audience is left bombarded by what seems like conflicting ethos, pathos, and logos…

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Off-Broaway Review: “The Low Road” at the Public’s Anspacher Theater

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft a-gley.” – Robert Burns Ever wonder how Adam Smith might spin his own free market economic theory in the throes of the current global economic turmoil? Ponder no more. “The Low Road,” currently running at the Public’s Anspacher Theater, ends the need for further speculation. In the engaging and entertaining play…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Kings” at the Public Theater’s LuEsther Hall

If there was any doubt about the monumental influence of lobbyists on Members of Congress in Washington, D.C., that uncertainty was dispelled quickly after the tragic murder of seventeen students and faculty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Wednesday February 14, 2018. Barely had the nations bereavement process begun before the NRA and the massive “I…

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