The most recent revival of “Little Shop of Horrors” by the musical theatre team Howard Ashman and Alan Menken surely proves to be timeless and timely. The musical numbers still seem to linger in your head long after you leave the theater just as they did when the show first opened off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theatre in 1982. The plot…
Four years after the Ardeatine Caves Nazi Massacre, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty (a conflicted and contrite Sean Gormley) visits Colonel Herbert Kappler (a robust and tenacious Haskell King) in his cell in an old-fashioned prison in Gaeta, Southern Italy. Kappler, an SS Colonel and head of Hitler’s Gestapo in Rome, was responsible for the massacre of 355 Italians (a random number…
“Slave Play,” currently running on Broadway at the Golden Theatre, reiterates the events on the fourth day of the Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy being held at MacGregor Plantation, a few miles south of Richmond, Virginia. Three couples have signed up for the workshop to engage in the “radical therapy designed to help black partners re-engage intimately with white partners from…
Jack Thorne’s “Sunday,” currently running at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, seems to elicit one of two responses: disappointment or robust enthusiasm. A group of Gen Z friends gather in a New York City apartment for one of what has become Sunday Book Club gatherings. This Sunday’s meeting is at Marie’s (a somewhat broken and conflicted Sadie Scott) and…
“Bernard Shaw’s Caesar & Cleopatra,” currently playing in Theatre 1 at Theatre Row, injects a palpable dose of modernity into the history of the relationship between Caesar’s Rome and Cleopatra’s Egypt. The 1898 play parses the political landscape in Shaw’s fictionalized account of the relationship between the royal pair and Cleopatra’s desire to assume complete control of the throne from…
Undertaker John Plunkett (Jeffrey Bean) and his intern Mark (Cillian Hegarty) enter the office of a funeral home on the Northside of Dublin where John works. They have just finished a service and John compliments Mark on his work at the graveside. With that non-descript arrival, Conor McPherson’s “Dublin Carol,” currently playing at Irish Repertory Company, begins its narrative. Over…
When couples have conversations about aging and approaching the end of their lives, generic yet fundamental questions arise. “What happens if I die before you? “Do you think you will die before I do? What am I going to do without you? “How will I live without you? “Is there anything you want to tell me before one of us…
The one and probably only thing you may be sure of when you leave the Cort Theatre after viewing the recent production of “Derren Brown: Secret” is that Mr. Brown is a very likable and convincing fellow, along with being a wonderful entertainer. He assures you that he cannot read your mind, that there is nothing contrived and there are…
As a result of playwright Mfoniso Udofia’s profound interest in the African Diaspora, perhaps no fictional couple in the recent history of Off-Broadway theatre have had their histories more parsed than Nsikan Disciple Ufot and his wife Abasiama Ekpeyong Ufot. “runboyrun” and “In Old Age,” currently running at New York Theatre Workshop, are the third and eighth plays in Mfoniso…
Part group therapy, part intervention, part Doctors Phil and Ruth, “Fern Hill,” currently running at 59E59 Theaters through Sunday October 20, 2019, rehearses the events at Sunny’s (Jill Eikenberry) and Jer’s (Mark Blum) country farmhouse (Fern Hill) that take place with their close couple friends and frequent guests Vincent (John Glover) and Darla (Ellen Parker) and Billy (Mark Linn-Baker) and…