Chatillion Stage Company’s “Tech Support,” currently running at 59E59 Theaters, begins with the play’s protagonist Pamela Stark (Margot White) frantically pacing around in her West Village well-appointed apartment as she remains on hold waiting for tech support for her malfunctioning printer. Pamela deals in antique books and when she finally reaches tech support, she tells Chip, “I need to pack…
In the appropriately titled play “The Waiting Game” by Charles Gershman, what quickly becomes apparent to the audience is that everyone in the play is waiting for something. Sam is in a coma from a drug overdose, waiting to wake up, die while in the coma or have someone terminate his life by pulling the plug. His husband Paolo is…
There is no doubt that the so called “Hello Girls,” the bilingual operators that were sent to the front line to operate secured switchboards, were invaluable to the Signal Corps units in World War I. It is unfortunate that they needed to fight for sixty years to be recognized as veterans of that war in order to receive appropriate benefits….
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” – Howard Campbell Howard Campbell’s (an even tempered and soft-spoken Gabriel Grilli) non-linear journey from Nazi Germany’s radio propaganda machine in World War II to his self-execution in 1961 is the subject of The Custom Made Theatre Company’s “Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night,”…
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…
It is difficult to parse David Byrne’s “Secret Life of Humans,” currently running at 59E59 Theaters, without issuing spoiler alerts. As the eighty-five-minute play unfolds, three “stories” – one lasting a single night, one across a lifetime, and one that spans humanity’s sixty-million-year history, collide in a cathartic resolution that jangles the senses. Inspired by Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief…
What are two aging ex-hippies supposed to do when the socio-political environment around them escalates its full-frontal assault on the values they espoused and fought so passionately for in the sixties and seventies? Not only do they continue to feel “stalked” by “corporate bastards” like the cable company, but they are about to be evicted from their rent-controlled apartment on…
Steeped in tradition, a musical commentary relevant to the current socio-political atmosphere, and an old tale told with songs that echo the poets of the past and the spoken word of the present, are the skeleton of “Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story,” the Klezmer-folk music-theater hybrid now playing at 59E59 Theaters. The Wanderer (a captivating Ben Caplan) is the…
The New York premiere of the not-so-new musical “The Mad Ones” is making its New York premiere and being presented by Prospect Theater Company at 59E59 theaters. It is a coming of age story that is propelled by the Jack Kerouac’s iconic 1957 novel “On the Road” but laden with clichés, superfluous situations and a skimpy script that tries to…
One of the territories occupied in Nancy Bannon and Mollye Maxner’s “Occupied Territories,” currently running at 59E59 Theaters, is the Jungle of Vietnam in 1967 during what seemed at the time to be an interminable and unpopular war. In the revival of the Theater Alliance’s 2015 play, that war appears as a haunting memory for Jude (Nancy Bannon) and her…