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…
Writing a play about two iconic figures like Paul McCartney and John Lennon is risky business. Detailed information about their lives, their work, and their relationships is abundant and readily available. For a script about the famous pair to be engaging and relevant, the writing needs to include either new information or it needs to attempt to bring some new…
Keith Hamilton Cobb has been on an urgent mission, crisscrossing the United States since 2013 performing his “American Moor.” Mr. Cobb’s almost-one-man-show is a trope, here an extended metaphor, for the pressing need for dialogue around the systemic racism and other “false securities that our society rests on” (Rachel Elizabeth Cargle). Keith Hamilton Cobb makes it clear that unless we…
Over the period of a year, three generations of Irish women share their stories ad seriatim while in a medical office waiting room. Amber (a spitfire Lauren O’Leary) rehearses her life from taking her beau Paul to a wedding, to his abandoning her after discovering she is pregnant with his child. Amber’s “ma” Lorraine (a pensive and seemingly broken Brenda…
“Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson” a new play by Rob Ackerman is based on the actual making of an ill-fated television commercial by AT&T that discredits the cell phone coverage of rival Verizon’s network. In that commercial, actor Luke Wilson (a convincing Jonathan Sale) stands in front of a Verizon network map covered with red dots to represent their coverage…
Irish Rep’s “The Plough and the Stars” (1926) closes after the Sunday June 22nd performance. Part of the Sean O’Casey Cycle (the Dublin Trilogy) at Irish Repertory Theatre, the groundbreaking play ran in repertory with O’Casey’s “The Shadow of a Gunman” (1923) and “Juno and the Paycock” (1924) and was the company’s debut production in 1988. Artistic Director Charlotte Moore…
After a successful run in 2008 of the musical “Enter Laughing,” the revised version of the original “So Long 174th Street” which was a Broadway flop in 1976, The York Theatre Company has revived that production to kick off their 50th Anniversary season. The book by Joseph Stein, and music and lyrics by Stan Daniels, with additional material by Stuart…
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…
The latest offering at York Theater Company’s Main Stage Series is the new musical “Midnight at the Never Get.” The production history started with a successful short run at New York’s historical “Don’t Tell Mama” cabaret, and then a run at NYMF in 2016. Subsequently it had a six-week 2017 run at Provincetown Inn, Massachusetts and returned to Provincetown for…
“On Beckett,” currently playing at Irish Repertory Theatre’s Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage, is part performance, part graduate school lecture (with perambulation), part predilections on whether Samuel Beckett’s writing is “natural clown territory,” and part perusal of the importance of culture and language – all presented with perfection and seemingly unbridled passion by Bill Irwin. During Mr. Irwin’s introduction, it becomes…