David Roberts

Off-Broadway Review: “The Butcher Boy” at Irish Repertory Theatre (Through Sunday, September 11, 2022)

As children fishing together and hanging out at the hide they had built in the chicken house, Francie Brady (an emotive and troubled Nicholas Barasch) and Joe Purcell (the effervescent and spirited understudy Dan Macke at this performance) know they could “live this way forever.” But both boys live in Ireland’s troubling neocolonial times. The political violence and the economic…

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Off-Broadway Preview: “Four Saints in Three Acts” at The Doxsee at Target Margin Theater (Through Sunday, October 9, 2022)

The Lucille Lortel Theatre presents a solo play presentation of Four Saints in Three Acts, starring renowned actor David Greenspan (The Patsy, Strange Interlude) interpreting 66 unique roles.   Four Saints in Three Acts is a culmination of Greenspan’s more than decade long journey into creating a tour de force trilogy of solo interpretations of plays from the 1920’s. These previous…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at The Theater at St. Clements (Closed Sunday, August 14, 2022)

“Skipper and me had a clean, true thing between us!–had a clean friendship, practically all our lives, till Maggie got the idea you’re talking about. Normal? No!–It was too rare to be normal, any true thing between two people is too rare to be normal.” – Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” It is Big Daddy’s (a scrappy…

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Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival Shubert Theatre Review: “Much Ado About Nothing” (Closed Sunday, August 7, 2022)

Under director Matt Pfeiffer’s helm, Akeem Davis (Benedick) and Brett Ashley Robinson (Beatrice) and the cast of “Much Ado About Nothing” bring Shakespeare’s late comedy (1598 or shortly thereafter) to a welcomed level of excellence at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival 2022. This is a “Much Ado” not to be missed. In this pleasing production, Don Pedro (a likeable and energetic Lindsay…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Epiphany” Tackles Wonder Head-On at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E Newhouse Theater (Closed Sunday, July 31, 2022)

In an email with several attachments (none of which any of the invitees bothered to read), Morkan (the incomparable Marylouise Burke) invites several friends to her “very big house, on the banks of a large river, just north of a big city” to celebrate Epiphany and meet the honored guest, Gabriel. This is the setting for one of the most…

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Off-Broadway Review: The Public Theater and National Black Theatre (NBT) Production of “Fat Ham” at the Public’s Anspacher Theater (Closed Sunday, July 31, 2022)

Things are going as well as they can as Juicy (a pensive, smart, and gay Marcel Spears who is thicc, beautiful, and lonely) and his cousin and oldest friend Tio (a relaxed and clever Chris Herbie Holland who is a stoner) set up for what appears to be his mother’s wedding reception at her house in North Carolina. Earlier in…

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Off-Broadway Review: “Exception to the Rule” at the Black Box Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center (Closed Sunday, June 26, 2022)

In “Exception to the Rule,” currently playing at the Black Box Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center, is playwright Dave Harris more concerned about what might be the exception to the rule in his play’s inner-city high school classroom or what is the rule that looms over classroom one eleven’s detainees on the last day of the week…

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Broadway Review: “A Strange Loop” at the Lyceum Theatre (Currently On)

Two deeply significant plays by Jeremy O. Harris – “Daddy” (Off-Broadway 2019) and “Slave Play” (Broadway 2021) – highlighted significant issues about the self-identity of young black gay and queer men and raised rich and enduring questions about the role of family, friends, culture, and “indifferent yet fetishizing white gays” in that process of discovery. This season, Michael R. Jackson’s…

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Broadway Review: “Hangmen” at the Golden Theatre” (Closed on Saturday, June 18, 2022)

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” – “To A Mouse” by Robert Burns Despite his claim to be “quite content to keep [his] own counsel, as [he] sees fit, and leave the jibber-jabber to the riff-raff, the riff-raff,” former hangman Harry Wade (played with a menacing panache by David Threlfall) seems quite content to…

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Broadway Review: “for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf” at the Booth Theatre (Closed on Sunday, June 5, 2022)

“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 Booth Theatre for the second time…

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