Situational ethics and moral ambiguity take center stage in “KENREX,” the true crime thriller currently running at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. On July 10, 1981, in Skidmore, Missouri (population 400), a town bully was shot to death in broad daylight. Sixty witnesses watched it happen. Not one would identify the killer. Jack Holden’s astonishing solo performance—playing prosecutor David Baird, Ken…
Tony Award winner Tonya Pinkins joins the cast of La Cage Aux Folles (running June 17 – 28, 2026) as Jacqueline, along with Peter Francis James as Edouard, and Rachel Webb as Anne. They join previously announced Emmy Award winner Wayne Brady (Georges), Emmy, Grammy, and Tony winner Billy Porter (Albin), Encores! alum Alaman Diadhiou (Jean-Michel), James Jackson Jr. (Jacob),…
The prologue to “The Lost Boys,” the new musical adaptation of the 1987 Warner Bros. film now at the Palace Theatre, immediately signals Michael Arden’s dark ambitions for this material. A police officer investigates the abandoned Coronado Ironworks factory by flashlight, interrupted by Ronald Reagan’s voice on a flickering television extolling “the strength and integrity of the family.” Before the…
Joe Turner was real. Brother of the Tennessee Governor, he would swoop down on Black men in the early 1900s – gambling, preaching, just walking down the road – and keep them enslaved on chain gangs for seven years. “They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone / Got my man and gone” – the women sang it, a blues…
Balusters are the decorative posts that support a porch railing – without them, the whole structure collapses. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s wickedly sharp “The Balusters,” now at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the title works both literally and metaphorically. The Vernon Point Neighborhood Association spends considerable energy debating historically appropriate balusters for the Crawfords’ front porch, but what they…
“Time can be a blisteringly fast thing, where in the blink of an eye – ten years are gone from your life, but the next week is agony.” Nick Yarris (Adrien Brody) opens Lindsey Ferrentino’s “The Fear of 13” with this observation, and it establishes the play’s central paradox. What follows is true – a man wrongfully convicted, 22 years…
For six scenes, “Becky Shaw” unfolds in shadows – David Zinn’s dark grays, Stacey Derosier’s moody shafts of light illuminating secrets and lies. Then, in scene seven, everything floods with brightness: whites, creams, merciless clarity. It’s a design choice that mirrors Gina Gionfriddo’s thematic strategy – dragging uncomfortable truths into the light. “Unless you’re Gandhi or Jesus, you have a…
Eleven shows. Eleven days. Welcome to April’s theatrical marathon. What follows are compressed reviews – 300 words each, five shows per roundup – covering everything we’ve seen for Outer Critics Circle nominating and voting purposes. The format is leaner, but the critical standards remain unchanged: what works, what doesn’t, and why it matters. “ATTICA! ATTICA!” Sonny Amato’s battle cry turned…
At the center of Julissa Reynoso and Michael J. Chepiga’s “Public Charge,” now at the Public Theater, are two marginalized women who understood something the State Department establishment did not: that fifty years of failed policy toward Cuba needed to change. Julissa Reynoso (Zabryna Guevara), a Dominican immigrant and Obama campaign veteran, and Cheryl Mills (Marinda Anderson), Hillary Clinton’s Chief…
The most devastating moment in Ro Reddick’s “Cold War Choir Practice” is not a Soviet missile strike. It is an American bomb, planted by an American cult, detonating on South Salina Street in Syracuse, New York. As flames consume Davis’s Candy Emporium and Atomic Fireballs rain down like radioactive fallout, 10-year-old Meek (Alana Raquel Bowers) watches her nightmare made literal…