Actor and comedian John Leguizamo makes his playwrighting debut at The Public Theater with “The Other Americans”, which may certainly be billed as a new American Tragedy. Although it may draw some similarities to “Death of a Salesman”, featuring a dominant patriarch and the disintegration of the American Dream, the comparison ends there. The head of the Latino family that…
This fall, “the Shakespeare of pop culture satire” (NYT), playwright and performer Ryan Raftery (Mother of the Year: The Kris Jenner Musical, The Trial of Andy Warhol, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Martha Stewart) returns to Joe’s Pub with his latest creation, The Ballad of JonBenét Ramsey, a satire about our society’s insatiable obsession with true crime. Opening September…
Asaf and the members of the audience are the unwitting protagonists of Itamar Moses’s “The Ally” which is currently running at the Public’s Anspacher Theater. Asaf Sternheim (a well-meaning but uncommitted Josh Radnor) is Jewish, a writer, and an adjunct professor of writing at a prestigious American University in a struggling American city where his Korean American wife Gwen Kim…
I am an LGBTQ+ able-bodied and hearing person walking into the lobby of one of my favorite venues: The Public Theater. There is a notice on the door to mask up before entering. I am early and after masking up and picking up my ticket, I lean up against one of the columns in the lobby and check out my…
The new musical “The Visitor,” now playing at the Public’s Newman Theater, is based on the 2007 film sharing the same title, with a book by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Brian Yorkey, music by Tom Kitt and lyrics also by Mr. Yorkey. The story is the same but somehow confining it to the stage provides a better focus on the characters…
Tony Kushner’s dystopian vision has a firm grounding in the history of the rise of fascism in Germany in the early 1930s and in the methodical and somewhat meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler to Chancellor of the German Reich. This vision is embodied in “A Bright Room Called Day” currently running at The Public’s Anspacher Theater. Mr. Kushner places himself…
Once again playwright Richard Nelson has gathered another family around the colloquial table to observe their trials and tribulations as they conquer another day of survival in Rhinebeck, New York. This time around it is “The Michaels” who are the subjects of this intimate study of human behavior. The revelations evolve almost in real time as friends and family convene…
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 Public Theater’s Martinson Hall. In this incarnation,…
“Soft Power” – the culture-bending, plot-twisting musical within a play currently running at The Public’s Newman Theater – challenges the notion that the only effective parameters of power are money, race, and sex. These constructs of “hard” power are the hallmarks of greed, systemic racism, and misogyny and, from Xue Xing’s (a sensitive and alluring Conrad Ricamora) point of view,…
“There have been, and will be again, many destructions of [humankind] arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.” – Plato (“Timaeus”) Rinne Groff has created an engaging extended metaphor based on the 1911 fire that destroyed the iconic Dreamland on Coney…