The musical “Titanique,” a parody of the well-known movie “Titanic,” has managed to dock at the Broadway stage of the St. James Theatre after it set sail from Los Angeles in 2017. It made a couple of stops at the Green Room for its New York premiere in 2018, and then berthed for three years at the off-Broadway, Asylum Theatre,…
Some may say that Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” may be the greatest play of the 20th century and there is evidence that supports that claim. It premiered on Broadway in 1949, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the TONY Award for Best Play. The sixth Broadway revival is now playing at The Winter Garden starring Nathan Lane…
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…
“Giant,” the new play penned by Mark Rosenblatt that opened on Broadway refers to the well-known author of children’s books Roald Dahl. The word ‘Giant’ may pertain to Dahl standing six foot six inches in height, to his enormous status in the literary world, or to the giant who so often is sought after to be slain. In this case…
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…
The latest offering at the Vineyard Theatre is “Bughouse,” conceived and directed by Martha Clarke, with a script adapted from the writings of Henry Darger, by Beth Henley. For those who are not familiar with the subject matter, Henry Darger was a prolific visual artist and epic novelist. He had a troubled childhood, losing his mother when he was 4…
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…
In her program notes for “You Got Older,” playwright Clare Barron shares her “optimistic belief that there is profound comfort in just living privately together. Life and desire can persist even if all we can muster up is the courage and time to sit together with something unspeakable between us.” It’s a beautiful articulation of what this 2014 play—now receiving…
Anna Ziegler’s “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School),” currently at the Public Theater’s Barbaralee Theater, is not the Sophocles tragedy I taught in high school—but then again, neither is James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham” the Hamlet Shakespeare wrote. The difference is that Ijames trusts his reimagining enough to tell his story without constantly stopping to explain it….