“I’m not obsessed with sex,” the unnamed narrator of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show, Fleagbag, says early in her sixty-five minutes. “I just can’t stop thinking about it.” For this character, played by Waller-Bridge, sex is something of a numbing agent. She masturbates compulsively—”Especially when I’m bored or angry or upset. Or happy”—and picks up men to […]
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There is an unmistakable hunger to their first encounter. Andre (Alan Cumming) is old and rich and white, Franklin (Ronald Peet) young and Black. Dubbing him “Naomi,” after the supermodel, Andre buries his face in Franklin’s legs, purring, “Smooth. Like the sweetest chocolate.” But Franklin is distracted by Andre’s wealth, by his infinity pool and […]
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On the eve of partition, Donal Davoren (Adam Petherbridge, the understudy, in the performance I attended) is just trying to write some verse. Living in a cramped Dublin tenement visited by a rotating cast of caricatures, Davoren is constantly interrupted by the havering of his neighbors, who are under the impression that he is an […]
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When Merrily We Roll Along opened in 1981, Frank Rich wrote, “to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” However, this time around, it was not simpy the songs that led to the heartbreak. “Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful—that soar […]
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Vera Stark (Jessica Frances Duke), a vaudeville alumna and now maid for “America’s little sweetie pie,” Gloria Mitchell (Jenni Barber), is desperate to elbow her way into the movies in pre-Hays Hollywood. She asks Mitchell to recommend her to her director, but the squeaky-voiced diva is consumed by her own casting woes. When the script […]
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For a time, I thought Ethan Hawke was the worst, most destructive stage actor in New York City. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht—it seemed there was no canonized playwright he was unwilling to defile, no production safe from his histrionics, his loud, heavily gestural, and self-absorbed brand of performance. So it is with great delight and more […]
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