a new york-based theater blog
If aliens with little knowledge of human beings decided to write a musical about Edgar Allan Poe, but somewhere along the way confused him with one of Tim Burton’s misfits, they couldn’t do much worse than Nevermore: The Imaginary Life & Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. To call it bad—and it is atrocious—is almost to […]
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Director Ross Williams has an nice, inventive touch, and his production of Titus Andronicus is filled with small but effective flourishes. There is, for example, the large, lit-up target that brandishes the back of the stage, which offers some effective foreshadowing when the newly-minted emperor Saturninus (Vince Gatton) stands in front of it and raises his arms in […]
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Jack Singer (Rob McClure) has the Jewish mother to end all Jewish mothers. On her deathbed, Bea (Nancy Opel) asks her son, “How can I know you’ll love me forever, unless I’m sure that you will never get married?” adding that “no other woman could love you like your mommy does.” Unsurprisingly, this Oedipal incident gives […]
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Death is good business in Moira Buffini’s Dying for It, a “free adaptation” of Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 The Suicide. Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov (Joey Slotnick) is an out of work Soviet who, somewhat accidentally, decides to kill himself. The once unpopular schlemiel is now barraged by a horde of obsequious vultures who want to seize upon his upcoming death for their own gain, […]
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