a new york-based theater blog
Stomping around the stage like Godzilla terrorizing Tokyo, the “internationally ignored song stylist” Hedwig (Darren Criss) spends nearly two hours performing what is less a traditional musical and more an almost one-man drag/cabaret show. An East Berliner who was seduced and abandoned by an American G.I., he finally made it to America after the botched sex change […]
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Calamity is brewing on the eve of country superstar Justin Spears’ (David Lind) wedding. Justin is in a prankish, gun-toting kind of mood. His bride-to-be is rightfully concerned about his whereabouts. His business partners are about to be given the shaft. Most importantly, his weed smoking, pill craving, alcoholic uncle Jim (Mark Roberts) is en […]
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Freelance journalist Kim (Samantha Soule) spends an evening with Carl (John Doman), the leader of a father and son ghost hunting team. Carl is a chauvinistic codger who thinks he knows everything about women and spirits. Yet unbeknownst to him, Kim is harboring a ghost: the vengeful presence of her dead mother lives inside her, manifesting […]
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A.R. Gurney has a knack for writing formally inventive plays that are, ultimately, rather conservative. Love Letters, which recently had a run on Broadway, is entirely epistolary, but the story it tells—about nostalgia, about the passage of time—is affecting but conventional. Now the Signature is reviving What I Did Last Summer, in which many of the […]
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Molière’s Don Juan is an amiable little comedy, a recklessly blasphemous sendup of religious faith and other hypocrisies, with the title character (Justin Adams) abandoning all calls for decency and kindness in favor of a monomaniacal pursuit of sexual gratification. And he really does seem sincere every time, worshipping each successive woman and then quickly abandoning her once a new one appears. […]
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“A Moscow aristocrat, by your accent,” Strelnikov (Paul Alexander Nolan) tells the doctor/poet Yurii Zhivago (Tam Mutu) in the musical bearing his name. I suppose it’s possible pre-revolutionary Moscow aristocrats spoke in crisp BBC English, but more likely director Des McAnuff has told his actors to avoid integrating any Slavic into their performance. It may […]
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona has unjustly been dismissed by most scholars. Harold Bloom, for instance, calls it “the weakest of all Shakespeare’s comedies.” But if it doesn’t have the meat of later plays like The Merchant of Venice or All’s Well That Ends Well, it does offer humbler pleasures. Fiasco, a company that previously mounted amiable if underwhelming productions […]
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