Mr. Ackerman and Ms. Rebeck have built a play that thrives on vacillating between tension and comedy, living somewhere in between the audience’s conscious of comfortable backstage drama and biting political commentary on existing power structures, perfectly suited for the multi-tasking, conscious-raising audiences of America 2019.
Read More“13 Fruitcakes” dazzles and destroys in one-two punches expertly strung along thirteen original musical vignettes depicting the queer experience across history. These thirteen scenes transport us from ancient to modern times, highlighting obscure and noteworthy LGBTQ+ figures and the prices they paid throughout their historical impact, ranging from AD 780 Korean King Hyegon.
Read MoreMIDNIGHT STREET, a dramatic, perplexing new musical written and directed by Arnold L. Cohen, with music direction by Matt Castle, is currently slogging its way through a run at Theatre Row through June 22.
Read MoreVanguard Theater Company's Broadway Buddy Mentorship Program offers emerging musical theater artists, ages 12 - 25, a unique opportunity for on-on-one mentorship with some of Broadway's most accomplished and rising performers, that culminated in a once in a lifetime cabaret performance on June 3, 2019, at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space.
Read MoreA poignant exploration of life, love, and loss, Emanuele Aldrovandi’s “Butterflies,” making its United States premiere currently at The Tank through June 8, unfolds over the next ninety minutes as a rollercoaster of blunt dialogue mashed with symbolic theatricality, a masterclass in heartbreaking coming of age vignettes.
Read MoreGina Femia’s extraordinary new high school-set play “The Virtuous Fall of The Girls From Our Lady of Sorrows” utilizes a simple premise to dive headfirst into the complex, all-too disheartening vortex known as the patriarchy. Set in the not-so-distant past immediately following 9/11, the play follows an adolescent group of girls trying to stage an original adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Measure For Measure” at their all-girls Catholic school.
Read MoreVanguard Theater Company’s “A Little Princess” bursts with the earnest vivacity of a small child at Christmas—or make that rather, twenty small children shining on stage currently in this valiant tale of a girl whose spirit can’t be squashed. Based on the classic novel by Frances Hodson Burnett, this “A Little Princess” by composer Andrew Lippa and book and lyric writer Brian Crawley hops, skips, and jumps it’s way around the dark Victorian undercurrents of racism and classism, preferring instead to bask in the warm glow of youthful optimism and defiant “keep your chin up” songs.
Read MoreAuthor Jean Kerr once quipped, “Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.”
Kerr is full of such quips, and she uses them hungrily in her 1960s comedy hit, "Mary, Mary," being revived ambitiously by Retro Productions at the Gene Frankel Theatre downtown.
"Mary" is about what happens when two people have married each other, separated, and after vigorously looking to the right and left, through a number of snarky quips, get back together happily ever after, no questions asked.
Read MoreIn a world enraptured equally by Game of Thrones and Fox News politics, female leaders vying for a place in the history books being pitted against each other is nothing new. In this fresh take on perhaps the world’s most iconic sister rivalry of Mary, Queen of Scots vs. Elizabeth I of England, Mary Stuart examines female leadership under the eyes of family, politics, and religion in a production fit for a Queen.
Read MoreTo go or not to go? If that is the question of this review, New Yorkers looking to escape the pendulum swing happening between seasons outside right now should get themselves inside to The Center at West Park where Hamlet Isn’t Dead’s “Hamlet” captivates and excites.
Read MoreWritten, directed, and choreographed by the industrious and passionate Yehuda Hyman, “THE MAR VISTA: In Search of My Mother’s Love Life” is a comical, semi-autobiographical dance-play hybrid that ultimately gets lost within its dizzying breadth of aspirations.
Read MoreMove over “Mean Girls,” there’s a new queen bee in town. Nine to be precise, currently gracing the stage at Theater 80 St Marks in the new musical We Are The Tigers.
Read MoreProvocative, whimsical, and ethereal, the Daniel Gwirtzman Dance Company defies expectations of postmodern dance and soars, unafraid to take risks and dazzle with unflinching honesty.
Read MoreMs. Heckler’s direction and the ensemble’s script are equal parts shockingly brave and vulnerable, a raw dissection of one girl’s decisions magnifying a nation’s sickness. The dialogue in the show is lifted from interviews with, tweets at, and scenes of female pornstars and the effortless juxtaposition of different formats from monologues to sound clips to choreographed interpretive porn scenes elucidate the team’s overall creative mastery.
Read MoreWorried about the fate of live performance or cinema in this digital age? Run to see Frankenstein at The Public’s Under the Radar Festival this month and you’ll be shouting, “It lives!!”
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein turns the anatomy of a play inside out in a unique amalgamation of shadow puppetry, cinematic techniques, sound, and live music. Interwoven stories of Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, and his Monster unfold before one’s eyes in a 97-minute spectacle of nonverbal, unadulterated marvel in which actors and technicians are one entity, seamlessly transitioning between a multitude of characters and multimedia platforms to tell the story. Three playing areas exist comprised of live feed cameras, lights, projecting screens, and puppets that allow Manual Cinema to manually create a sort of live movie projected on one giant screen above center stage.
Read More“Ruben & Clay’s First Annual Christmas Carol Family Fun Pageant Spectacular Reunion Show” panders and meanders its way through a muddy mix of Christmas songs and jokes, that equal parts put you in the holiday spirit as they do put you to sleep.
Read MoreIn an age of inescapable information inundation, First Maria Ensemble’s “Macbeth,” directed with ferocity by Celeste Moratti, is a light in the dark. Lines are blurred between truth and fake news, leadership and tyranny, and this production shines with an earnest honesty to interrogate Shakespeare’s classic text in a way that can only be driven by our modern time’s aggrandization of the self in an increasingly isolating world.
Read MoreBlog dedicated to show reviews of Broadway and nationwide Community Theater. Blog also discusses theatre water cooler topics and stories from personal theatre experience.
