Editor
Julia Polinsky wrote, directed, produced, and starred in her first play when she was 7 years old. She’s been paying a lot of attention to theater ever since.
Helen Schneider, Lucca Züchner (Photo: Maria Baranova) Last Call By Julia Polinsky In 2025, it’s challenging to remember that the 1930s and 40s shaped the rest of the 20th century culturally as well as economically and politically. In Last Call, the world premiere play by Peter Danish now at New World Stages, remind us of…
Mia Barron, Abubakr Ali (Photo: Matthew Murphy) Dakar 2000 By Julia Polinsky Playwright Rajiv Joseph, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and twice won the Obie, offer us Dakar 2000, a slick, twisty two-hander at Manhattan Theater Club’s City Center venue. Set in the last few days before Y2K, which at this point…
What and how you speak: this is who you are. That is the idea behind Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, English, now at the Roundabout. A co-production with the Atlantic Theater Company, English is set a classroom in Iran, where students are preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). English presents…
Andrew Garman, Amelia Workman, Julius Rinzel (Photo: Emilio Madrid) The Antiquities By Julia Polinsky Two women, one heavily pregnant, dressed in the style of the early 19th Century, stand at the front of the dimly lit stage, and peer out into the audience as if it were a museum display. “Thank you for coming,” they…
There are two kinds of people: those who are willing to be enchanted by magic shows, and those who are all about figuring it out. Whether or not enchantment works for you, spending 90 minutes with Vinny DePonto’s Mindplay will be a delight. DePonto delivers patter like a showman, introducing the illusions and weaving a…
Ella Dershowitz (Photo: Valerie Terranova) Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library By Julia Polinsky A basement prison cell: white walls, high windows. Two chairs, a desk, a door. A young man (Brett Temple) in a German army uniform of the early 1930s hustles in a young woman (Ella Dershowitz). He demands her purse,…
Funny/not funny, and timely as hell, Eureka Day pokes hard at the vaccination debate. Manhattan Theatre Club, known for producing plays that deal with difficult subjects, somehow makes even the thorniest controversies deeply entertaining. They have done it again: Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day mercilessly satirizes the aggressively woke parents and board members at Eureka Day,…
Bedlam’s Music City, a country-western musical featuring the songs of million-selling songwriter JT Harding, is as warm-hearted and feel-good as a Hallmark Christmas movie. Even if you don’t particularly like country music, some kickass performances from superb performers, a tight, bright musical sound, and a gritty, welcoming, enveloping environment make this almost-jukebox musical a must—see….
Swept Away is a standout entry in the grim-but-entertaining Fall 2024 Broadway season. It’s a solid tell-don’t-show work, in which a narrator talks to the audience to tell a story, at least partly in flashback (book by John Logan). Michael Mayer’s direction makes the most of this storytelling technique, a solid cast, and some lovely…
Maybe Happy Ending, now on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, looks great, sounds great, has splendid performances and touches the heart as it explores what it means to be human. Or to love. Or both. It has real songs, that advance the show and reveal the characters’ thoughts. It has fireflies. It has robots in…