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.
Review by Julia Polinsky Cost of Living switches back and forth in time and place, interleaving the stories of two couples, with a prologue out of chronological order (Jo Bonney’s seamless direction helps hugely). Both couples consist of a caregiver and “differently-abled” partner in a wheelchair; blue-collar Eddie (David Zayas) and his estranged wife Ani,…
Between the Lines Review by Julia Polinsky “Enchanting” is not too strong a word to describe Between the Lines — especially since our heroine takes refuge in books from her overwhelmed, workaholic mother, her absent, detached father, and the general dreariness of life, and in this case, by reading and re-reading a children’s story. Based on a…
(l to r): Michael Zegen ( Al Manners ) , Alex Mickiewicz ( Eddie Fenton ) , Don Stephenson ( Bill O’Wray ) Photo: Joan Marcus Trouble in Mind By Alice Childress Reviewed by Julia Polinsky Originally an off-Broadway success in the 1950s, the play was slated to move to Broadway, but the producers wanted…
Reza Salazar, Kara Young, Ron Cephas Jones, Edmund Donovan (Joan Marcus) Clyde’s By Lynn Nottage Directed by Kate Whoriskey Reviewed by Julia Polinsky It’s such a relief to laugh in the theater again that it might escape you that, really, Clyde’s is a morality play: a demon and a boddhisattva wrestle for the…
Dep Kirkland, Alan Trinca, Christine Evangelista Photos by Jeremy Daniel MsTRIAL by Julia Polinsky Dep Kirkland’s MsTRIAL deals with men, women, power, and rape. Have we become so jaded that this terrible subject has become a mildly annoying yawn? Or is it just this play that made rape tedious? I’m betting on the…
Harvey Fierstein photos by Jeremy Daniel Bella Bella by Julia Polinsky Multiple-Tony-winning Harvey Fierstein has entered the pantheon of stars so famous, they only have one name: Bette. Barbra. Bernadette. Harvey. The show may be called Bella Bella, and be about the marvelous Mrs. Abzug, but it’s really All Harvey, All the Time; it’s…
Mary E. Hodges, Soraya Broukhim, Greg Brostrom, William Ragsdale Photos by Beowulf Sheenan The Hope Hypothesis by Julia Polinsky At the start of The Hope Hypothesis, lights come up on an unspecified government office that looks mightily like the DMV. A teller (terrific performance by Wesley Zurick), behind bulletproof glass, confronts Amena…
Rebecca Naomi Jones and Damon Daunno photos by Teddy Wolff by Julia Polinsky Director Daniel Fish’s integrated, intimate, immersive staging of one of the landmark pieces of American musical theater transforms Rodgers and Hammerstein’s sunbeams-and-cornpone vision of America into art as dark as the oil-soaked soil of the state itself. Though not…
Sara Means, Mark Evans photos Joan Marcus I Married an Angel Encores! At New York City Center by Julia Polinsky What theater aficionado doesn’t love a Rodgers and Hart score? Just knowing that Encores! was doing their dance musical, I Married an Angel, was enough to tip off anticipation. The cream on…
Mark Jacoby, Sean Hudock, Sophia Blum, Seamus Mulcahy, Carey van Driest Vilna by Julia Polinsky Vilna! An Eastern European capital of Jewish culture, “owned” in turn by Lithuania, Germany, Poland… In the 1930s, Vilna was home to 80,000 Jewish residents, and their schools, university, theatres, concert halls, galleries, all gone in just a…