Stephen McKinley Henderson in Between Riverside and Crazy. Photo by Joan Marcus Between Riverside and Crazy By David Schultz Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis must be grinning like The Cheshire Cat. First staged almost ten years ago at The Atlantic Theater in Chelsea, followed by a move uptown to The Second Stage in 2015,…
Nancy Robinette, Daniel Oreskes, Richard Masur, Ari Brand, Ethan Haberfield (Photo: Jeremy Daniels) Prayer for the French Republic By David Schultz Complex generational stories are a dime a dozen. Prayer for the French Republic, penned by Joshua Harmon (Significant Other, Bad Jews), is the exception. This play, currently running at Manhattan Theatre Club s Friedman…
Jeremy Pope and Paul Bettany in The Collaboration. Photo by Jeremy Daniel The Collaboration By Julia Polinsky Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration, as directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah at the Old Vic in London, has been beautifully transferred to the Manhattan Theatre Club. Interesting, eye-filling, and talky, The Collaboration presents the manipulated collaboration and unexpected…
Ohio State Murders By Julia Polinsky It must be said: Audra McDonald is a force of nature, and her performance in Ohio State Murders is wrenchingly, devastatingly sublime. Those are fighting words, perhaps, but it would be hard to find another single actor who could drive a play about race, murder, failure, and success, while…
Andrianna Hicks, (center, l) J. Harrison Ghee (center, right) (Photo: Matthew Murphy) Some Like It Hot By Fern Siegel The Billy Wilder’s 1959 movie classic “Some Like It Hot” remains the top comedy on the American Film Institute’s list. And for some cinema purists, turning it into a musical comedy on Broadway…
The Piano Lesson by Cammy Paglia Tony Award nominee Latanya Richardson Jackson makes her directorial debut in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Piano Lesson, a masterpiece that not only tugs on your soul, it forces the mind to venture into the ugly truth which underlies the story of America’s shameful…
Victoria Clark plays the lead in the off-beat musical. (Joan Marcus) Kimberly Akimbo By Fern Siegel Sometimes the youngest person in the room is the wisest even if she is 16 and looks like a 72-year-old. That s the premise behind the Broadway musical Kimberly Akimbo, starring Victoria Clark as the smart, dry-humored New…
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins in Topdog/Underdog. Photo: Marc J. Franklin Topdog/Underdog Review by Julia Polinsky Topdog/Underdog tells the story of two brothers — Black men — endlessly vacillating between contempt and admiration for each other; affection and anger; conflict and cooperation; who’s winning, who’s losing. Named for an American president and his assassin,…
Review by Julia Polinsky Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt weaves a tale of family, place, time, and identity. The family is Jewish, the place Vienna, the time surrounds the Holocaust, and the question of identity is answered with a very hard kick. Leopoldstadt’s five acts, which occur in 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938 and 1955, take place in…
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,…