Off-Broadway Archives

  • The Comedy of Errors

    The company of The Comedy of Errors (Photo:  Peter Cooper) The Comedy of Errors By Deirdre Donovan The Mobile Unit’s bilingual musical adaptation of The Comedy of Errors has been taken out of mothballs from last summer’s staging and is traveling to the city’s parks throughout the five boroughs. Directed and choreographed by Rebecca Martínez,…

  • Titanic

    The company of Encores! Titanic (Photo: Joan Marcus) Titanic By Deirdre Donovan The Tony award-winning musical Titanic closed out the Encores! 30th anniversary season at New York City Center on a high note.  Under the direction of Anne Kauffman, and with Maury Yeston’s brilliant music and lyrics intact, this sung-through concert staging of the original…

  • Staff Meal

    Susannah Flood, Greg Keller (Photo: Chelcie Parry) Staff Meal By Julia Polinsky In Staff Meal, now at Playwrights Horizons, Abe Koogler wallows in the confusing banality of everything. You might wonder if author Koogler knew of the Douglas Adams’s novel, The Restaurant at The End of the Universe, and this play is in some ways…

  • Sally and Tom

    Sheria Irving, Gabriel Ebert (Photo: Joan Marcus) Sally and Tom By Julia Polinsky The powerhouse that is Suzan Lori Parks has partnered with the Public Theater and director Steve H. Broadnax III to give us Sally and Tom. But this time, is Parks’ work about the history of American skin color politics, or about cutting a…

  • Teeth

    Jenna Rose Husli, Wren Rivera, Alyse Alan Louis, Phoenix Best, and Helen J Shen (Photo: Chelcie Parry) Teeth By David Schultz Who could have guessed that a grade B horror flick could be transmogrified into a musical? With Teeth, Anna K. Jacobs (Book & Music) and Michael R. Jackson (Book & Lyrics) have done just…

  • Illinoise

    Illinoise   By Deirdre Donovan 0 The Cast of Illinoise. (Photo: Stephanie Berger) What better time to reimagine the American musical than now? On March 2, Illinoise, the theatrical adaptation of Grammy- and Oscar-nominated Sufjan Stevens’ 2005 concept album Illinois, arrived at the Park Avenue Armory’s capacious Wade Thompson Drill Hall as a new kind…

  • White Rose

    Cole Thompson, Paolo Montalban, Jo Ellen Pellman, Kennedy Kanagawa and Mike Cefalo. (Photo:Russ Rowland) White Rose   By Fern Siegel It s easy to protest if your life isn t in danger. When it is, standing up to tyranny takes a special brand of courage. Such courage defined a group of real-life university students, led…

  • Amid Falling Walls

    The Company. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)   Amid Falling Walls   By Julia Polinsky     The Holocaust. Hardly are those words out, when they evoke the mental image: black and white photos of people passively lined up to get on to boxcars; living skeletons; ghettos as filthy and unwelcoming as prisons; concentration camps, chimneys belching…