Directed by Robert O’Hara, this all-Black revival of La Cage aux Folles is an Encores! production, so you know the drill: a little under-rehearsed (and who can cavil at that with less than 2 weeks to put it all together). Maybe a script in hand; a little cramped, with the orchestra right there on the…
Shakespeare Downtown is now inviting everyone for its 10th anniversary season of free outdoor summer performances of the classics. This year’s offering, at Battery Park’s historic Castle Clinton National Monument, is a limited engagement of Chekhov’s 1897 masterwork Uncle Vanya, directed and translated by the company’s co-founder Geoffrey Horne. Complimentary tickets are available at the door at…
Political theater doesn’t get much more political than Building the Wall, Robert Schenkkan’s 2017 two-hander now in timely revival at Urban Stages. Schenkkan, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Kentucky Cycle and other notable plays, many of them political, proffers a hot topic, the warehousing and mistreatment of immigrants, and sets up a tense encounter between…
A heartbreakingly excellent performance from Stephen Spinella and heavily timely subject matter infuse Jerome, John J. Caswell, Jr.’s new play now at Playwrights Horizons. It’s June; Pride Month is here, and LGBTQ-forward theater is everywhere. But Jerome can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s a love story, a soap opera, a comedy, a…
It’s no mean trick to take a Charles Dickens’ novel and distill it to its essence. But that’s the genius of the Guildford Shakespeare Company, which is presenting David Copperfield as part of 59E59’s Brits Off Broadway celebration. The semi-autobiographical novel charts the life of young David, from his opening line — “Whether I shall…
In Kip Williams’ electrifying new adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids at St. Ann’s Warehouse, the playwright’s fever dream of class resentment and fractured identity is thrust headlong into the social media age with startling immediacy and theatrical bravado. Fueled by storming performances from Phia Saban, Lydia Wilson, and Yerin Ha, this turbo-charged Donmar Warehouse…
The People Versus Lenny Bruce, now playing at Theatre Row, should’ve been called Martin Garbus Reflects on the Lenny Bruce trial and Other Stuff. Even though Lenny Bruce’s name was in the title, clearly Martin Garbus, Bruce’s trial attorney, was the star. In fact, Martin Garbus, 92, is still practicing law. He’s best known for…
Elmer Rice wrote The Adding Machine in 1923, a play about the devastating effects of technology on employment. A bookkeeper with 25-years of dependable service is replaced by an adding machine touted as more efficient, without the need of skilled labor. Mr. Zero (Daphne Rubin-Vega), a cog in a corporate machine, will be replaced by a high…
At the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Hamlet arrives not as a museum piece but as a joltingly alive modern tragedy, with director Robert Hastie stripping away centuries of dust to reveal the play’s unnerving immediacy. Led by a magnetic, emotionally volatile performance from Hiran Abeysekera, this National Theatre production proves both darkly funny and…
Baize Buzan (Photo: Alexia Haick) Beauty Freak By Julia Polinsky James Clements has given us a new play about Leni Riefenstahl. She was one of the more fascinating and polarizing people of the 20th century. Unquestionably a feminist pioneer, she was also a monster of pragmatism, using concentration-camp inmates as extras in her film, then…