Should a teacher serve as an inspiration for a student’s life outside the classroom? Or are there boundaries? TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) NYC’s oldest and longest continuously producing LGBTQIA+ theater company, continues to honor its mission with its latest show, Burning Leaves, by Tom Rowan. The production combines humor, honesty, and compassion to…
Manhattan Theatre Club has burst onto the stage in this new season with a hyper-energetic, entertaining play, inspired by a true story with a warning that needs to be heeded. School Girls: or, the African Mean Girls Play is called a comedy, but its implications are far from humorous. It dramatizes a malaise familiar to…
Human Things, a new play from Joshua Owen now at the West End Theatre, leaves us with questions. Not necessarily the ones the author intended. The story follows a young couple, Margaret (Rebecca Robles) and Greg (Ben Rosenfield), who have been isolated on a remote South Pacific island for a couple of years. There is…
The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard’s 2001 play now having a limited run in an elegantly spare, beautifully acted revival at the Theaterlab, satisfies the urge to chew on exquisite language. To revel in words, words, words. To dust off your English-major quote-meter and give it a whirl (spoiler: pegged). And, alas, to wallow in…
Now playing at 59E59, Stephen Sheffer’s Lean-To, a difficult-but-somewhat-charming exploration of interpersonal relationships masquerading as a comedy, blows up fairly spectacularly, and you see it coming. If it were harder to care about the characters, if they were less likable, if your compassion weren’t evoked, it would be harder to be ticked off at the…
The profoundly felt connection between Neo-Expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and actor, director, and writer Roger Guenveur Smith is the basis of the outstanding solo show In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Created and performed by the multi-award-winning Smith, it’s now playing a limited engagement at New York Theatre Workshop, where it had a critically acclaimed sold-out run in…
In 1999, the musical revue Our Sinatra, conceived, created, and performed by Eric Comstock, Christopher Gines, and Hilary Kole, made its debut at the Algonquin Hotel’s historic Oak Room. It transferred to Off-Broadway, has played two national tours, numerous regional runs, and many nightclub engagements. The popular show has now returned to the NYC stage with a…
With the opening of Paranormal Activity, horror is alive and well on Broadway, which is saying something, considering the genre usually has a pretty high mortality rate. After its highly praised runs in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and Toronto, Paranormal Activity is attempting to bring its beloved movie franchise to the Great White Way with…
After winning multiple awards and selling out shows in Sydney and Melbourne, London’s West End, and the Edinburgh Fringe, Garry Starr: Classic Penguins is now making its US debut at Off-Broadway’s Studio Seaview. The super-wacky, rapid-fire, no-holds-barred solo comedy, written and performed by Australian native Damien Warren-Smith, takes us on a literary adventure like no…
Theater lovers can catch up on their reading and revisit some of their favorite works and NYC landmarks with two recently released books. One is a two-play volume that concludes a series of twelve critically acclaimed award-winning Off-Broadway productions; the other is a new murder mystery by an industry artist, centered on the 1975 Broadway…