Nancy Ma, Kim Wuan (Photo: Russ Rowland) Warrior Sisters of Wu By Julia Polinsky The tag line for Damon Chua’s delightful play, Warrior Sisters of Wu, is “Romance of the Three Kingdoms meets Pride and Prejudice.” Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a classic Chinese epic and billions of people have known and loved this…
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,…
Roger Dominic Casey, Tom Holcomb. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel) Aristocrats By Deirdre Donovan “I’m suddenly sick of Chopin — isn’t it strange?” asks Claire in the final scene of Brian Friel’s Aristocrats, but audiences visiting the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of his 1979 play may well hear Claire’s cri de coeur as…
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…
Eric Yang and Amy Kim Waschke. (Photo: Ahron R. Foster) The Far Country By Fern Siegel Immigration is a hot topic of debate. But the searing human cost is often lost in weaponizing it. Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country, now at the Atlantic Theater Company, reveals a tragic period in American history, the…
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…
The Rat Trap By Marc Miller First, a bit of history. It’s 1918, and young Noel Coward is performing in other people’s plays while trying to write his own. Under these busy circumstances he concocts The Rat Trap, which, it is speculated, he conceives to star himself and his great friend, the celebrated young actress…