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,…
Melanie Long in Angel of the Amazon Angel of the Amazon By Cammy Paglia Under the direction of Nancy Rhodes and musical direction by Elizabeth Hastings, composer-librettist Evan Mack’s Angel of the Amazon is an operatic portrayal of a devout soul who was assassinated for her convictions. Mack was inspired to write the work after…
(l-r) A.J. Shively and Jim Parsons (Photo: Julieta Cervantes) A Man of No Importance By Fern Siegel “You love who you love,” Alfie Byrne, a middle-aged bus conductor in 1963 Dublin explains to a friend. Alfie is making a philosophical statement, but quietly underscores the “love that dare not speak its name.” Yet in his…
By Cammy Paglia Belgian born actor Ronald Guttman takes on the daunting task of elucidating the inner workings of the complex mind of Nobel Prize winning philosopher, Albert Camus in the stage production of The Fall. Directed by Didier Flamand and adapted for the stage by Alexis Lloyd, tickets will give you entree to 70 minutes…
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,…
The Roundabout Theatre Company’s 1776 cast. (Photo: Joan Marcus) 1776 By Fern Siegel The Broadway musical 1776, which chronicles the founding of the United States, opens with 10 pairs of shoes on an empty stage. And as the cast enters – female, nonbinary and trans – they step into history. When it first debuted in…
Francesca Carpanini,Austin Pendleton, Angelina Fiordellisi, Uly Schlesinger Photo by Emilio Madrid This Beautiful Future By Marc Miller This Beautiful Future could have been sweet. A World War II love story, and how many of those do we get anymore, where the nice young couple overcome cultural differences, grope toward greater understanding, and point their lives…
Between the Lines Review by Julia Polinsky “Enchanting” is not too strong a word to describe Between the Lines — especially since our heroine takes refuge in books from her overwhelmed, workaholic mother, her absent, detached father, and the general dreariness of life, and in this case, by reading and re-reading a children’s story. Based on a…