Past reviews, recommendations, profiles, and posts about arts and culture in New York City.
A new play written by John Pastore, Panic at the Riverside Motel is a dark comedy. Kaitlin and Jake, a couple engaged to be married, find themselves in over their heads after they start dealing cocaine to finance their extravagant wedding. When Panic at the Riverside Motel opens, the two stand[…]
Atlantic Theater Company presents the U.S. premiere of The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, adapted by British playwright and Olivier Award nominee Roy Williams from Alan Sillitoe’s classic short story of the same title. The play is set in modern day London and follows the story of Colin, a high school aged[…]
After a New York season filled with plays in repertory, The Acting Company (in association with the Guthrie in Minneapolis) presents a popular two-play combo at the Pearl – Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, itself a riff on a minor Hamlet plot thread. A cast[…]
Tony Award winner and A-list movie star Hugh Jackman will return to Broadway next year with The River, a British drama/thriller by Jez Butterworth. The New York Post broke with the story, quickly leading to Jackman’s enthusiastic confirmation: Jackman’s last stint in New York, a solo show in 2011, called[…]
David Byrne announced in an email to fans that Here Lies Love is returning to the Public Theater for an open ended run. Previews begin April 14, 2014, opening night is scheduled for May 1. The production will be remounted in the same theater as its original, the LuEsther, and[…]
AdLib (Actors and Directors Living in Brooklyn) Productions presents the world premiere of Sarah Levine Simon’s The Portrait. Originally written and produced as a radio play for NPR, it’s a satirical “comedy of bad manners” that mocks the disconnect between the haves and have-nots. The play takes place in the 1980s[…]
Poetry Electric is a performance series at La MaMa fusing music, movement, sound, and dance with the spoken word. It is curated by William Electric Black, a seven-time Emmy Award winning writer, playwright (American Star, Welcome Home Sonny T), and faculty member in the dramatic writing program at the Tisch School of[…]
The 3-Legged Dog (3LD) Art + Technology Center is owned and operated by the 3-Legged Dog Theater + Media Group. It’s a state-of-the-art art space, performance venue, and integrated technology lab, built to further 3-Legged Dog’s mission to create new, original works in media, theater, performance, and hybrid forms. The[…]
59E59 Theaters presents the U.S. premiere of Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s I Am The Wind, a meditative drama helmed by Paul Takacs and translated by Olivier Award-winning British playwright Simon Stephens. The story begins as two men embark on a dangerous voyage on the open sea and turns into an exploration of the resulting psychological crisis they[…]
Veteran actor Frank Langella stars in the title role in Shakespeare’s King Lear in a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), through February 9, 2014. For those of you less familiar with the play, it is a tragedy about a king who distributes his estate to his three[…]
A real-life mother and son unravel and re-build following a shared tragedy in Have I No Mouth, by Irish theater company Brokentalkers, appearing in New York City through January 26, 2014 as part of COIL14. The show received much acclaim in its previous run in Ireland. It was awarded the Total[…]
Roundabout Theatre Company makes an daring choice in reviving Machinal, a seldom-produced 1928 masterpiece by Sophie Treadwell. This dark, haunting drama follows a young woman’s slow descent from the shy neuroses of an isolated youth to the full-on panic that drives her to kill her husband. Through terse, repetitive dialogue, deliberately robotic[…]
Diana Oh Actor, musician, lyricist
Other Forces 2014 from the Incubator Arts Project presents She Is King, a multimedia performance by Laryssa Husiak. In She Is King, Husiak reenacts three pivotal interviews with legendary tennis player, feminist, queer icon, and a leader of the U.S. delegation to the 2014 Sochi Olympics Billie Jean King. The[…]
Beto O’Byrne Playwright, director
Karl Custer’s Parables for the One Percent is a satirical comedy about the nation’s richest individuals, featuring the exaggerated interior monologues of elite one-percenters. The play has three alternating scenarios. In the first, two wealthy women–both named Jacqueline–savagely compete to be the doyenne of their posh neighborhood (and we mean ‘savagely’ very[…]
Performance Space 122 presents the New York premiere of Muazzez as part of this year’s COIL festival. Written by Mac Wellman, theater rebel, playwright, poet, and winner of a Lifetime Achievement Obie Award, Muazzez is a play derived from his collection of short stories A Chronicle Of The Madness Of Small Worlds. The term “muazzez” refers[…]
Inspired by Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the new musical Columbia: The Life and Death of Rospo D. Oro from Pipe Dream Theatre deals with the complex themes of freedom, destiny, and responsibility all set in the fantastical, steampunk world of The Wild Woods. Rospo D. Oro is a likable,[…]
PROTOTYPE festival presents the New York premiere of Visitations: “Theotokia” And “The War Reporter”, a double bill of one-act chamber operas by composer Jonathan Berger and librettist Dan O’Brien. The two pieces share the common theme of auditory hallucinations. Theotokia looks at the consciousness of a man who is plagued by his inner voice and taunted by the[…]
Following a world premiere in 2011 at the Signature Theatre in Virginia, Ted Shen’s A Second Chance is making its way to New York City’s Public Theater in the spring of 2014. This musical tells the melancholy story of two middle-aged people–Dan and Jenna–who find themselves seated next to one another at[…]