Daniel Talbott’s Yosemite, an underwritten, underwhelming, over-wrought new play inexplicably produced by Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre and lugubriously directed by Pedro Pascal.
more
Sometimes I love my job. It’s my great pleasure to direct you to Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good), the first must-see of an unusually busy 2012.
more
Family is a funny thing—especially in Joel Drake Johnson’s The Fall to Earth at 59E59 Theaters. Estranged mother and daughter Fay (Deborah Hedwall) and Rachel (Jolie Curtsinger) fractiously reunite to complete a gruesome task.
more
Plays lit by candlelight are reliably murderous on one’s consciousness—but never more so than in the Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s intimate three-hander The Road to Mecca. Stranding both Fugard’s story and actors Rosemary Harris, Carla Gugino and Jim Dale on a giant stage to chatter away for two-and-a-half hours with a marked lack of dramatic conflict is a recipe for nap-taking.
more
The worst aspect of the super strain of SARS that is terrorizing the South in Matthew Maguire’s new drama Instinct is that it’s targeting the wrong people.
more
A stylish and snappy one-man show conceived by and starring Tobias Wegner, Leo boasts a one-joke premise that finds Wegner sliding around on the stage in various postures that translate into gravity-defying feats of acrobatics thanks to a hidden camera
more
Anyone with a tight budget and a hankering to see Chinglish, David Henry Hwang’s Broadway comedy about how radically—and hilariously—different American and Chinese cultures are, should head to the Off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre, where a scaled-down version of Chinglish called Outside People is being performed.
more
This past year has seen some memorable moments on stage (Playwrights Horizons’ offerings; Nina Arianda on Broadway—twice!), but they all pale in comparison to the amount of wrongheaded dreck that theatergoers had inflicted upon them. As everyone gazes with holiday-glazed eyes at glasses half full, let’s look at the other half of that glass, containing these distressing trends.
more
Manhattan Theatre Club has given theatergoers a lump of coal this holiday season with Close Up Space, a tedious new comedy-drama about editing, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, feminist literature and family failures. That the cast includes pros like David Hyde Pierce and Rosie Perez makes the whole 80 minutes just that much sadder.
more