Schmigadoon! Book, music, and lyrics by Cinco Paul. Directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli. At the Nederlander Theatre. Based on the Apple TV+ series created by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio. Schmigadoon! is Schmigadoonapalooza, and it knows exactly what it is. The Apple TV+ series that followed a couple stumbling into a town trapped in…
NY Theatre Review: Rheology
Rheology. Written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, in collaboration with Bulbul Chakraborty. A Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center, and Ma-Yi Theater Company production. At Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater through May 29. Performed in Bangla and English. 90 minutes, no intermission. As you find your seat, a woman with black hair streaked with…
NY Theatre Review: The Adding Machine
The Adding Machine. By Elmer Rice, revised by Thomas Bradshaw. Directed by Scott Elliott. At the Theater at St. Clement’s (The New Group). Through May 17. 90 minutes, no intermission. A century ago, Elmer Rice wrote a play about a man who mistakes routine for achievement. Mr. Zero spends twenty-five years adding columns of numbers…
NY Theatre Review: Masquerade
A Phantom that moves you through the building as seriously as it moves you through the score. Masquerade is the rare immersive show that remembers it is supposed to be a musical. You move through five floors of a transformed West 57th Street building, and the night still holds together as a story. You are…
NYC Theatre Review: The Wild Party at Encores!
Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s jazz-age tragedy gets the production it has always deserved. Not everyone has been to this party. Not the joyous bar crawl, not the house party that got a little out of hand. This is the after-party in someone’s loft where the refreshments veer into the illegal, where things…
NYC Theater Review: A Korean American Family Gathering Defined by Ritual and Conflict
Jeena Yi’s Jesa, directed by Mei Ann Teo and now running at The Public Theater, is anchored by sharply observed characters but hampered by a structure that repeats more than it builds, stretches where it should tighten, and resolves with a neatness that feels at odds with the play’s otherwise compelling messiness. Four estranged sisters…
NYC Theater Review: In Antigone, a woman refuses to apologize for her body
Anna Ziegler’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) at the Public Theater is a show you should see. It is a powerful, performance-driven piece that draws on the ancient tragedy to make a contemporary argument about bodily autonomy and state power. Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, the production grounds the story in recognizable, present-day…
NYC Theater Review: A Latina in the State Department Deserves a Bolder Play
Public Charge, a new play by Julissa Reynoso and Michael J. Chepiga, directed by Doug Hughes at the Public Theater, arrives with strong material and a capable production. The staging is clear, the direction disciplined, and the acting consistently solid. It is a story worth telling. The problem is that the writing undermines it, diminishing…
Oh, Mary!: A First Lady in Full Comic Frenzy
Mary Todd Lincoln is having a moment. Cole Escola’s gleefully unhinged portrait of the First Lady built a cult following off-Broadway before arriving on Broadway last season with Tony nominations and audiences already primed to laugh. The show’s success was confirmed at the Tony Awards, where Escola won for Best Actor in a Play and…
NYC Theater Review: Initiative
Initiative runs for five hours with two intermissions. That length sounds punishing until you are twenty minutes in and the play has no interest in testing your patience. It holds your attention through people worth following and scenes that keep shifting their center of gravity. You stay because the characters earn the time. Written by…