J. Stephen Brantley has a distinct voice for re-creating the New York of yesteryear – to paint a picture of the gritty pre-Giuliani New York that I only know from films and rerun credits of Saturday Night Live. Of course, living in the city during that time was bound to have some lasting effects, and […]
The Second City’s latest mainstage revue is as honest as it is funny, as biting as it is charming, and as surprising as it is (mostly) consistent. Every member of the cast brings a different style and point of view to the table, all hilarious in their own right but especially effective together. Created […]
Typical off-West End, though you’d expect Soho Theatre to programme something more enticing (and I’m definitely enticed by Burning Doors). Writer Owen McCafferty and Director Adam Penford’s Unfaithful is of the barely-enough variety, the kind of play that chucks rough sex and swears around to raise the room temperature (in the dramatic sense, not in […]
It is always difficult to adapt something that is as ingrained in popular culture as the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, particularly when such a film’s very title and premise have entered the modern lexicon. The musical certainly had a large degree of hype behind it, not least owing to the news that the book and lyrics […]
Every other month, seven playwrights come together at The Tank in Manhattan to engage in a creative collaborative process that results in seventy minutes of artistry sharing common themes and elements. The structure of Rule of 7×7, the brainchild of writer and producer Brett Epstein, sounds simple – seven writers conceive of and produce seven […]
Runts School can be rough, but one can hope it’s never as rough as it is in Runts. Set in an English state school, it tells the story of a class of girls in a school filled with bullies, uncertainty and cat fights. It depicts the kind of school many parents dread because children don’t feel […]
August in New York City can only mean one thing: it is Fringe festival time. Each year for two weeks in August, the Fringe takes over a vast array of cozy theatre venues throughout Manhattan to showcase new and established talent and unique theatrical story-telling ventures. Unfortunately, between travel and work obligations this summer, I […]
The Tom Patterson theatre is great; it allows for fully in-the-round staging (or in-the-rectangle, rather) and it’s big enough that the kings aren’t undermined by a crowd too small for their thundering speeches but it’s small enough that we can see them up close for the men they are underneath the crown. I wouldn’t wish […]