Jennifer Egan must be a wise soul. I would love to sit down with her and ask for her advice about my own life. She just seems to know so much about the powerlessness of… living. “Emerald City” is a collection of short stories that she published in 1989 (two decades before “A Visit from […]
Be sure to check out our Full List of SummerWorks Reviews Body So Fluorescent (A+) Desiree and Gary are close friends. Very close. Until one night in a club leads to an explosive fight. Lets just say that Desiree is black and Gary is white, but sometimes takes on the mask of a black woman […]
Over the course of the past year, numerous playwrights have attempted to explore the difficult issue of white privilege to varying degrees of success on New York City stages. For some, the issue has proved too complex to distill with any clarity into a short narrative. Playwright Young Jean Lee does not have such an […]
I loved Jane Austen. And I loved this modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. It perfectly updates the story to capture all of the same themes and it made me squirm, laugh, and seize up in anticipation the same way I did when I first read P&P as a teenager. In Eligible, Jane is nearly […]
The Gunfighter Meets His Match, recently at NYMF, successfully marries the classic American aesthetic of the Old West to the modern, enchanting, original music of singer/songwriter Abby Payne. Abby Payne’s music is the greatest strength of the production, without a doubt. She has clearly developed her style through a musical portfolio born more out of […]
Arguably the greatest challenge faced by a festival with as strict a mandate as The Shaw Festival’s “plays by Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, and plays about the period of Shaw’s lifetime” is the issue of relevance, or perhaps freshness is a more accurate word for the issue since I honestly believe you can find […]
Mirvish Productions has been on a run of great programming for the last little while with Come From Away’s Canadian sit-down production as a quality anchor, and tours of The Phantom of the Opera and Wicked coming through town. Phantom certainly can take some criticism but I’d argue its messages about empathy and mercy ultimately […]
