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  Theatre in Review: The Heart of Rock and Roll (James Earl Jones Theatre)
Stop the presses! The headline news of the day is The Heart of Rock and Roll is...not bad.
It is obvious by now that we at Lighting&Sound America take a dim view of the jukebox musical format, seeing it as the ...
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Theatre in Review: Uncle Vanya (Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont)
The title character of Anton Chekhov's play is permanently at sixes and sevens but, in the new production at the Beaumont, his distress is surprisingly undistressing. Vanya, of course, is a virtuoso complainer, and he has plenty to ...
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Theatre in Review: Staff Meal (Playwrights Horizons)
Before it comes down with a bad case of the apocalyptic vapors, Staff Meal reveals a new and entirely delightful side of Abe Koogler's talent. The playwright's previous works examine American life from the bottom of ...
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Theatre in Review: Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions (Second Stage at the Hayes Theater)
In the most remarkable sequence of Paula Vogel's new fractured family portrait, Jessica Lange silently communicates the state of her character's soul. She is Phyllis, a middle-aged Washington, DC divorcee, living alone and ...
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Theatre in Review: Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club (August Wilson Theatre)
When did Cabaret become so effortful? It's a recent development for a nearly sixty-year-old musical that has been remarkably supple in terms of bending with the times. A ground-breaking, norm-rattling work in 1966, it ...
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Theatre in Review: Mary Jane (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)
I don't want to drive people away from the Friedman, but Mary Jane is that most singular thing, a portrait of an everyday saint, and a compelling one to boot. The title character of Amy Herzog's haunting drama is the ...
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Theatre in Review: Stereophonic (Golden Theatre)
The good news is thatStereophonic has transferred to Broadway from Playwrights Horizons with all its gorgeously discordant notes intact. David Adjmi's drama, about a band very much like Fleetwood Mac, working on an ...
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Theatre in Review: Grenfell: in the words of survivors (National Theatre at St. Ann's Warehouse)
Grabbing a bite before the theatre the other evening, I read "Time's Up," Sam Knight's devastating assessment of what years of successive Conservative governments have done to the UK. (It's in the April 1 issue of The New Yorker and ...
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Theatre in Review: The Great Gatsby (Broadway Theatre)
For those who feel an affection for F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, this is not the attraction for you. If you pass by the Broadway Theatre, keep moving; nothing to see here. Even for hardcore musical theatre fans, however, The Great ...
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Theatre in Review: Jordans (Public Theater)
In one of Jordans's sharpest, funniest sequences, the staff of Atlas Studio, "a full-service rental studio and production facility," are planning a launch party for a line of watchbands designed by a rapper named L'il ...
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Theatre in Review: Patriots (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
Peter Morgan's latest political thriller rests on the solid foundation of two sharply different antagonists. Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has just purchased as his latest shiny toy the state television network, looks ...
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Theatre in Review: Suffs (Music Box Theatre)
Maybe one of the awards-giving bodies should create a new category: Most Improved New Musical. In that event, Suffs would take the crown. When it opened at the Public Theater in 2022, this chronicle of the campaign for women's ...
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Theatre in Review: Stargazers (Page 73 at Connelly Theatre)
Stargazers is either terrible or the work of a writer with an entirely original sensibility -- I don't know which. Then again, even when I started to balk at Majkin Holmquist's play, I was never bored. I was also, ...
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Theatre in Review: Orlando (Signature Theatre)
Virginia Woolf's prose is a lily that needs no gilding, but Will Davis' production applies plenty of shellac anyway. The occasion is Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Woolf's celebrated novel, a picaresque epic rooted in shifting ...
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Theatre in Review: The Outsiders (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre)
It's only when The Outsiders gets ready to rumble that the new musical at the Jacobs starts to show a real pulse. In its climax, the rival gangs Greasers and Socs square off for control of a public park. (In case you're one ...
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Theatre in Review: Lempicka (Longacre Theatre)
The new musical Lempicka reveals its kooky intentions right at the top: Eden Espinosa -- currently, the hardest-working woman in show business -- enters as the elderly Tamara de Lempicka, once a notorious artist and ...
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Theatre in Review: Still (DR2 Theatre)
Beware of exes' reunions; they can lead to unexpected repercussions. That's the big takeaway from Still, a slender two-hander that, with some success, mirrors the challenges of living and loving in our disunited world. Helen ...
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Theatre in Review: The Wiz (Marquis Theatre)
"So you wanted to meet The Wizard!" So sings Wayne Brady at the Marquis, stepping out of a weird green structure that looks like a chess piece or maybe a perfume bottle. (Ozian architecture, it seems, has touches of both Dr. Seuss ...
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Theatre in Review: Agreement (Lyric Theatre, Belfast at Irish Arts Center)
There's a moment late in Agreement that sums up the entire tense, fractious, and thoroughly engrossing proceedings at the Irish Arts Center. Owen McCafferty's script focuses on the negotiations to end the Troubles, ...
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Theatre in Review: Sally and Tom (The Public Theater)
Suzan-Lori Parks's new play is most interesting when the characters stop talking to each other and confront the audience. Tom, you should know, is Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and a lifelong slaveowner ...
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