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  Theatre in Review: Lone Star (Ruth Stage/Theatre Row)
"Imagine a Burt Reynolds movie as written by Mel Brooks, and you might have an approximation of the hilarity." So wrote Mel Gussow about Lone Star when it opened on Broadway in 1979 to general acclaim (and admittedly, a ...
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Theatre in Review: Manahatta (Public Theater)
Manahatta is a thing of mirrors, a fact immediately obvious in Marcelo Martínez García's set, which features an upstage reflecting wall that, when backlit, reveals new depths. This is, I think, a nod to the structure ...
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Theatre in Review: Spain (Second Stage)
The care and handling of historical material is an ongoing challenge for playwrights. Stick too stodgily to the historical record and you might bore the audience; reach too insistently for contemporary relevance and you risk ending up ...
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Theatre in Review: Here We Are (The Shed)
You didn't think Stephen Sondheim would say goodbye with a warm hug, did you? For his final act, our greatest musical theatre artist teamed up with playwright David Ives and director Joe Mantello on a wicked little ...
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Theatre in Review: 'Til Death (Abingdon Theatre)/The Jerusalem Syndrome (York Theatre)
Some weeks, nothing goes right; for example, two new plays, opening just after Thanksgiving, made for back-to-back headscratchers, leaving one pondering the mysterious process by which some shows get produced. 'Til Death ...
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Theatre in Review: Spamalot (St. James Theatre)/Mind Mangler (New World Stages)
Right now, in New York, you have an opportunity to sample two very different kinds of British humor, each with its own distinct provenance. The choice is yours, although one is, despite its revival status, noticeably fresher than the ...
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Theatre in Review: Amusements/School Pictures/Sad Boys in Harpy Land
For its fall attraction at the upstairs Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Playwrights Horizons has cracked open a three-pack of solo shows. It's putting it mildly to note that they are a mixed lot, but this often seems to be the dominant format ...
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Theatre in Review: Hell's Kitchen (Public Theater)
The trouble with Hell's Kitchen, I think, is that it didn't spend enough time in the development kitchen. The new musical at the Public is a seriously undercooked dish, a slice of New York life that comes out of the oven ...
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Theatre in Review: Amid Falling Walls (National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, Museum of Jewish Heritage)
The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene has given us some mighty revelatory things over the years, including the lost 1920s operetta The Golden Bride and a heartbreaking Yiddish-language Fiddler on the Roof. In terms of ...
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Theatre in Review: Harmony (Ethel Barrymore Theatre)
After wandering the regional theatre scene for lo these many years -- I first saw it in La Jolla in 1997 -- Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman's musical comes to Broadway in the production it has always deserved. Harmony
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Theatre in Review: Make Me Gorgeous! (Playhouse 46)
"Life, am I right?" So says Wade McCollum, his head wrapped in a scarf, his face obscured by movie-star sunglasses, the very picture of ennui; when an actor gets a laugh on the first line, you suspect you're in good hands. In this ...
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Theatre in Review: A Good Day to Me Not to You (Waterwell at the Connelly Theatre)
A convent? What's a nice girl like Lameece Issaq doing in a place like that? All right, it's not Issaq, it's the character at the center of her new solo show. And Issaq isn't a girl but, rather, a mature theatre artist whose resume ...
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Theatre in Review: War Words (NewYorkRep/New Light Theater Project at ART/New York Theatres)
We talk a lot about political divisions in the United States, but here's one that doesn't get nearly enough attention: "The number of Americans who serve in the Armed Forces is less than one percent of our entire population. There's no ...
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Theatre in Review: Scene Partners (Vineyard Theatre)
If you ever get lost in a mysterious, shifting reality, pray you have Dianne Wiest to see you through it. In John J. Caswell's slightly wobbly, but inventive, new play, she is Meryl Kowalski, a Midwestern widow of a ...
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Theatre in Review: Waiting for Godot (Theatre for a New Audience)
Sometimes you're at a play that seems as familiar as an old shoe when a line leaps out, causing you to see it through new eyes. This happened to me the other night at TFANA, where Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks are mining ...
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Theatre in Review: Arcadia (Bedlam/West End Theatre)
Bedlam's Arcadia is a rarity on two counts, being an Off-Off-Broadway revival of a Tom Stoppard play and a high-concept staging at that. It's a nervy move by the director Eric Tucker -- Stoppard's works aren't ...
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Theatre in Review: I Need That (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)
If you want to experience the very definition of a star vehicle, Roundabout has a show for you. Before you bite, however, consider the star: It's unclear if Theresa Rebeck wrote I Need That for Danny DeVito or ...
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Theatre in Review: Ode to the Wasp Woman (Actors Temple Theatre)
It was like a sign from God: On the very day that I had recorded a TCM broadcast of the 1959 horror epic The Wasp Woman -- in an attempt at reviving the midnight movie thrills of my remote youth -- I received an announcement of ...
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Theatre in Review: Food (Brooklyn Academy of Music Fisher/Fishman Space)
I hope Geoff Sobelle has an unlimited supply of Tums. Partway through his new theatre piece, Food, he commits an apparent act of gluttony that has audience members laughing, whispering, and shaking their heads in ...
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Theatre in Review: I Hear You and Rejoice (Irish Arts Center)
I Hear You and Rejoice takes place at an Irish funeral, which is to say that laughter and grief compete for pride of place. The deceased is Kitsy Rainey, the title character in The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey, ...
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