Jesse Oxfeld
Philip William McKinley and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa should get themselves to East Fourth Street. They are the director and playwright charged with transforming the newly de-Taymored $65 million (and surely rising) Broadway extravaganza Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark into something entertaining, understandable and enjoyable. And it turns out that down at the tiny New York Theater Workshop, directors Roger Rees and Alex Timbers, working from a script by Rick Elice, have done exactly what... MORE >
Decades ago, a prize was won. Its winners have reveled since in their triumph. In the here and now, though, the victory is revealed to be hollow, and the victors still celebrating it, empty. This is the crux of That Championship Season, which debuted at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1972, was transferred to Broadway later that year, and the next spring won both the best play Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for... MORE >
Raúl Esparza was waiting for fried chicken and talking about the mystery of existence. "The most beautiful thing about the play, and what moves me every night, has to do with humanity's search for something greater than themselves," he said. "Some sense of fitting in, whether it's in time, whether it's a sense of history." He was discussing Tom Stoppard's Arcadia on a day off from rehearsal for the David Leveaux-directed revival of the play... MORE >
Compulsion, the new play by Rinnie Groff that opened Thursday at the Public Theater, is a strange piece of work. What is at base a fairly straightforward and essentially true story-frustrated writer goes mad-is simultaneously many different tales rolled into one.... MORE >
When you arrive to see a play called Interviewing the Audience, you expect that there will be something metaphoric or something ironic, something somehow deep and significant buried in that straightforward titular gerund. You expect that you will see something insightful and revealing, something that asks some questions of theatergoers and transforms their responses with performative... MORE >
The injuries that befall Doug, the accident-prone boy and man in Gruesome Playground Injuries, are indeed gruesome. He loses an eye to fireworks; he impales his foot on a nail; he's struck by lightning. But only one of his injuries can be fairly described as tragic: He doesn't end up with the love of his... MORE >
"We have, in New York, the best actors in the world," wrote the estimable Village Voice critic Michael Feingold last week in reviewing Adam Bock's A Small... MORE >
If I told you that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is visually stunning but emotionally unengaging, that its action is sporadically thrilling but its plot often indecipherable, and if I told you that this is what I've been hearing from friends and reading in chat rooms and status updates, I'd be telling you the... MORE >
The Break of Noon opened Monday night at the Lucille Lortel bearing an impressive marquee: It was written by Neil LaBute, the celebrated cynic behind the movies In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, and it stars the sex-addicted television star David Duchovny and the pixieish movie star Amanda Peet. But while that trio of Hollywood names will help lure people into the MCC Theater production, it doesn't deliver much once they're... MORE >
Even in this recently political season, Broadway’s fall offerings have been mostly light and fluffy, a collection of swinging Spaniards, flatulent Frenchmen, stand-up comics, Beatles, and elves. But off-Broadway has picked up the slack, staging excellent political work—including, now, the intelligent, warm, crisply staged, and fantastically cast After the Revolution, which opened at Playwrights Horizons’ small Peter Jay Sharp Theatre a week... MORE >
The audience provides two rounds of star applause during the Public Theater's wonderful production of The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Broadhurst Theatre Saturday night after a praised run in Central Park over the... MORE >
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The short take on Long Story Short: It's... MORE >
"Where do you look for a blind spot?" wonders Ellen, the tortured do-gooder at the heart of Lisa Kron's wonderful new play, In the Wake. "Because it's easy to see someone else's blind spot, isn't it? But it's, wow--it's so much harder to see your own." In the Wake, which opened Monday night at the Public Theater, is a powerful, engrossing and very funny examination of blind spots seen and missed--Ellen's, and also the... MORE >
When I once saw Super Diamond, the curiously devotional Neil Diamond cover band, they were playing at Irving Plaza. My parents have a fondness for a guy they call "Fake Frankie," a Sinatra impersonator they insist is actually quite entertaining, who works the South Jersey bars. The outfit that calls itself Rain is a Beatles tribute group, and it's excellent, as these things go. What's unclear is what makes its set a Broadway show... MORE >
Pity Mark Rylance. The poor guy is giving a brilliant performance eight times a week at the Music Box, where he opened in the otherwise not-so-brilliant La Bête last week. The French term means the beast, but also a fool, an idiot, and Mr. Rylance plays the titular fool, creating a compulsively watchable, utterly compellingly idiot. And he spends the first 40 minutes of the play delivering what is essentially a comedic monologue. By... MORE >
