Reviews

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Angry Alan

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Angry Alan

John Krasinski first made a splash on the TV series The Office (2005–13), and after that with the creepy horror film A Quiet Place (2018) and its goosebump-laden sequels. He has a long film resume as actor, writer and director, and lately he has boosted his credits as an action star in the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan. Yet, although Krasinski appeared in the play Dry Powder with Hank Azaria and Claire Danes in 2017, film acting doesn’t necessarily point toward stage prowess. But the confidence with which Krasinski takes the stage in the first moments of Angry Alan gives one hope that he’s an exception, and it only increases as the actor’s masterly performance opens Studio Seaview (formerly 2nd Stage) with a bang.

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Pride & Prejudice

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Pride & Prejudice

In a whirlwind of wit and whimsy, Abigail Pickard Price’s (with Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches) new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice offers an unexpectedly funny take on the classic, featuring just three actors who embody 18 characters. Directed by Price, this madcap rendition breathes fresh life into Austen’s sharp social satire, as the performers navigate cultural pitfalls of Regency England.

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Point Loma

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Point Loma

In life, people are all haunted by one thing or another. For some, it might be love, loss, or anything in between. For the characters in Tim Mulligan’s latest play, Point Loma, what haunts them are literal ghosts. The play explores the supernatural with an immersive production by the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.

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The Wash

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The Wash

Kelundra Smith’s The Wash is an inspiring play about the originators of the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881, a little-known chapter in American labor history. Making its New York premiere, Smith’s drama captures the black strikers’ struggles during the Jim Crow era in the post–Civil War American South, including public indifference to the women’s working conditions and the demeaning, hateful attitude of their white customers toward them.

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Lunar Eclipse

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Lunar Eclipse

Lunar Eclipse, Donald Margulies’s 2023 play now receiving a Second Stage Theater production (at Signature Center), opens with one of the two characters, George, sobbing alone. George is a farmer in his 70s, sitting in darkness in a field in western Kentucky, where he is soon joined by his wife, Em, to watch a lunar eclipse. George and Em will not simply observe the overnight event: they will overcome George’s gruff exterior and look back over the course of their life together, facing difficult subjects, including the death of a child, and ultimately reaffirming their connection.

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The Imaginary Invalid

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The Imaginary Invalid

The Imaginary Invalid is of interest to historians not just because it is Molière’s last play and not just because Molière himself performed the lead role of Monsieur Argan. It is also due to the fact that, while Argan is a hypochondriac, Molière suffered from dire, real-life ailments that caused him to collapse on stage during just his fourth performance. He died soon afterward. Such dark irony does not haunt his lighthearted comedy, though, and so it has floated, for more than 350 years, from one fizzy reinterpretation to the next. The latest, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and produced by Red Bull Theater, is a loosey-goosey affair. The vibe is French farce à la The Marx Brothers. The company is a puff pastry stuffed with ham. And the story is King Lear, but with enema jokes.

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Eurydice

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Eurydice

Encountering adaptations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seems as inevitable as Orpheus’s fateful turning around to look toward Eurydice on their journey out of Hades. Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, from 2003, is receiving a revival to conclude her Signature Theatre residency. The production is directed by Les Waters, who also helmed the play at Yale in 2006 and at Second Stage in 2007. Ruhl’s mournful and whimsical take emphasizes Eurydice’s life and point of view, hence the title excising “Orpheus and,” even bestowing its heroine with some agency, especially during that oh-so-famous moment of Orpheus looking back.

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Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole

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Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole

Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole is a fanciful fever dream of the final taping of The Nat King Cole Show on NBC in December of 1957. This musical hits some high notes with Dulé Hill and Daniel J. Watts’ excellent acting but is hamstrung by a disjointed book by Colman Domingo and Patricia McGregor, who also directs.

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Goddess

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Goddess

The new musical Goddess signals from the get-go that it has Broadway ambitions. Vivid with saturated colors, eye-catching in Arnulfo Maldonado’s underground nightclub, and bursting with energetic dancing and singing, the Public Theater production is a grand assemblage of first-rate talent. And, as in the long-running Hadestown, another show with a subterranean setting, the characters are a mixture of supernatural entities and humans.

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Bus Stop

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Bus Stop

Bus Stop, the third of four Broadway successes that playwright William Inge scored between 1950 and 1959 (the second, Picnic, won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize), takes place in a small-town diner on a route between Kansas City and Topeka. Grace (Cindy Cheung), the proprietor, keeps the place open all night, when necessary, as a refuge for travelers marooned by inclement weather. During a blizzard, a Topeka-bound bus arrives around 1 a.m.; the driver, Carl (David Shih), informs his four passengers that they’re stranded until highway crews clear the road ahead.

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Shellshocked

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Shellshocked

Two-character plays are a tricky thing to pull off. When they are successful, they can be engaging entertainments. Sleuth boasted a great deal of mind games, along with costume changes. In the past season, The Roommate and Dakar 2000 traveled through scene and time changes, but with expectations often upended. Although Philip Stokes’s Shellshocked also relies on mind games, it feels hermetically sealed.

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Cracked Open

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Cracked Open

Cracked Open is about one family’s journey with mental illness after their 18-year-old daughter suffers a psychotic breakdown. Presented during Mental Health Awareness Month, this drama, written and directed by Gail Kriegel, explores the stigma of mental illness and the often bewildering path for a family to find an effective treatment for a loved one.

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Outraged Hearts

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Outraged Hearts

In a letter to Jay Laughlin, founder of the publishing house New Directions, in late 1945, Tennessee Williams wrote about his process: “All of my good things, the few of them, have emerged through this sort of tortured going over and over—Battle [of Angels], [The Glass] Menagerie, the few good stories. ... But always when I look back on the incredible messiness of original trials I am amazed that it comes out as clean as it does.” The bill of two one-acts under the umbrella title Outraged Hearts—early versions of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, revived by the Fire Weeds theater company—confirms the messiness Williams alludes to. As ambitious as Fire Weeds’ project is, it yields little beyond the confirmation of Williams’s own words.

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Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening

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Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening

If the British actress Gertrude Lawrence is remembered at all nowadays, it is primarily for originating the part of Anna Leonowens in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (1951). She didn’t get the role in the 1956 film, and her reputation rests on a long theatrical career in Britain and America, as Lucy Stevens’s gossipy Gertrude Lawrence: A Lovely Way to Spend an Evening, makes clear.

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The Imaginary Invalid

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The Imaginary Invalid

For its seventh season, Molière in the Park (MIP), in partnership with the Prospect Park Alliance, is producing Molière’s comedy-ballet The Imaginary Invalid in a fresh new translation by Lucie Tiberghien. Tiberghien, MIP’s founder and artistic director, has cut Molière’s original text to the bone for her streamlined production. One of the cuts is the minor character Louison, Angélique's younger sister, to bring the play to a brisk 100 minutes and focus on the central characters.

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The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse

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The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse

The New Group, celebrating its 30th anniversary this spring, may not be so new anymore, but that doesn’t mean they have forgotten how to rock. Indeed, their latest production, a pop musical called The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, is nothing if not a Gen Z shout-out to teenage angst. With his music and lyrics, Michael Breslin delivers a handful of clever, hard-driving songs into the hands of a capable company of young performers. Unfortunately, Breslin’s book, co-written with Patrick Foley, has all the charm of an undisciplined child.

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The United States vs Ulysses

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The United States vs Ulysses

Just ahead of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Ireland’s Once Off Productions has arrived in Hell’s Kitchen with The United States vs Ulysses, the frisky entertainment now playing at the Irish Arts Center. Written by journalist/dramatist Colin Murphy, the play is intricately researched yet undidactic. Featuring a six-member cast from Ireland directed by Conall Morrison, it’s an imaginative, fresh-mouthed account of one of literary modernism’s most significant legal confrontations.

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We Do the Same Thing Every Week

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We Do the Same Thing Every Week

In Robert Leverett’s We Do the Same Thing Every Week, Dick (Leverett himself) and Jane (Jessica Nesi), the famous elementary schoolbook characters, are visited on a rainy Sunday afternoon by a strange, humanoid Cat (Casey Worthington) that is going to help them have fun—whether they want it or not.

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Five Models in Ruins, 1981

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Five Models in Ruins, 1981

The October 1981 issue of Vogue magazine features Nastassia Kinski on the cover and includes the infamous Richard Avedon two-page photo spread of the actress wearing nothing but a huge, writhing boa constrictor. But in the alternate reality of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s vitriolic new comedy, Five Models in Ruins, 1981, that October issue very nearly comes to feature a much lesser-known cover girl, and the accompanying story would showcase not a serpent, but five decidedly catty women in flowing white gowns.

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Hold Me in the Water

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Hold Me in the Water

Ryan J. Haddad’s Hold Me in the Water, like the dramatist himself, is charming and effervescent. Also like Haddad, it’s slender (though that word has different connotations when applied to the human form and to an Off-Broadway play).

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