Chess. The Cold War serves as a frame for Chess, the musical account of a match between a Russian champion, Anatoly, and his petulant American counterpart, Freddie. The action takes place in 1989, in the weeks before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Florence is Freddie’s second, coaching…
There was a moment in Chess that undid me completely. It occurred when the heroine, Florence, met the man she believed to be her father — the father she had last seen in 1956 when, as a terrified little girl, she’d been torn from his arms by the Hungarian revolution…
The death penalty is an obscenity in itself, and the ways in which it’s applied are equally vile: the endless waiting on death row, where prisoners can sometimes see fellow inmates led to slaughter or hear the readying of the death equipment; the capriciousness of the appeals process; the countdown…
After Ashley. We first meet Ashley while she’s watching one of those smarmy television shrinks with her teenage son, Justin. The shrink, Dr. Bob, is giving advice to a sexually incompatible couple, and this leads Ashley to reveal far more than Justin wants to know about her relationship with his…
The United States could recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years…. Nuclear war is not nearly as devastating as we have been led to believe. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it. Dig a hole…
The most interesting character in After Ashley disappears after the first scene. This is Ashley herself, whom we meet while she’s watching one of those smarmy television shrinks with her teenage son, Justin. The shrink, Dr. Bob, is giving advice to a sexually incompatible couple, and this leads Ashley to…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
I’ve been dancing around this conclusion, trying to find a way to put it more tactfully, but I can’t: Waitin¹ 2 End Hell is a nasty, misogynist play. You can dress it up all you want with theories about the problems of the black family and the unfair and emasculating…
Quartermaine¹s Terms simply refuses to come to life. In fact, from the current Germinal Stage production, I can’t quite figure out what the play’s supposed to be about. It seems like one of those gentle, wistful British comedies in which all the meaning lies beneath and around the actual lines,…
The Clean House. The first act of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is close to a perfect piece of theater. On a stunningly evocative, elegantly gray-and-white set, Matilde cleans house for a pair of doctors — Lane and her surgeon husband, Charles. Matilde hates to clean. She wants to figure…
The first act of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is about as perfect a piece of theater as I can imagine. On a stunningly evocative, elegantly gray-and-white set, with cool, beautiful lines and an abstract but vaguely human-looking sculpture lurking in the background, Matilde cleans house for a pair of…
Private Eyes is a very smart play. For a while I tormented myself trying to decipher the plot, but I couldn’t do it. Some critics have compared the story to a set of nested Russian figures, but I think it’s more like a drawing by M.C. Escher. An event makes…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
At the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt was the grande dame of French theater and Eleonora Duse her Italian counterpart. The two actresses had contrasting strengths. Bernhardt’s acting was glamorous and stylized; she posed prettily and had a self-consciously beautiful voice. Duse’s approach was more realistic; she believed…
“Poor Wandering One” is among the loveliest of Gilbert and Sullivan’s many lovely melodies, but you haven’t really lived until you’ve heard Johnette Toye singing it — as she does in Phantom of the Music Hall. Toye preens and staggers and makes her mouth into a dark, wide-open square from…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
Watching television with Isabelle, my crinkly-haired, adventurous, lemon-curd-loving Belgian anthropologist friend, was always a hoot. I’d explain to her the inexorable rules of U.S. television drama: No, House hasn’t arrived at the correct diagnosis because it’s 8:30 p.m., and that only happens at seven minutes to 9. She delighted in…
Although Man of La Mancha first opened in New York in 1965, I’d somehow managed to go all these years without seeing it. I had heard the songs, of course — who hasn’t? — but I thought of the musical as soggy and dated and had no intention of attending…
The Last Five Years. A bittersweet account of the breakup of a five-year marriage, a specifically New York love story, The Last Five Years is told with the kind of warm, neurotic, clever-rueful Jewish humor we expect from such stories. Catherine is a young actress looking for her big break;…
There has been a great deal of excitement around The War Anthology, which began when Curious Theatre Company artistic director Chip Walton and assistant director Bonnie Metzgar commissioned several writers to create stage pieces based on war photographs. Anticipation grew when the theater announced the participation of Pulitzer winners Paula…
There’s nothing more romantic than being young and in love in New York City, walking together along the worn, sooty streets touched by that filtered city sunlight, oblivious to the sound of traffic and the rush and impatience of the anonymous crowd. The Last Five Years has been widely described…
Amy’s View. The protagonist of David Hare’s Amy’s View is a London stage actress, Esme Allen. By the play’s opening, her star has dimmed and she hasn’t worked in a few years. Still, she’s stylish and witty, accustomed to sweeping into rooms and commanding attention. She believes in the theater…
