In the theater, the age-old fantasy of a happy marriage between art and science has given us some truly great plays about the lives of scientists: Brecht's Galileo and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, to name just two that have set the bar quite high. Un...
Like time spent staring at roof pigeons, the summer doldrums in New York are good for stocktaking. A recent lunch with an uptown museum curator led to some, as we debated a type of show popular with local institutions since 2008: the historical sur...
Four ladies, four dudes, some wacky clowns, and lots of wordplay--sounds like a foolproof formula for Shakespearean comedy, right? In the case of Love's Labour's Lost, though, it's not that simple: On its surface, the play is a love-fest celebratin...
First Date is a new and aggressively stupid Broadway musical that follows a young man and woman through a blind dinner-date. Even its lone moment of fun is embarrassing. That moment arrives when the female lead's phone rings, the call goes to voice...
Untitled Theater Company's workshop production of Money Lab explores one of the quintessential cocktail party dilemmas--the "flower vs. food" dichotomy, as its charismatic, fast-talking MC Clive Dobbs calls it. Is it possible to measure the relative...
Last weekend kicked off the 17th year of the New York International Fringe Festival (aka FringeNYC), which runs through August 25. As with any such festival, when you choose what shows to see, you're really rolling the dice. This two-week-long feast...
Ahhh, the '80s: Reagan was in the White House, Thirtysomething was on the tube, and Julian Schnabel's retrospective was at the Whitney. But the decade wasn't all bad. Early in curator Raphael Rubinstein's insightful essay for this group exhibitio...
How does this sound: Whitney Houston stars in Precious: a one-woman musical based on the TV show Intervention, with music by Diane Warren, from executive producer Tyler Perry! Jeannette Bayardelle's solo musical Shida might not fit that bill exactly...
How will the expansion of the American family influence the domestic drama--that most durable and venerable of genres? Will our stages still be dominated by an endless supply of formulaic tales of dysfunction and healing? Or will playwrights imagine...
The camera pans across battered cinder-block walls, a muddy infield, concrete stands shorn of awnings, and palm trees silhouetted against gray skies. On the soundtrack, an old-timer reminisces in Spanish about his days on a Cuban baseball team: "Nob...
While organizing the group show "Hair and Skin," curator Isaac Lyles considered recent research into "mirror neurons" and "physical empathy" suggesting that the human brain simulates the experience of what the eyes are seeing (now we understand how ...
Who killed Arthur Whitney, the successful New England novelist who knew everyone's secrets--and used them in his books? Why doesn't anyone in his shifty entourage seem to care that his corpse lies flat on the parlor floor? And not-so-incidentally, w...
Let It Be, a new concert-style "celebration" of the Beatles and their ubiquitous music--which you would hardly think needs more celebrating--is basically a living greatest-hits album, an ambulatory boxed set, only performed by a bunch of ringers. (T...
Bushra Rehman's first novel, Corona, is a fragmented, poetic, on-the-road adventure told from the perspective of the charismatic Razia Mirza. After coming of age in a tight Muslim community surrounding the first Sunni Masjid built in New York City, ...
Wallace Shawn is a dangerous man. If he confronted you in some darkened alley you might feel more inclined to giggle than cower, but don't let that roly-poly exterior and slight lisp catch you off guard. His plays describe the seductive power of bad...
Nobody Loves You, the musical comedy now running at Second Stage, is the theatrical equivalent of the watermelon martini: jokey, overly sweet, sneakily refreshing. Written by brainiac playwright Itamar Moses and composer Gaby Alter, it concerns Jeff...
Back when evolution was a scary new idea--unlike now, when in certain circles it's a scary old idea--H.G. Wells wrote The Island of Doctor Moreau, about a scientist's misguided efforts to fast-track assorted critters up the biological ladder to huma...
There's nothing more stubbornly middle-of-the-road than shock art. Like inflexible suburban Baptists and food co-op rules committees, purveyors of this trying trend insist on viewing reality in stark black and white. Such a worldview mistakenly inve...
Storyville is a portrait of the New Orleans red light district sometimes credited as the birthplace of jazz, in the days before the federal government closed it by force in 1917. Boasting a book by acclaimed playwright Ed Bullins, with music and ly...
Outsider art is the new blue-chip art. Or so various New York insiders would have you believe. From this summer's Venice Biennial (curated by the New Museum's Director of Exhibitions Massimiliano Gioni) to yards of boosterish column inches in the no...
A sense of humor about the macabre, as well as a love for the underbelly of American society pervades "Zoe Strauss: 10 Years," a survey of Strauss's work currently open… More >>
Many among the crowd that gathered around a patch of graffiti on the corner of a vacant, crumbling building in Tribeca earlier this month had no clue why they stopped… More >>
What do you picture when you hear the word magician? Maybe David Copperfield. Or a birthday party. "Magic suffers from the people who do magic," Derek DelGaudio says. DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães,… More >>
Sometimes, a few well-delivered laugh lines are what makes a production tick. Other times, though, straining for levity strikes a sour note—especially when the subjects at hand are rape, murder,… More >>
Fictional characters are such hapless creatures. Doomed to lives composed of unfortunate choices, secrets, and tragic flaws, their faith supported by mere circumstantial evidence, they flounder in the footlights. These… More >>
Classic Stage Company’s new production of Romeo and Juliet—ably directed by Tea Alagić—has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, some of its virtues are double-edged. It’s admirably uncluttered: The sparse… More >>
When Sean O'Casey put pen to paper for Juno and the Paycock, the 1924 Dubliner domestic drama set against the ghastly Irish Civil War, the playwright's country was in a… More >>
Odd that a play so steeped in loneliness should burst with such life. The Team's RoosevElvis, a stirring, absurd, and grandly human historical-cosplay road-trip fantasia, centers on a depressed North… More >>
The Roundabout's Broadway house specializes in well-upholstered revivals. Few come better carpeted, curtained, and papered than The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan's 1946 play about a family seeking justice for a… More >>
As David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette begins at Soho Rep, actors array tiers of delectable pastel macarons. You might be tempted to snatch one. Restrain yourself. Adjmi is a playwright with… More >>