NEW YORK — Why would a charismatic young playwright, with a critical hit playing to 800 people a night in Midtown, debut a new work, in which he also stars, at a 72-seat theatrical incubator so far off Broadway it’s in Brooklyn? And why would he do so under a pseudonym that sounds like the name of a bot?
NEW YORK — Here’s an idea for a Broadway musical: An awkward boy with an absent father and an overwhelmed mother gets involved with friends in a dubious scheme that spins out of control and almost undoes him.
NEW YORK — Surely you know that telltale moment, at the start of many great Golden Age musicals, when the curtain rustles, the lights glow warmer and the violins start churning out the schmaltz. Whatever sadness the story has in store, the sound from the pit tells you all will be well.
NEW YORK — “We are becoming like all the other nations,” the queen says in a moment of despair. “We have unhappy prisoners, indifferent citizens and the young people refuse to reproduce.”
NEW YORK — For the characters in Jeff Augustin’s “The New Englanders,” which opened on Wednesday at New York City Center’s Studio at Stage II, “basic” is quite the insult.
NEW YORK — About halfway through “The Great Society,” the overstuffed, underbaked play by Robert Schenkkan that opened Tuesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, something strange happens to Lyndon B. Johnson. He loses his grip.
NEW YORK — When we first met Abasiama in Mfoniso Udofia’s play “Sojourners,” it was 1978 and she had come to the United States temporarily, to study biology at Texas Southern University. But when she showed up again in “Her Portmanteau,” 36 years had elapsed and she still hadn’t returned to Nigeria.
NEW YORK — So far, three of French playwright Florian Zeller’s plays have made it to New York: “The Father,” “The Mother” and now “The Height of the Storm,” which for symmetry might have been called “The Father or the Mother.”
NEW YORK — All is sweetness in the church courtyard off West 11th Street where the prologue to “Novenas for a Lost Hospital” takes place. A woman sings a pretty song; another plays the flute; several people with bright smiles and diaphanous garments dance. When a pitcher and bowl are passed around, and the audience of 60 is encouraged to wash hands, it’s a pleasure but a mystery: Are we about to engage in a New Age Christian ritual or a medical procedure?
NEW YORK — “If you have faith, then it must be true,” says the man who has just extracted slimy gobbets of flesh from a woman’s abdomen with his bare hands and no incision. The gobbets, he says, are disease-causing “negativities,” though we know they are actually chicken guts marinated in fake blood.
