Juan A. Ramirez

New York

Freelance Chief Critic at Theatrely

Freelance Theater Critic at Exeunt Magazine

Freelance Arts and Culture Writer at DigBoston

chief critic @Theatrely / writing @nytimesarts @vogue @vanityfair and whoever will take me 🇻🇪

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Articles

THE SWAMP DWELLERS & Kosky’s THREEPENNY OPERA - Review Roundup

6 days ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

In a rare treat of African theater in New York, director Awoye Timpo stages the pitch-perfect off-Broadway debut of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s 1958 play, The Swamp Dwellers at the Theatre for a New Audience. It’s a production sharply attuned to the work’s mysterious rhythms, built, like its stilt house set, atop a delicate and inevitable flow of deliberately paced revelations.
Selling Identity to the Art World in MINOR.ITY - Review

1 week ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

A sharp satire of the art world through the double prisms of race and generational gaps, the Cape Verdean-American playwright francisca da silveira’s minor.ity makes a canny premiere at the WP Theater. Co-produced with Colt Ceoeur, it takes place backstage at “Diaspora Now!”, a bigwig international fair in Paris, but begins with a front-of-curtain address from Cheikh (Ato Essandoh), a mid-career Senegalese artist who acts as our charming, unreliable griot.
A Heady Sex Education in JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN - Review

1 week ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

Nevermind that their sex ed and drama programs were cut, the juniors at a small-town Georgia high school find plenty of those to pore over in John Proctor Is the Villain, a savvy new play by Kimberly Belflower. Starring a note-perfect ensemble, it follows a core group of teen girls interpreting, and unwittingly reenacting, that old witch-hunt chestnut, The Crucible.
A Ruthless, Sensational SMASH - Review

2 weeks ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

That it subtitles itself “A Comedy About a Musical” is one of the few kindnesses imparted by Smash, the stage adaptation of the messy but memorable 2012 television series about the troubles of putting a show on Broadway. I mean that as a high compliment, because this show provides a delectably nasty view of show business to rival that of Bob Fosse.
BOOP! THE MUSICAL: Betty Lands on Broadway and Broadway Gains a Star - Review

2 weeks ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

If you’ve never actually seen a Betty Boop short film – and, despite her ubiquity on tattooed biceps, it’s likely – you’re in for a treat. Like all the best early 20th century works tragically and systematically erased from our cultural memory, she’s bright, effervescent, relentlessly charming and sexy.
A Curiously Beta GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS - Review

3 weeks ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

To stage David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross in 2025, starring Bill Burr, Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk, would appear to be a huge win for the meninist movement. Your brother’s favorite TV stars cursing up a storm as real estate agents engaging in all sorts of chicanery to stay at the top of their food chain? The Palace Theater fills itself.
Jessica Hecht on Her Adaptation of Brecht’s Mother

3 weeks ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

After 2020, as pandemic restrictions were beginning to loosen up, Jessica Hecht was looking to create a piece about, as she puts it, “what it is to be a mother, and also somebody who is political in spirit but doesn’t find her voice until later in her life.” Walking around the Strand bookshop, she stumbled upon a play she’d first encountered in high school, where she never fully grasped its meaning: Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother.
LOVE LIFE: Marriage, American Style - Review

4 weeks ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

Come one, come some, and step right up to what might be the apotheosis of the City Center Encores! project: the first New York staging of Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life since its premiere in 1948. The grandfather of the concept musical, nearly lost to time without a published book or recording, promises the niche, almost academic experience Encores! has lately forgone in favor of guaranteed crowd-pleasers.
Model Citizens in WINE IN THE WILDERNESS - Review

1 month ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

In her New York directorial debut, LaChanze returns to the work of Alice Childress, in whose play Trouble in Mind she fiercely starred on Broadway in 2021, renewing interest in the writer’s under-seen oeuvre. This time, she stages her 1969 play, Wine in the Wilderness, in a smart Classic Stage Company production featuring a sizzling Olivia Washington.
An Aimless OTHELLO - Review

1 month ago | theatrely.com | Juan A. Ramirez |Juan Ramírez

The uber-prolific Kenny Leon has somewhat perfected his directorial strategy of casting extremely well then getting out of the way of his talented performers, trusting them to deliver the work cleanly, and largely on their own. If a bit of nuance goes unexplored here, or some text feels hurried there, he typically pulls it off on the strength of the material. It worked with a rollicking comedy like Purlie Victorious, it worked with an emotional meditation like Our Town.