New York Stage Review

New York Stage Review features timely evaluations of both Broadway and off-Broadway productions, written by experienced theater critics.

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Trophy Boys: The guilted age

2 days ago | nystagereview.com | Michael Sommers

Freed from her Victorian corsets as earnest Marian Brook of TV’s current The Gilded Age series, Louisa Jacobson rips into a juicy contemporary role as a swaggering prep school bro in Trophy Boys. Ball cap backwards, oxford shirttails flying, Jacobson rages around as a boisterous jock who constantly and hoarsely proclaims, “I love women!” amidst Emmanuelle Mattana’s short, sharp, seriocomic study in toxic masculinity.
Prince Faggot: A royal fairy tale unravels

1 week ago | nystagereview.com | Michael Sommers

Who enjoys The Crown, the dishy six-season British TV series dramatizing the affairs of the House of Windsor? Opening Tuesday, Prince Faggot delivers an episode of The Crown pushed ahead in time to the 2030s. In a new Off Broadway play, Jordan Tannahill spins a what-if story around Prince George, the UK heir to the throne. His fiction presents George as an 18 year-old gay art student at Oxford who shares a red-hot romance with Dev, a fine South Asian British man.
Passengers: A Classy Party of Tip-Top Cirque-Style Artists Take the Train Downtown - New York Stage Review

1 week ago | nystagereview.com | Michael Sommers

The splendid Montreal-based troupe of acrobats, gymnasts, dancers and circus artists known as The 7 Fingers currently makes a two-week appearance in far lower Manhattan at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, where its delightful Passengers opened on Sunday. Passengers is a Cirque du Soleil sort of entertainment, sans that estimable company’s typically extravagant décor and themes.
Prosperous Fools: Taylor Mac Attacks, Unpersuasively

2 weeks ago | nystagereview.com | Michael Sommers

That ever-remarkable playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac claims this latest event, Prosperous Fools, is inspired by Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Moliere’s 1670 comedy about a rich slob who takes lessons in hopes of becoming a classy A-Lister. No need to brush up on it—this is not at all the story that the MacArthur and Guggenheim award-winning Mac presents in Prosperous Fools, which premiered on Thursday at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in downtown Brooklyn.
Angry Alan: John Krasinski Swallows the Red Pill

2 weeks ago | nystagereview.com | Michael Sommers

A popular mainstream actor, John Krasinski enjoys a profile as an agreeable white American guy, established by his role as the affable Jim in the long-running sitcom The Office and since maintained by subsequent projects and his cheerful visits to talk shows. Krasinski’s personable brand puts a deceptively happy face on Angry Alan, a dark comedy about a Mister Nice Guy whose online trip into the “Google vortex” causes his outlook on life to grow increasingly misogynistic.
Angry Alan: A Brilliant Skewering of Male Toxicity

2 weeks ago | nystagereview.com | Frank Scheck

Contrary to what you might assume from the poster art showing him erupting in an anguished scream, John Krasinski doesn’t play the title role in Angry Alan, the new play being presented at off-Broadway’s Studio Seaview. In this (mostly) one-person drama written by British playwright Penelope Skinner and (as the credits put it) “created with” Don Mackay, Krasinski plays Roger, a middle-aged man who’s hit hard times.
The Wash: Airing a Ripe Slice of American History

3 weeks ago | nystagereview.com | Michael Sommers

A remarkable event in American labor history, little known today, is the Atlanta washerwomen’s strike of 1881. The successful action was organized by underpaid, overworked Black women who washed everybody’s dirty clothes by hand back in the day before homes had laundry machines. Their summertime strike literally stunk up Atlanta for weeks just as the city was about to host an international cotton exposition intended to celebrate the revitalized New South.
From Massachusetts: Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) and Fall in Like

3 weeks ago | nystagereview.com | Bob Verini

New York and points west should keep an eye out for this sparkling two-hander, a romantic musical comedy from England, because it’s going to get around and could build a phalanx of fans.
A Freeky Introduction: Divine Wisdom for Being Your Best Sexy Self

3 weeks ago | nystagereview.com | Michael Sommers

Poetical rants and sexy raves of an affirmative bent are delivered by writer and performer NSangou Njikam to a funky musical mix in his new, not-quite-solo work A Freeky Introduction.
Lunar Eclipse: A Moving Portrait of a Married Couple in Twilight

3 weeks ago | nystagereview.com | Frank Scheck

In the opening moments of Donald Margulies’ new play, we see a character in the shadows, sobbing profusely. That turns out to be the most dramatic moment in Lunar Eclipse, which depicts an evening-long conversation between a long-married couple as they watch the titular event. It might sound like the recipe for a listless evening in the theater, but when those two characters are played by Reed Birney and Lisa Emery it’s anything but.