My review of the Hypothetical Theater Company’s “There or Here” is up at CurtainUp. Short version? I did not care for the play.

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Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner that Jersey Boys is so good? I guess it did pick up its fair share of Tonys in ‘06 (including Best Musical), but I have a distinct bias against jukebox musicals, especially after having to sit through the execrable The Times They Are A-Changin’, and always dismissed the [...]

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I’m seeing six plays in seven days this week (yesterday was my day off), doing reviews of the Fringe Festival for CurtainUp. The Fringe reviews are here, and my first contribution is here. Writing that little paragraph led me to realize that above a certain threshold of competence with the English language, everyone’s [...]

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I heard from an acquaintance last night that the Delacorte’s Hamlet no longer kicks off with “To Be or Not To Be.” Interesting. I wonder which is the norm—if they intended it to start that way and changed it around after getting poor feedback, or if they were experimenting with foregrounding it at [...]

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The Public’s Hamlet at the Delacorte starts off with a bang: it opens with the “to be or not to be” speech. It makes no sense at all (it occurred to me several hours later that it’s possible that the implication is that Hamlet is world-weary even before the action gets going, or perhaps [...]

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1) Why squander a theoretically interesting premise (three people get entangled, and they are simultaneously all wrong and all right about what’s going on amongst them) with a climax that simplifies, rather than complicates, the dynamic? Making the wife right all along makes her immediately into a martyr, which she remains for the rest [...]

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Maybe the reason I didn’t fall head-over-heels for the current, Patrick Stewart-helmed Macbeth is that it’s not my favorite Shakespeare, just as a play—I find it a little long, a little slow; I tend to mix up the tertiary characters; I have trouble with the way the two major elements (1. The darkness-of-the-human-soul introspective stuff, [...]

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