Interested in writing for us? With Curtainup's editor and critic in chief currently sidelined from theatergoing due to an accident, our need for some additional theater loving, insightful backups is urgent. However, able new reviewers are welcome to stay with us on a regular basis. . . so check out our Guidelines and then get back to us with details about yourself at esommer@pipeline.com
The Sound Inside - beautifully written/emotionally involving play by Adam Rappl Starring Mary Louise ParkerRead
More
Linda Vista -
Descriptive Excerpt: If the title were not already taken by a much produced French classic, Tracy Letts might well have called his play about a middle-aged guy who hates everything and everyone — including himself Read
More
The Lightning Thief - If you had told me at age 12 that my two favorite literary protagonists — Harry Potter and Percy Jackson — would be headlining Broadway shows side-by-side in less than 15 years, I can't imagine I would have believed you. Read
More
The Great Society - If you invest the time and money to watch Cox's LBJ get all these bills that made America greater than ever passed, I suspect you'll exit the theater fervently hoping that Robert Shenkkan — or some playwright — - will soon have the facts to write a play to fit the title The Rise and Fall of Donald J. Trump. Read
More
Slave Play - Jeremy O. Harris's uncompromising, graphic, sexually explicit play Read
More
Free Style Love Supreme -
This isn't an introspective show. No group member attempts to persuade you that anything done on stage is IMPORTANT. What IS important, however, is the shared theatrical experience between the artists and audience members and finding truth in the moment.Read
More
The Height of the Storm - Eileen Atkins and Jonathan Pryce manage to turn Florian Zeller's overly clever script into a truly unmissable point counterpoint performance duet Read
More
Betrayal - Jamie Lloyd directs a compelling, minimalist take on Pinter's play with impressive Broadway debuts by Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox, and Tom Hiddleston.
Read
More
Moulin Rouge! The Musical - a brightly wrapped, intricately decorated package with little inside. It's racy, sometimes vulgar, and always indifferent to historical context and narrative logic. This makes it just the right stuff for the Trump eraRead
More
To Kill A Mockingbird - A beautifully acted and staged new and more relevant production of Harper Lee's iconic novel Read
More
Mean Girls - Another teen audience targeted movie now sing and dances on Broadway Read
More
..
Frozen - A visually rich production that keeps us wide-eyed and on tenterhooks for more than two hours, even when we know how things are going to end. . . Read
More
Come From Away - Its uplift message has helped this fact-based musical fly from Canada to Broadway. . . Read
More
Dear Evan Hansen - A small musical's big heart and big on talent cast is now a welcome addition to the Broadway musical scene. . . Read
More
Forbidden Broadway: The Next Generation -
How did we survive this long interval without Alessandrini's insightful satirizing and inspired spoofing of Broadway shows both current and on occasion recent past? This corner welcomes it back as it again demonstrates that it has what it takes to mock the mediocre even as it also joyously celebrates the parodic life upon the wicked stage
Read
More
Soft Power -
With the key cast members as well as director, choreographer aboard , David Henry Hwang's and Jeanine Tesori's genre busting Soft Power has arrived in New York. I can't think of a better place than the Public's Newman Theater for it to find an audience ready to buy into Hwang's dazzlingly original but flawed mash up of fact and fiction.Read
More
The Wrong Man With the help of Hamilton's director Thomas Kail and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire, Ross Golan's almost two dozen story telling songs became the musical, The Wrong Man, now premiering at MCC's beautiful new theater in Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan. Read
More
Heroes of the Fourth Turning -
Will Arbery's world premiere at Playwrights Horizons is an ultra-conservative reverie about our present cultural moment stirs up a perfect storm of debate on those hot-button issues tethered to religion, politics, and the family. Read
More
The New Englanders -
The changes in the typical American family (if ever there really was one outside of Rockwell's famous idyllc canvases and 1940s movies) are indeed welcome. But these now acceptable new family units have brought on new new issues to deal with. And it t should thus not come as a surprise that the marriages possible in our more open minded societies don't all follow a blissfully ever after path Read
More
Dublin Carol -
It was inevitable that Conor McPherson's morose but incisively impassioned one-act play would find its way to the Irish Repertory Theatre. Here it is receiving as polished and vivid a production under the direction of Ciaran O'Reilly as one would want. Read
More
Kingfishers Catch Fire -
Although superbly staged and acted, this is not light entertainment. However, who go will have a rare theatrical experience that will linger after the house lights go down.Read
More
Fern Hill - Michael Tucker's dramedy adds up to a pleasant two hours, thanks to excellent actors and helpful staging by director Nadia Tass. . .Read
More
L.O.V.E.R. - playwright performer Lois Robbins tells us all about herself -- often more than we need to know Read
More
Felix Starro - Extended to 9/21!
The world premiere of Jessica Hagedorn and Fabian Obispo's new musical, kicks off Ma-Yi Theatre Company's 30th anniversary season. Its being the first created by Filipino-Americans about Filipino-Americans is indeed a milestone worth celebrating. . . Read
More
Da Vinci & Michelangeo: The Titans Experience - His voice catches on a plaintive note, then crescendos to peals of laughter. Is this Lear? Is this Hamlet? No, it's just Mark Rodgers. . .delivering a 2-hour lecture performance Read
More
Fiddler On the Roof -
The not to be missed Yiddish version of the golden era's most perfect musical is now uptown. . . Read
More
Fiddler on the Roof The show will move uptown to Stage 42 from 2/11/19; opening 2/21/19 -
The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene's (NYTF)
excellent Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof as directed by Joel Grey makes us fall in love with Tevye, his wife, Golde, and his three daughters all over again. Read
More
Noises Off Michael Frayn's brilliant farce of farces goes behind the scenes of repertory theatre . . .
Read More
The Watsons Laura Wade tackles an unfinished Jane Austen novel, The Watsons and creates a dramatic coup . . .
Read More
The Lady Vanishes In the perfect play for Brexiteers comes this accomplished thriller from Alfred Hitchcock as a tale of the British abroad, heroic and eccentric. I want to cheer! . . .
Read More
BIG The 1988 movie is recreated as a musical three decades after the film . . . .
Read More
For Services Rendered Somerset Maugham's 1932 play looks at the predicament of those who survived the First World War . . . .
Read More
Torch Song In the brand new Turbine Theatre in the shadow of Battersea Power Station, Drew McOnie directs Harvey Fierstein's iconic Torch Song with a star performance from Matthew Needham . . . .
Read More
Appropriate Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's family drama set in an ex-plantation mansion in Arkansas brings out the cracks between siblings . . . .
Read More
On Beckett -When you consider that so many of Beckett's iconic characters are face to face with the reaper, Bill Irwin &emdash; a very youthful 69 year old &emdash; could conceivably be Hamm-ing and Krapp-ing for years to come. For now, he is content to draw back the curtain and give us all a look at what has been so inspiring. Read
More
Girls -
The only items missing from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' ambitious but messy Girls, having its world premiere at Yale Rep, are cellphones. Otherwise, this modernization of Euripides'weird 5th century BCE Bacchae fits right in with our current solipsistic society where self is all and we communicate via technology.Read
More
Just think of those shocks you've got/ And those knocks you've got/ And those blues you've got/ From that news you've got/ And those pains you've got/ (If any brains you've got). . ./ 'Cause Franklin knows/ Anything goes.
—Cole Porter lyric quoted in Thomas Friedman's 3/06/09 New York Times column The Trump Musical: 'Anything Goes'. You gotta crawl around in another man's skin 'fore you can really know him
—Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mckingbird
