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 Inheritance, Part One & Part Two -This award-winning production of a new American play arrives from London ’s West End with a top-notch cast, almost seven hours of engrossing dialogue, and an array of challenging themes.
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Tina- The Tina Turner Musical -
With the arrival of Tina on Broadway the jukebox genre takes on a feminist sound and a modern social conscience. Indeed, it may well be the first me-too musical of the millennial.Read
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The Sound Inside - beautifully written/emotionally involving play by Adam Rappl Starring Mary Louise ParkerRead
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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
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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
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Slave Play - Jeremy O. Harris's uncompromising, graphic, sexually explicit play Read
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Free Style Love Supreme - Extended to 1/12/10!
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
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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
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Betrayal - Jamie Lloyd directs a compelling, minimalist take on Pinter's play with impressive Broadway debuts by Zawe Ashton, Charlie Cox, and Tom Hiddleston.
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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
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To Kill A Mockingbird - A beautifully acted and staged new and more relevant production of Harper Lee's iconic novel Read
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Mean Girls - Another teen audience targeted movie now sing and dances on Broadway Read
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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
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Come From Away - Its uplift message has helped this fact-based musical fly from Canada to Broadway. . . Read
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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
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Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven - Atlantic and LAByrinth Theater Companies team back up with Stephen Adly Guirgis for the playwright's first new work since the Pulitzer-winning Between Riverside and Crazy in 2014Read
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The Young Man from Atlanta -Michael Wilson, who so beautifully directed Horton Foote's 9-play The Orphans' H ome Cycle is now resurrecting The Young Man from Atlanta with its sad truth about middle-class American life at the Pershing Square Signature Center
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A Bright Room Called Day - Exctended to 12/22!
It was in 1991 that Tony Kushner’s 1985 play saw the light of Day in New York at the Public Theater. A newly "revisited" version is back at the Public under the direction of Oskar Eustis it remains an intentionally provocative, scary, almost absurdist, example of didactically-driven dramatic agitprop. Read
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The Half-Life of Marie Curie -
Lauren Gunderson's Audible production is a snapshot of the brilliant woman who not only discovered radium and polonium but became the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences.
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Pumpgirl -Abby Spallen's three-hander about hard-luck lives in today's Northern Ireland
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Little Shop of Horrors - Mayer convincingly sells Little Shop of Horrors as a near-perfect piece of musical theater writing. Read
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Hamnet -
Shakespeare, played maturely with a mix of grim optimism and snarky despair by Aran Murphy in his professional debut, has been stuck at eleven for a long, long time.
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Seared - Theresa Rebeck's literslly tasty comic take on art versus commerce is having its New York premiere at the beutiful new MCC Thesters's intimate Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater. Read
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Macbeth -
Though John Doyle breaks the rules in all the right ways, newbies to the play are likely to t become confused at times by its gender-blind casting and the nine cast members who play multiple roles in this all-hands-on-deck production.Read
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Is This A Room - As an animation of a single document, that feels like a refreshingly innovative concept. Read
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Bella Bella - Harvey Fierstone's biographical solo play is filled to the brim with Bella Abzug's trenchant wit and wisdom. For older theater goers, it's a trip down memory lane that spans many administrations, detailing presidential good deeds as well as the all too frequent surrenders to political expediency. . . for millenials it's an enlightening history lesson Read
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Fiddler On the Roof -
The not to be missed Yiddish version of the golden era's most perfect musical is now uptown. . . Read
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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
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Dear Evan Hansen The musical about an isolated teenager comes to London after storming success in New York . . . . Read
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Ghost Quartet Brand new intimate theatre The Boulevard stages its inaugural production of Dave Malloy's Ghost Quartet for four actor/singer/musicians . . . . Read
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Soho Cinders
The pantomime season starts early with a gay pantomime based on the legend of Cinderfella with pretty tunes and a difference. . . .
Lungs Claire Foy and Matt Smith re-pair in a less royal role . . . .
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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -
David Catlin has written as well as directed a stunning dramatic narrative that combines a period in the life of the novelist herself, and the circumstances that served to ignite her imagination for her novel. Read
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The Thanksgiving Play| -
There's a certain irony in a PC-skewering play written by a Native American playwright and set "in a high school drama room anywhere but the Los Angeles area” is being staged at the Geffen Playhouse, a theater with one of the least diverse audiences in the city. Well, The Thanksgiving Play contends, we've all got a lot to learn. If FastHorse's play isn't entirely a full banquet, it's certainly no turkey either Read
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Washington - DC
Amadeus -
Every now and then the stars align with a perfect play, superb direction,
set and costumes, inspired lighting and a performance by the lead that is
brilliant. Such is the case with Amadeus at the Folger Theatre, with Ian
Merrill Peakes as Salieri. Read
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White Pearl -
Anchuli Felicia King hass juxtaposed race, ethnicity and the responsibilities of the cosmetic business, which after all is engaged in the practice of illusion. Plenty of conflict to work with.
A Chorus Line - Signature Theatre has a reputation that goes far beyond its Arlington, Virginia home for taking "classic" or "forgotten" musicals and making them new again. That's certainly true of their current show Read
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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
