"Teenagers are unmitigated dickbags," declares Daniel Kitson halfway through his funny and tender solo show It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later, currently running at St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO. This uncontroversial fact is established by way of explaining that Caroline Carpenter, one of two fictional Brits at the center of Kitson's exhaustively detailed monologue, is an exception to the rule. Yet that's probably the most exceptional thing about Caroline: As a teenager, she was kinder and more sensible than most adolescents, but she's no hero, and her life story, as told by Kitson, is not distinguished by the extraordinary circumstances we've come to expect from dramatic characters. Kitson, a writer/performer, has instead taken the stage to reveal the extraordinary poetry in the "ordinary" moments. more ›

Though Cillian Murphy and his famous blue eyes easily dominate the massive St. Anne's Warehouse stage in his New York stage debut, the real star of Enda Walsh's one-man show Misterman is the remarkable sound design by Gregory Clarke. From Doris Day at the top to the dead silence before the curtain call, Clarke's clever design (along with Donnacha Dennehy's compositions) is almost distractingly good. Which makes sense since as a series of reel-to-reel recordings are a crucial plot point in this tight play that initially appears to cover a day in the life of a troubled, deeply religious Irishman in Innisfree. more ›

Anton Chekhov's final play, The Cherry Orchard, premiered in Moscow just six months before his death, in 1904. It was immediately well-received, but the author was frustrated with the production. Chekhov considered it a comedy, but Moscow Art Theater director Constantin Stanislavski staged it as tragedy, with what the playwright felt was an insufferable amount of "weepiness." Over a hundred years and a hundred thousand boring Chekhov productions later, one imagines the author would have been pleased with Andrei Belgrader's fresh revival of the play at the intimate Classic Stage Company, where an almost sublime balance of absurd humor and poignant wistfulness has been achieved, thanks to a splendid ensemble featuring John Turturro, Dianne Wiest, Josh Hamilton, Alvin Epstein, and Daniel Davis. more ›

Last night, while protesters were marching over the Brooklyn Bridge, John Malkovich was marching over dead prostitutes at BAM at its premiere of The Infernal Comedy: Confessions Of A Serial Killer. If the idea of Malkovich Malkovich playing real-life Austrian Hannibal Lecter Jack Unterweger as he gives a book tour in hell accompanied by a trio of opera sopranos sounds up your alley—well, the show runs through tomorrow. And you won't be disappointed. The show is a beautifully sung jukebox opera—but in English ("The international language of love," Malkovich as Unterweger explains) and with ladies being strangled to death with their bras. more ›

Puppetry is often associated with the cuddly, but let's get one thing straight: the puppets in 69ºS are not cute. In Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff's new production, now playing as part of BAM's Next Wave festival, ghostly marionettes are used to silently reenact the harrowing Antarctic voyage of Ernest Shackleton in 1914. We took a look at Sanko's fantastically creepy studio over the summer, but the finished result is finally here. And it's one stunner of a show. more ›

Silence! The Musical is exactly what you think it is. If you've been meaning to rewatch Jonathan Demme's 1991 Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins classic Silence of the Lambs but keep wishing it included musical numbers, more laughs and the possibility of having a free Twinkie hurled at your face, the surprisingly faithful unauthorized parody currently cutting up audiences at P.S. 122 should do the trick. more ›

Few worlds are as ripe for the mockery as the New York food world. From the ridiculously image-obsessed chefs to the extreme overabundance of local/sustainable restaurants to the gossipy websites that track their every trivial move, there's plenty to trash. But it takes someone who truly knows the scene to be able to properly rip it apart, which is where the Upright Citizen's Brigade's Pig: A Restaurant steps in. more ›

"I admit Freud was a genius. Who else could make an hour into fifty minutes?" quips the Rabbi in Woody Allen's one-act play Honeymoon Motel. "" One-liners of both the classic and clunker variety abound in Allen's play, which makes up one-third of an evening of one-act comedies called Relatively Speaking at Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It's tough for straight plays to make it to Broadway these days, and even tougher for one-acts to see the light of day there. But when you've got big names like Woody Allen, Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and John Turturro on the marquee, anything's possible. But is it worth the $55-$135? more ›

Robert Wilson's gorgeous Berliner Ensamble production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's classic The Threepenny Opera premiered at BAM last night and it was everything that the Roundabout's dreadful 2006 revival was not: sexy, stylish and very, very German. At three hours the show is a little long (Wilson is a big fan of highly-stylized slow movements*) but it really doesn't matter when the material is this good. And the pitch-black satire that defines Threepenny remains vibrant and relevant more than 80 years after it first premiered in Berlin. If you are lucky enough to catch this production before it leaves BAM at the end of the week, you're sure to walk out humming...and wishing that some soul would take another stab at bringing Mac the Knife back here for a longer run. But maybe in English next time? more ›

Catch enough downtown theater and performance art, and sooner or later you'll get desensitized to ribald, transgressive on-stage behavior. A fully naked burlesque performer urinating in a plastic cup and then balancing it on her head before (seemingly?) drinking it won't make you bat an eye; a courtly man in an expensive suit unscrewing a light bulb and eating it is just another Tuesday night in the Village. But in his newly updated extravaganza Arias with a Twist, drag queen extraordinaire Joey Arias makes even the most jaded experimental theatergoer's jaw drop. I've seen a lot of crazy stuff, but I never expected to witness a six-foot-tall drag queen get sodomized by a couple of giant anatomically-correct demon puppets. more ›

A great Broadway revival can be an immensely compelling experience for obsessives and neophytes alike (see: Anything Goes). But the transfer of the Kennedy Center's production of Follies is less a great Broadway revival than a solid regional one. The score still shines and the key moments are all there, but awkwardly shoehorned into a drape-covered Marquis theater that comes off flat and cheap instead of grand and decayed. The ghosts of showgirls past who haunt the fictional Weismann Theater here seem less ethereal and menacing than bored, directionless and neutered. more ›

As you settle into your seat before the start of The Select (The Sun Also Rises), you may find yourself wondering if Elevator Repair Service has developed Attention Deficit Disorder. After all, the performance you're about to see is only three and a half hours long—less than half the length of their last production, a word-for-word adaptation of The Great Gatsby. But have faith, lovers of long-form theatrical epics: what The Select lacks in length it makes up for in depth, and unless you're an authority on Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, you probably won't notice what's been excised from this otherwise faithful interpretation. more ›

Writer and director Garson Kanin, whose gimlet-eyed satire Born Yesterday is currently in revival at Broadway's Cort Theatre, once said of Frank Capra, "I'd rather be Capra than God, if there is a Capra." You can definitely see his admiration for the great social-minded director reflected in Born Yesterday, which was a huge hit when it debuted in 1946 starring comedian Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn, the airheaded arm candy of corrupt tycoon Harry Brock. Like Capra's body of work, Born Yesterday walks a fine line between screwball comedy and earnest sermonizing. more ›

Catch Me If You Can, which opened last week at the Neil Simon Theater, offers the basic pleasures of a big Broadway musical but not much else. Like Steven Spielberg's 2002 Tom Hanks/Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle of the same name, the show follows the true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr—a very young conman who in the early '60s impersonated a pilot, a doctor and a lawyer while pulling off millions in check fraud. But don't go to the show expecting the rush of pulling off a con, or catching one. Like that other musical currently on the Great White Way in which a young man in the '60s gets places on charm, an essential spark of life just isn't in this one. more ›

Can Daniel Radcliffe succeed in persuading everybody he isn't Harry Potter? He's certainly trying, but one wonders if Frank Loesser's How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was really the ideal choice for the young star's resume-building. The latest revival of this utterly forgettable musical comedy, which debuted on Broadway in 1961, stars Radcliffe as an ambitious window washer who, with the aid of a self-help book narrated by a disembodied Anderson Cooper, ascends swiftly to the top of the corporate ladder. As boulevard diversions go, it's all harmless enough, but Radcliffe's problem is that the role of J Pierrepont Finch is vague and shallow, and he can't really come up with anything to do beyond winkling smugly at the audience. more ›

In the beginning of his ribald and heartfelt solo comedy Ghetto Klown, John Leguizamo projects a subway map of New York onto a giant screen. "I'm from the scrotum of Queens, next to the penis of Manhattan," he explains, as a black magic marker suddenly reveals the uncanny anatomical resemblance heretofore hidden in our familiar subway map. "You'll never be able to look at the subway map the same way again," he adds, and the moment is representative of Ghetto Klown at its best: after seeing the city through Leguizamo's eyes, you can't help but take a little bit of his salty perspective with you out on the streets. more ›

Tina Satter's wonderfully weird play In The Pony Palace/FOOTBALL uses imaginative wordplay, quirky choreography, and marching band dance music to explore the passion and absurdity often associated with high school football. Our heroes are The Owls, an all-girl team with a lot of heart and dedication, and a sad mascot who sometimes fills in as linebacker on game day. more ›

J.D. Salinger, speaking through the voice of Buddy Glass, hit the nail on the head when he wrote, "Have you ever seen a really beautiful production of, say, The Cherry Orchard? Don't say you have. Nobody has. You may have seen 'inspired' productions, 'competent' productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov's talent it matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage." Indeed, Chekhov's oeuvre can prove maddeningly elusive for actors and directors, who have a hard time resisting the urge to overemphasize the understated. The playwright himself was often unhappy with the first productions staged by Constantin Stanislavsky's famed Moscow Art Theater; in fact, after a preliminary reading of what is arguably his most challenging play, Three Sisters, Stanislavsky remarked, "[Chekhov] thought he had written a happy comedy and all of us considered the play a tragedy." more ›

Who's up for trudging through the frozen tundra out to a DUMBO warehouse to watch a one man show called The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church? Lots of people, as it turns out (Lou Reed!), and with good reason: though the title may imply a long, dreary black turtleneck slog through cliche solo Off Broadway theaterland, those familiar with the play's writer and performer, Daniel Kitson, know better. This was my first encounter with Kitson, and I can guarantee you that whenever this brilliant British comedian and raconteur rolls through in NYC again, I'll be there. But considering he hasn't brought a theater piece here in five years, you'd be making a big mistake by sitting out his current creation, which runs through January 30th at St. Ann's Warehouse. Tickets are sold out, but where there's a will, there's a way. (For one thing, the theater enlists volunteer ushers for every performance, and they get to see the show for free.) more ›

The full title of Daniel Fish's new play isn't exactly designed for a Broadway marquee. Starring the superb Thomas Jay Ryan (The Little Foxes, Henry Fool) and Christina Rouner (The Duchess of Malfi), this strange 70 minute whirlwind is quite descriptively titled (deep breath) Tom Ryan Thinks He’s James Mason Starring in a Movie By Nicholas Ray in which a Man's Illness Provides an Escape from the Pain, Pressure and Loneliness of Trying to be the Ultimate American Father, Only to Drive Him Further Into the More Thrilling Though Possibly Lonelier Roles of Addict and Misunderstood Visionary. If you're looking for Spider-Man, you took a wrong turn at Union Square. more ›

Taken as a whole, 2010 won't go down as one of the most extraordinary years for theater in NYC. Compared to the past three years, which saw such electrifying works as The Eaten Heart, Passing Strange, and The Confidence Man, there simply didn't seem to be quite as many "must-see" productions. But the highlights were as terrifically high as any other year, and, in our humble opinion, these were the ten best shows we saw in 2010, in order of excellence: Gatz, Chekhov Lizardbrain, Clybourne Park, The Aliens, Dusk Rings a Bell, Lear, Red, The Collection and A Kind of Alaska, The Little Foxes, and The Creditors. Click on the image for more on why these shows made NYC's theater scene one of the best reasons to pay the extortionary rent in this town. more ›

"Truth in drama is forever elusive," wrote Harold Pinter in his incisive speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Indeed, part of what makes his plays so fascinating is the way in which the truth eludes his bewildered characters, who thrash about uncomfortably in a world of menacing darkness and latent ferocity. Pinter's one act play The Collection, currently on view in a first-rate production by the Atlantic Theater Company, revels in this slippery uncertainty. Written in 1961, it concerns two couples, James and Stella and Harry and Bill. Stella, a dress designer who lives in a mod apartment with her husband and business partner James, may have had a fling with Bill, who is also a designer and lives with the much older Harry in his posh house in Belgravia. The evening's unease begins with a chilling phone call placed by James (from a classic British phone booth above the stage) to Harry's house. He's convinced Bill has made a cuckold of him, and he wants... something. more ›

The gang's all here, more or less. From a distance, Paul Reubens looks exactly the same as when many of us first encountered him on his hit Reagan-era Saturday morning kids' show. His fantasy kitsch cabin has been rendered in exacting detail, and puppet master Basil Twist has anthropomorphized all the old objects marvelously. Lynne Marie Stewart is back as Miss Yvonne, and though Laurence Fishburne couldn't be coaxed onstage as Cowboy Curtis, the actors who played Mailman Mike and Jambi the Genie in the original live show are on the scene. The antics are manic, the colors are primary, and many of the best old bits from the hit series have been meticulously recycled. And yet, and yet... the packed playhouse still feels sort of empty. I know you are but what am I? more ›