Whoa! Looks like the MTA is poised to go buckwild on perpetrators of scratchiti. That's the fairly craptastic end of graffiti where people use sharp objects to scratch tags on subway windows and doors. The results look similar to etch-- that's where vandals use glass-etching fluid in shoe polish bottles to catch tags. Apparently the incidence of both kinds of graf is way up over the last year. Newsday reports: The number of major......

So, as noted earlier this morning, the distance to Broadway’s mostly predictable yet hotly coveted trophies just got a little shorter for this year’s crop of shows, with feel-good musicals taking the lion’s share of recognition, though the reason for a theater climate in which History Boys so easily get beat down by Jersey Boys might also be that there are so few other History Boys. But we digress. So, turning back to our regularly......

THEATER: Mike Daisey, the versatile, unpredictable monologuist (and onetime Gothamist interviewee), has revealed a lot about his own past and personality over the course of his years of performing and writing. Now, in the last entry of the season at Galapagos' "Evolve" series, he's going after new material -- a select array of "Great Men of Genius" other than himself. Last week he explored the life of Bertolt Brecht; tonight, he takes on circus impresario......

Along with producing shows by up and coming playwrights, one of the things off-off-Broadway does best is to resurrect plays first presented ages ago that have hardly been seen or thought of since. One such is V.R. Lang’s Fire Exit: A Vaudeville For Eurydice, which is nominally a modernization of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth but in actuality, at least in this incarnation, is more an opportunity for some majorly bizarre antics by a brave, eager cast.......

In yesterday’s theater round-up, we noted the Stadttheater festival of new German theater at HERE Arts Center, but right now you can also see a staging of one of the most cherished works in classic German literature: Goethe’s Faust. For three years, Target Margin Theater Company has been working toward a full presentation of the 18th century masterpiece, newly translated by Douglas Langworthy, and on Sunday – probably not coincidentally, Walpurgisnacht, which, as those familiar......

The weather outside might be just starting to feel like spring, but in the theater world there’s already a summery vibe going on. Last night the Lortel Awards kicked off the trophy-giving season; this Friday the Drama League awards go out. Then there’s the festivals; not that there aren’t festivals at other times of the year, but as the weather heats up they start crowding in thick and fast. Currently you can get a square......

On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author. “Ablutophobia” – the fear of bathing – sounds more like a joke to be played out over a few days in a comic strip than a potential centerpiece for a play that has at least some serious things to say. But in Naked Angels’ The Mistakes......

April 27: Taste of the Lower East Side This fundraiser, their sixth annual, benefits the Grand Street Settlement's Youth Programs and features 35 of the neighborhood's favorites. $120 tickets are available at the door, 7-11 pm, Puck Building, 295 Lafayette. April 30: Dining for Darfur Join in Andrea Strong's dine out fundraiser this Sunday, when participating restaurants will donate 5% of their gross sales to the International Rescue Committee’s humanitarian relief efforts in Darfur and......

In a city where there’s as much theater as there is here, we’re never too surprised when shows open that have a lot in common, but it’s always fun to note and wonder what was happening in the creative Zeitgeist to generate technically unrelated but similar works. This week, for instance, Rachel Shukert’s Bloody Mary opens, bringing the life of the notoriously unbalanced daughter of Henry VIII to the stage in suitably off-the-wall fashion (Mary......

So many long-hyped shows are in the giddy last throes of previews on Broadway, we’re a bit afraid it might just pop and cover everything in its surrounds with tiny microphones and flakes of pancake makeup. Better stay far away – philosophically if not physically. 61 Dead Men looks like a great way to do so. It’s the first show we’ve ever seen billed as an “improv tragedy,” and that alone piques our interest. Janus......

We’ll probably jinx it by saying this, but spring does finally seem to be inching into the city, and we’re eagerly speculating about how many days until the little leafbuds on the tree outside our window pop open. With arboreal imagery in our minds, and since it’s almost Passover, we’ll start off this week with Jake Ehrenreich’s one-man memoir-in-a-musical comedy, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn. Ehrenreich, who has had success on and off Broadway as......

As we try to get over the possible snub of NYC by Matthew Bourne’s adaptation of Edward Scissorhands, at least we can console ourselves with the usual mind-bending assortment of theater that’s definitely here now. Last week we took note of Starmites, a comic book-inspired musical that was showing briefly at CAP 21, and wondered whether it could be a new trend. This week, to prove we’re not crazy (at least not because of this)......