MUSIC: Five O'Clock Heroes, The Octagon and Ford & Fitzroy play Mercury Lounge tonight. In an odd turn of events we're most excited for the opener, Ford & Fitzroy - who played our Movable Hype show in February (video here). more ›

Gersh Kuntzman and Marc Dinkin, Creators of SUV: The Musical! more ›

It might be hard to get to a theatre in time to see any of these picks, but here goes. Even with our fairly averse attitude toward holiday-specific performances, it’s hard not to notice that the current crop of shows is pretty heavy on the fractured fairytale side of things. Except for kids, there’s almost no straightforward telling of a Christmas- (or other holiday) related story. We’re not complaining, but it does make it harder to pick out something as the zaniest take on the genre. Broken Watch Theatre Company’s A Broken Christmas Carol (a 21st century, NC-17 version) and the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre Company’s Christmas Carol, Oy Hanukkah, Merry Kwanzaa, Happy Ramadan (a version “with Old World accents and New World inclusiveness” – Scrooge would not approve) show that Dickens’s story is still the go-to touchstone for holiday theatre. Maybe because it’s so omnipresent, we can’t help but be a bit more drawn to Jeffrey Solomon’s one-man Santa Claus is Coming Out (or, How the Gay Agenda Came Down My Chimney) which is playing three nights at Queens Theatre in the Park. Solomon takes on a dozen plus characters in this reprisal of mockumentary about the jolly red guy with the giant belly. Oh, if the people howling about a “war on Christmas” could see all this now…not that they’d expect much more from us NYC heathens, of course. more ›

Just in time for Election Day comes Pulling The Lever, an interesting sounding new work from Rising Circle Theatre Collective. The Collective provides a voice for artists of color, joining voices to nurture and produce theatre that reflects their experiences. more ›