Capital New York

The stage doesn't do much for 'Old Jews Telling Jokes,' but it doesn't need to

Watching someone stand still and tell a joke isn’t the same thing as watching multiple people act out a joke, with gestures and props and video backdrops and musical accompaniment. The best jokes on the website are stronger when they’re simply being told straight to the camera, and it takes more skill to land a joke without any help—when it’s just the jokester and his or her delivery that sell it. More

Posted on May 21st, 2012 9:47am

The Broadway premiere season is over; now go check out Patricia Buckley off-Broadway in 'Evolution'

It’s an unusual piece, a blend of character sketches and monologues and performance art, written and performed by Patricia Buckley. She opens the show as Minnie, a young woman suffering from an unspecified illness, who, after trying dozens of pharmaceutical solutions, is having a breakdown. More

Posted on May 7th, 2012 3:35pm

A great playwright, a great star, and a great subject aren't enough to keep 'The Columnist' from being boring

Broadway's latest effort, the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of The Columnist, would seem to have the right ingredients: thoughtful playwright David Auburn (Proof), charismatic star John Lithgow, and source material that's rich with possibilities. It's the story of real-life syndicated columnist Joe Alsop, a Washington insider best remembered for his role in helping to escalate the Vietnam war—as well as a KGB blackmail scheme touched off by his sexual escapades with men.

Yet The Columnist tamps down the excitement, smoothing over most of the explosive political drama—war! espionage! betrayal!—leaving little more than a gentle character sketch of a man struggling (fairly calmly and fairly predictably) with his personal demons. More

Posted on April 26th, 2012 12:13pm

After a thrilling start, José Rivera's new play 'Massacre' is dead boring

Massacre was staged in 2007 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, but the play has been reworked enough that this off-Broadway production is being billed as the “premiere” of a “new play.” Why now? Perhaps Rivera is trying to stir up some buzz around a television adaptation of Massacre calledMayhem, for which he’s written an HBO pilot. But if Mayhem is anything like Massacre, you’ll be reaching for the remote after those very impressive first five minutes. More

Posted on April 13th, 2012 3:30pm

Young British theatrical wunderkind Matt Charman debuts new play, 'Regrets,' stateside, to little effect

The 32-year-old playwright is being hailed as one of Britain’s most promising young playwrights, with three commissions from the National Theater in London under his belt. But there’s not much about Regrets that’s promising: the characters are thin, the emotions are shallow, and neither of the play’s two distinctive subjects—divorce colonies and the McCarthy-era Red Scare—gets explored in any more depth than you’ll find in the average Wikipedia entry. More

Posted on March 29th, 2012 10:15am

In new Off-Broadway play 'Big Meal,' the pregnant teen from '30 Rock' steals the show

The play charms at first, especially since the early scenes are directed at a rapid clip by Sam Gold and played with casual sarcasm by Cameron Scoggins and Phoebe Strole. But the exhausting pace can’t last the whole evening—it’d be like watching a flip-book for 90 minutes—and once The Big Meal slows down, it loses its distinctiveness. More

Posted on March 22nd, 2012 2:02pm

A compelling exploration of deafness is stifled on the stage (in much the same way as its protagonist) by a boring, self-involved family

Christopher and Beth’s three adult children have all moved back home. While this might sound cozy for some families, it’s far from it for this quirky, argumentative English clan: “Why am I surrounded by my children again?” Christopher asks, in front of all of them. “When are you going to fuck off?”

For the first half hour of the play, which consists of exhausting, self-centered yammering around the dining room table, the audience is wondering the same thing. More

Posted on March 5th, 2012 4:20pm

From the playwright behind Sundance hit 'Bachelorette,' a new and biting tale of assistants to an evil, unseen boss

We've already seen plenty of stories about horrible bosses (Horrible Bosses, for instance) but Assistance manages to feel fresh. Perhaps it's because while most similar stories focus on the antagonism between the big wigs and the wide-eyed peons whom they torture, here the focus remains exclusively on the interactions between the people at the very bottom of the corporate ladder. In fact, the boss—a mogul whose exact occupation is never revealed—is never seen or heard. Imagine The Devil Wears Prada if it didn't need the devil to work. Or the Prada. More

Posted on February 29th, 2012 2:58pm

In 'CQ/CX,' the Jayson Blair scandal takes the stage, with less drama than the real thing

The resignation of the Times’ top editors is an interesting story for people who care deeply about newspapers and pay attention to mastheads; but the fact that a young man with a questionable background could and would intentionally fool those editors—and many many readers—for so long, lying and cheating his way to the top of the nation’s most respected newspaper, abusing even the people who tried to help him the most, is a far grander story about the very core of human morality, and it is relevant to every American, even those who don’t read the Times. More

Posted on February 16th, 2012 3:14pm

'Tokio Confidential' is not like typical Broadway musicals: It has human characters and a real plot

Tokio Confidential may not have the elements of a typical Broadway musical: no sing-along show-stoppers, no feel-good happy ending. But instead of bombast and melodrama, it has human characters, a real plot, and an honest heart. More

Posted on February 13th, 2012 1:32pm