There’s something missing in the salmon-colored living room of Pete (Mark Blum) and Mary (Mare Winningham), somewhere in the American sunbelt. And it’s not just the old sneakers that Pete may or may not have accidentally stuffed beneath the big secti …Read more

According to online biographical notes, Madelaine Warren started her performing career as an opera singer. Later she transitioned into the pop-music arena, performing in concert halls and clubs, as well as on cruise ships (often teamed with her husba …Read more

In singing music associated with Judy Garland, Karen Luschar has clearly found her métier as a performer. In her current show at Don’t Tell Mama—”Chasing Rainbows: Songs of Judy Garland”—the singer doesn’t exactly impersonate the late star, although …Read more

The “play within the play” has been a useful dramatic trope at least since Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the actions in the traveling players’ “The Murder of Gonzago” help young Hamlet attempt to “catch the conscience of the king.” Lawrence Dial now …Read more

Contaminated water endangers a community. Science denial is widespread in the face of inconvenient truths. The discomfiting idea that populism can be a dangerous thing hangs in the atmosphere. There is plenty in David Harrower’s 2013 adaptation of He …Read more

A new production of The Black Crook (at the Abrons Arts Center) marks the 150th anniversary of the premiere of a work that has been dubbed (erroneously, some say) America’s first musical. The show is largely unknown now, but throughout the late 19th …Read more

A comedian, actor, and author, Loni Love is probably best known as a panelist on television’s talk fest The Real. Her brand of stand-up may not necessarily stick out in a crowd—she trades in traditional comic staples: race and ethnicity, politics, re …Read more

Austin Pendleton and Barbara Bleier have a sweet rapport with one another in their show “Late Nights in Smoky Bars” (at Pangea; directed by Barbara Maier Gustern). The two portray longtime friends who meet regularly over potent potables to sort out t …Read more

Love—you impossible thing! Elusive? Obviously. But sometimes you can also be slippery even to define. Your borders are often blurry and difficult to trace. Andrea Axelrod explores this particular conundrum in her new show at the Metropolitan Room: “A …Read more

In Liberty (presented at 42West), the Statue of Liberty sails from France to America in 1885. There she lingers in a sort of limbo as Americans finish raising money for the pedestal on which she will stand. Onstage the statue is a moving, breathing h …Read more