A few minutes into The Long Shrift, Robert Boswell’s new play at the Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre, and Sarah and Henry, a middle aged couple, are in the midst of what is surely not their first argument over their son, barely out of high school an …Read more

About midway through the opening number of Academia Nuts, you will think: “It’s A Chorus Line for nerds.” Here’s a collective of kids hell-bent on giving their all to win, not a dancing gig, but a scholarship; surely the songs and confessions of pers …Read more

In Feather Gatherers, presented at The New Ohio Theatre as a part of the Ice Factory Festival, Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin, along with The Drunkard’s Wife, their troupe of actors, dancers, and musicians, remind us that sometimes the best sto …Read more

Set in exotic Yucatán on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, The Mapmaker’s Opera is a dramatic adaptation (of a novel by Béa Gonzalez) that has more in common with a telenovela than with the art form mentioned in its title. Not that there is anything …Read more

We hear the notes of a piano, the clinking of glasses, the murmurs of a crowd and then a voice, “good evening ladies and gentleman, welcome to Philadelphia’s liveliest spot in South Philly: Emerson’s Bar and Grill” says the announcer, before introduc …Read more

If it has ever seemed to you that the typical “coming of age” trope is getting a bit stale, then Jon Provan’s two hour anthology of adolescent growth and development will revive your interest in the genre. In Coming of Age, simplistic, yet powerful d …Read more

While we all read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in high school, few of us ever experience life imitating art. Such is the case in Brian Sutton’s Searching For Romeo, now at the Alice Griffin Jewel Bow Theatre as part of the New York Musical Theatre …Read more

Why write a play about Ethel Rosenberg, you may ask? We already know the ending (spoiler alert: she dies); and we all know the evils of McCarthyism, but it’s old news, a relic of the fifties. But Joan Beber’s new play, Ethel Sings: The Unsung Song of …Read more

Among the many very nice things about Cloned!, the backyard-ish little musical now playing at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival, is that your lack of a date for the evening is unimportant. What matte …Read more

The largest musical theater festival is here, and if you’re a theater lover they’ve got just the thing for you.  With musicals ranging from serious to strange and everything in between, the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) showcases new shows …Read more