Long before there was the jukebox musical, there was the musical revue, and few songwriters have as many fabulous songs worthy of a musical revue than Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. The show Smokey Joe’s Cafe, featuring 39 of their songs, opened in 1 …Read more

My Life on a Diet, starring Renée Taylor (now at the Theatre at St. Clement’s), is also the name of a book by Taylor, published in 1986. The stage version has been around for a while too. Her husband and writing partner Joseph Bologna, who passed awa …Read more

The plot of the 1965 Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever centers on reincarnation. A kooky young New Yorker, Daisy Gamble, visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Bruckner, for help in kicking her smoking habit. Under hypnosis, she reveals a …Read more

Though it may be somewhat unorthodox to mention the New York Times critic Jesse Green, I must concur with his final thoughts on Teenage Dick, developed by both the Apothetae and the Ma-Yi Theatre Companies and performed recently at the Public Theatre …Read more

In the opening scene of the revival of John Wulp’s The Saintliness of Margery Kempe at The Duke on 42nd Street, Andrus Nichols comes barreling on stage in a red dress as the title character declaring, “Morality! Damn all Morality! Damn! Damn! Damn!” …Read more

As the #metoo movement has made evident, recent years have witnessed not only the revelation of women’s long-buried truths but a new awareness of the systems which necessitate and uphold their silencing. Western society may trace this devaluing of fe …Read more

The sounds of silence are beautiful in a spectacular new show by the playful team of Swiss puppeteers known as Mummenschanz. The wordless You & Me was created by Mummenschanz co-founder and Artistic Director Floriana Frassetto and features a stro …Read more

The United States leads the world in incarceration by a hefty margin, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies; there are over 2.2 million people imprisoned and it is not necessarily because of higher crime rates, but because of laws …Read more

“Tell the truth, if you could have us back — well, wouldn’t you?” So asks Laura Bush (winningly played by Lisa Hodsoll) to the audience as she takes them through a series of vignettes of her life from two days after her 17th birthday, when she kille …Read more

Sparks fly between friends and lovers as gay and trans rights are discussed in Log Cabin, Jordan Harrison’s superb play about LGBTQ politics. Showing at Playwrights Horizons, directed by the great Pam MacKinnon, and just in time for Pride Month, this …Read more