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‘Starlight Express’ Review: The Gravy Train Rolls On
Nostalgia will undoubtedly lure many to a London revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It has more in common with a theme park than with theater, our critic writes.
By Houman Barekat
Nostalgia will undoubtedly lure many to a London revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It has more in common with a theme park than with theater, our critic writes.
By Houman Barekat
Is moral leadership possible without parliamentary power? Two very familiar congresswomen battle it out onstage.
By Jesse Green
Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the huge James Joyce novel retains much of its humor, pathos and bawdiness.
By Jesse Green
A family gathering fuels Crystal Finn’s new play, in which an excellent cast teases out the many complications of inheritance.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Resetting the “Memory” musical in the world of ballroom competitions makes for a joyful reincarnation.
By Jesse Green
Marin Ireland’s play opens with Tatiana Maslany in a rotating cast of stars, and “What Became of Us” continues its own experiment with changing casts.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
A play from Denmark, with a South African cast, turns the heroic tropes of horse operas into the tools of tragedy at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.
By Jesse Green
A somber yet witty play set in 18th-century England is a clever perversion of a courtroom drama that features strong performances from an ensemble cast.
By Maya Phillips
Her frenetic new dance-theater work, which opens a new festival at the new park on the Hudson, includes references to Camus and music by T Bone Burnett.
By Naveen Kumar
Maury Yeston’s score, stupendously played and sung, is the star of the final production of an excellent Encores! season at New York City Center.
By Jesse Green
Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play about the uprooting of a Black farmer returns to Broadway for the first time.
By Jesse Green
Shayan Lotfi’s topical play about a family building a new life in a new country leaves the details vague, deliberately.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
Maggie Siff plays a war journalist facing the most dangerous assignment of her life: domesticity.
By Jesse Green
The Irish Rep ends its season-long Brian Friel survey with the story of a blind woman who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight.
By Naveen Kumar
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How do you bring an almost plotless book of elliptical fragments to the stage? The director Katie Mitchell has tried with three actors, four screens and three bottles of whiskey.
By Houman Barekat
Raja Feather Kelly makes his playwriting debut with a spellbinding story of three generations of Black men at Soho Rep.
By Brittani Samuel
In José Rivera’s latest play, a Puerto Rican family moves to Long Island in 1960, contending both with Hurricane Donna and their neighbors’ hostility.
By Juan A. Ramírez
A production at the Shakespeare’s Globe theater faced criticism because a nondisabled actor plays the scheming king. But disputes like these miss the point, our critic writes.
By Houman Barekat
T. Adamson’s new comedy, which opens Clubbed Thumb’s popular Summerworks series at the Wild Project, is about a group of worked-up Franciscan friars.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
A hit at Edinburgh Fringe last year, Julia Masli’s show arrives at SoHo Playhouse for its New York debut.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Lauren Patten and Taylor Iman Jones star in an achingly romantic, softly sexy new musical by Rachel Bonds and Zoe Sarnak.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
It’s open mic at the post-pandemic cocktail bar where Dave Malloy’s hypnotic triptych of monodramas takes place.
By Jesse Green
While poking fun at her own agreeable malleability, Benanti flexes her talents in a show that will be available on Audible, without the physical dimension.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Improv adds a theatrical dimension to the role-playing game, which has been undergoing a renaissance as it turns 50 this year.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
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Julia May Jonas turns the menacing male siblings of Sam Shepard’s “True West” into squabbling pregnant sisters in Vermont.
By Rhoda Feng
The French writer Laurent Gaudé taps into collective trauma from the Nov. 13, 2015 terrorist outrage and channels it into something like catharsis.
By Laura Cappelle
Maia Novi stars in her play about a Hollywood-struck actress from Argentina who stops at Yale’s drama school and an inpatient psych ward on her way.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
Laura Winters’s romantic comedy pays careful attention to the dynamics of living with disabilities.
By Naveen Kumar
Archivists are the heroes of a documentary play about a photograph album depicting daily life among the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
By Jesse Green
A quirky and joyful play based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books joined weightier works at this year’s Theatertreffen drama festival.
By A.J. Goldmann
A stage production of the beloved Studio Ghibli movie is big on spectacle, but rarely grabs the heart.
By Matt Wolf
Abigail and Shaun Bengson muse on death in their latest work, but its looseness makes it hard to get a handle on.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Benedict Andrews’s production in London offers perfectly pitched comedy where other directors find somber tragedy.
By Houman Barekat
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The Royal Shakespeare Company’s co-artistic directors have put together a challenging debut season. But many visitors come to Stratford-upon-Avon seeking something more traditional.
By Houman Barekat
Restaurant patrons and staff members are oblivious to the impending apocalypse in Abe Koogler’s new show at Playwrights Horizons.
By Naveen Kumar
Elfriede Jelinek’s latest play deals with collective calamity and individual grief, but is let down by a chaotic production.
By A.J. Goldmann
The revival of a 2006 work by Thomas Jolly, the director masterminding the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics, shows his gift for visual flamboyance.
By Laura Cappelle
Alternating between funny and bleak, the Public Theater’s latest production tackles race and the modern workplace.
By Maya Phillips
This musical adaptation, now on Broadway, is a lot of Jazz Age fun. But it forgot that Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel endures because it is a tragedy.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.
By Alexis Soloski
Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.
By Jesse Green
In this revival of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the Woolf novel, now starring Taylor Mac, the flashes of comedy can’t make up for the loss of poetry.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Amy Herzog’s heartbreaker arrives on Broadway with Rachel McAdams as the alarmingly upbeat mother of a fearfully sick child.
By Jesse Green
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The new musical doesn’t take itself too seriously and has many winning moments — almost enough to eclipse the weaknesses of its story.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Michael Stuhlbarg and Will Keen shine as a kingmaker and his creature. But in Peter Morgan’s cheesy-fun play, it’s not always clear which is which.
By Jesse Green
At St. Ann’s Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin star in a buzzy Broadway revival that rips the skin off the 1966 musical.
By Jesse Green
The retooled jukebox musical, with its top-notch performances and exciting choreography, “stands out as one of the rare must-sees” in a crowded season.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Despite a juicy premise, this Colt Coeur production, starring Tim Daly and Jayne Atkinson, never manages to take off.
By Rhoda Feng
In David Adjmi’s new play, with songs by Will Butler, a ’70s band’s success breeds tension, and punches up the volume on Broadway.
By Naveen Kumar
Shaina Taub’s new Broadway musical about Alice Paul and the fight for women’s suffrage is smart and noble and a bit like a rally.
By Jesse Green
The musical traces the story of Black twin sisters who pass as white, and exact their own form of justice for the crime of slavery, in 19th-century Texas.
By Naveen Kumar
Almost 50 years after it debuted, this classic Black take on “The Wizard of Oz” tries to update its original formula.
By Maya Phillips
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The 30-year relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the basis for Suzan-Lori Parks’s hilarious and harrowing nesting doll of a play.
By Jesse Green
A musical about the groundbreaking Art Deco painter is vocally thrilling but historically a blur.
By Jesse Green
The Wooster Group’s staging of Richard Foreman’s play operates like a delightful love letter from one giant of experimental theater to another.
By Jason Zinoman
In Robert Icke’s adaptation of Parts 1 and 2 of “Henry IV,” the veteran stage actor’s performance belies his age.
By Matt Wolf
The classic coming-of-age novel has become a compelling, if imperfect, musical about have-not teenagers in a have-it-all world.
By Jesse Green
In his new show, James Harrison Monaco blends storytelling and electronic beats in service of curiosity and escape.
By Naveen Kumar
New productions of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” follow a French tradition of adapting familiar works. The results are innovative, and sometimes cryptic.
By Laura Cappelle
Jesús I. Valles’s prizewinning play gets a stage at the Flea, but the ambitious work about queer history proves too difficult to wrangle.
By Brittani Samuel
Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?
By Jesse Green
Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1977 John Cassavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, turns a taut character study into a corny melodrama.
By Houman Barekat
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Kate Taney Billingsley’s play starts with a fictional apology, but then segregated choirs and a racist waitress create tonal dissonance.
By Rhoda Feng
“For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy” and “Red Pitch” offer generous portrayals of male bonding.
By Houman Barekat
In his solo show, the screen and stage star shines a light into his formative dark corners and on the people who made an impression.
By Naveen Kumar
The circus-themed love story, already a novel and a movie, becomes a gorgeously imaginative Broadway musical.
By Jesse Green
In Charles Busch’s satire of Henrik Ibsen’s plays, a widow faces a rather catty fight to save her husband’s legacy.
By Juan A. Ramírez
A cult horror film about a teenage girl with a surprise set of chompers gets another surprise: the song-and-dance treatment.
By Jesse Green
The “Succession” star headlines a Broadway revival of Ibsen’s play about a lifesaving doctor and the town that hates him.
By Jesse Green
The 2004 weepie comes to Broadway with songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a $5 box of tissues.
By Jesse Green
In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s play, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are a couple who fall in love during a pharmaceutical trial.
By Naveen Kumar
A new play by J.T. Rogers goes behind the scenes of the shady “news-gathering” that rocked Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire over a decade ago.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
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The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan star in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s moral head spinner about pride, the priesthood and presumptions of pedophilia.
By Jesse Green
Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 concept album has become an unlikely and unforgettable dance-musical hybrid, directed and choreographed by Justin Peck.
By Jesse Green
Romeo Castellucci’s production of the classic play by Jean Racine is all about the lead performer — and that’s it.
By Laura Cappelle
Zach Zucker delivers a raucously funny portrait of a catastrophically dim stand-up comic at SoHo Playhouse.
By Jason Zinoman
John Patrick Shanley’s new play, starring Cecily Strong and David Zayas, is a romantic comedy with a penchant for the resolutely dismal.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
Itamar Moses’s play offers eloquent arguments on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it doesn’t offer much drama.
By Jesse Green
Cole Escola’s play, which imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated cabaret singer, surprisingly pulls off stretching a stupid joke to its extremes.
By Joshua Barone
If Fiasco Theater has mixed results in its production of this Shakespearean tragicomedy, it celebrates actors supporting and delighting in one another’s work.
By Alexis Soloski
A sleekly designed production, starring Cynthia Nixon and Taylor Trensch, aims to skewer the art world but falls flat.
By Naveen Kumar
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This modern-day fable, directed by Rupert Goold and starring Tobias Menzies, is styled with horror.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
A jukebox musical about a Midwesterner’s big dreams is heavy on the Petula Clark.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Did Jelly Roll Morton “invent” jazz, as he claimed? A sensational Encores! revival offers a postmortem prosecution of one of the form’s founding fathers.
By Jesse Green
Moses Ingram makes her New York stage debut in Dominique Morisseau’s love poem to Nina Simone.
By Juan A. Ramírez
Dael Orlandersmith’s slender new solo play is a meditation on living that seems also like a curveball response to loss.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
In a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Snook plays all the characters — with the help of screens.
By Houman Barekat
Mona Pirnot’s crisis-centered play uses all its resources to keep the audience at a physical and emotional remove from her sorrow.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Two deadly standoffs at Wounded Knee are the bookends for a show that manages to narrate a violent history with moments of light and humor.
By Naveen Kumar
Themes of incest and sexual abuse of minors loom large in this strikingly becalmed play named after a legendarily vengeful Greek mother.
By Rhoda Feng
Worldwide colony collapse is the subject of a bright, strange, upbeat thought experiment about insect hives, and our own.
By Jesse Green
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Eddie Izzard is a wildly witty ad-libber, but a play straitjackets this gift — especially in this new staging that is short of ideas.
By Jason Zinoman
Through self-examinations and social recriminations, Phillip Howze’s new show explores the injustices facing Black men.
By Naveen Kumar
Jez Butterworth’s new play explores the family dynamics of a song and dance troupe that didn’t make the big time.
By Houman Barekat
An unlikely dark comedy imagines the people pushing #PizzaGate, Donald Trump and who knows what next.
By Jesse Green
If Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s four-hour rock opera were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
An Off Broadway musical about the sins of journalistic fabrication might benefit from more make-believe.
By Jesse Green
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