Cry-Baby: The Musical  

Review by Amy Krivohlavek

 

The brainchild of a crackerjack creative team including “The Daily Show’s” David Javerbaum, Cry-Baby marks John Waters’s anticipated return to Broadway, where his first movie-to-musical, Hairspray, swept the Tony Awards in 2003. But Cry-Baby is a hair product of a different color: This formulaic love story of a good girl and a bad boy will show you a good time, but it won’t make your hair stand on end.....more

 

The Importance of Being Earnest  

Review by Christopher Zara

 

Comedy doesn’t always age well. Revisit, for argument’s sake, the “Austin Powers” trilogy, or pretty much anything starring Rob Schneider, to witness how quickly those scenarios that seemed so funny a few years ago can lose their charm. It’s that much more refreshing, consequently, to watch The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s 113-year-old sitcom of manners,....more

 

Les Liaisons Dangereuses  

Review by Nick Breault

 

Lies, deception, sex, brutal honesty, love: these are the themes prevalent throughout Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, now showing at the American Airlines Theatre. Graphic and at times uncomfortable, Liasons is a fantastic theatrical rendition of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel.

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The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

Review by Andrea M. Meek

 

Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, the high-strung Alma Winemiller in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale reflects Tennessee Williams’s penchant for fragile, emotionally unstable female characters. In the play, which Williams wrote in 1951 as a revision of his earlier work, Summer and Smoke, Alma (the excellent Mary Bacon) is a misunderstood and ostracized oddity in the small town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, just before World War I.,....more

 

What’s My Line? – Live on Stage  

Review by Meg Van Huygen

 

After three years in Los Angeles, the stage production of What’s My Line? has made a smashing transition to the West Village. Produced by Jim Newman and host J. Keith van Straaten (formerly of Comedy Central’s “Beat the Geeks”), the show faithfully follows the TV format: A panel of four B-list-ish luminaries are presented with a civilian whose unusual occupation they must guess via yes-or-no questions,....more

 

The Set Up  

Review by Ethan Kanfer

 

With its familiar subject matter — singletons and their meddling, married friends — The Set Up could easily descend into sitcom-style predictability. Thanks to an engaging cast and James Lindenberg’s smart, sensitive script, the evening steers clear of clichés and seamlessly blends farce with psychological realism. What emerges is a painfully funny take on the dance of intimacy — and the bruised toes that result from its awkwardness.....more