Word: off-broadway
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With nonmusical plays routinely costing $1 million to mount on Broadway and sometimes soaring to twice that, producers are increasingly tempted by one- person shows. Simply staged and lit, they are cheaper both to launch and to keep running, and every season brings one. Broadway last week had three: Tracey Ullman impersonating '50s stage mother Florence Aadland in a tour de force that has just closed; Jackie Mason opining about almost everything; and Julie Harris portraying writer Isak Dinesen. Off-Broadway, Eileen Atkins appears as Virginia Woolf. Artistically, these shows recall the theater's primal origins in storytelling. At best...
HENRY IV. Both parts of Shakespeare's chronicle play in rotation at Joseph Papp's Public Theater off-Broadway, in a fiercely idiosyncratic staging by Papp's heiress apparent, director JoAnne Akalaitis, featuring a multiracial cast and minimalist music by Philip Glass...
...pivotal scene of the off-Broadway Absent Friends, one of two Alan Ayckbourn works from the 1970s making New York City debuts (the other, Taking Steps, opened last week on Broadway), a man rattles on about his drowned fiance to old friends who never met her. Because Colin lost his love during the first blind rapture of romance, she remains forever perfect. For friends with whom he spent times that he recalls as golden and that they barely recall at all, his ardor is tedious -- especially when he hauls out an immense volume of snapshots of the deceased. His sentimentalizing...
Annette Bening plays whores too -- Hollywood sometimes thinks that for women prostitution is the world's only profession -- but these doxies are in control. The smile that dimples her face in Valmont and The Grifters signals the sexual predator anticipating a hearty meal. An off-Broadway alumnus, Bening also did brief time in Postcards from the Edge as a romantic rival of Meryl Streep's. Time will tell if she can challenge Streep's pre-eminence. For now she seems a better bet as a threat to Kathleen Turner; she comes on like Turner's slim, sex-kitten kid sister...
When the ever venturesome Stephen Sondheim said his new musical would portray people who killed, or tried to kill, U.S. Presidents, even fans of his acerbic wit and nonpareil invention wondered how such a show could be put together. The work that opens off-Broadway this week amply, at times brilliantly, demonstrates how. The question that lingers...