Review

THE COLORED MUSEUM

Some productions call for grander venues to play to full advantage, but this one has found a perfect home in this intimate setting. Allowing the actors to make eye contact directly with the audience, often uncomfortably so, adds an appropriate urgency to George C. Wolfe's remarkable satire of what ...

Brooklyn Boy

Presented by Manhattan Theatre Club in association with South Coast Repertory, casting by Nancy Piccione/David Caparelliotis and Joanne Denaut, at the Biltmore Theatre, 261 W. 47 St., NYC, Feb. 3-March 27.

GOLDA'S BALCONY

As a child, Golda Meir wanted to make a speech at her synagogue. "When you're a man, you'll talk inside the synagogue," her father told her. It was oddly prophetic. She lived a man's life, serving as Israel's prime minister (1969–1974), forgoing family life for ...

THE CHEKHOV MACHINE

A dying Chekhov, coughing up horrendous amounts of blood, is confronted, minutes before his death, by the characters he created in his plays. There is Konstantin (Dylan Maddalena) from The Seagull and his mother, Arkadina (a remarkable Faye Jackson). There's Lopakhin (Patrick Tuttle), who bought the cherry orchard and ...

Stage Spot

Playing a real-life historical character comes with formidable challenges, including the responsibility of being as true as possible to the person, based on what we know. When that character suffers through a great injustice yet isn't a very likeable individual, the ante goes up in evoking empathy. And when ...

NoCal Notes

International Relations

OF MICE AND MEN

Novelist and playwright John Steinbeck was born in Salinas and worked as a farmhand in that fertile California area. Most of his writing focused on characters in that occupation and in that luscious area—everything from East of Eden to The Grapes of Wrath, his best-known work. His first big ...

ST. ELMO'S FIRE

A few years back, an offshoot of L.A.'s notorious Theater A-Go-Go company came up with the outlandish notion of staging a production of that cloying 1980s Brat Pack movie St. Elmo's Fire. With an ironic eye to the dated quality of the movie, the production was enacted ...

Classical Savion

Presented by the Joyce Theater Foundation Inc. in association with Nederlander Worldwide Entertainment LLC in association with Savion Worldwide LLC & Columbia Artists Theatricals at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., NYC, Jan. 4-23.

SAUCY JACK AND THE SPACE VIXENS

The Confused Artist Sometimes Known as Prince might have concocted this campy, sex-space musical mayhem. Its pansexual glee parenthetically covers a nominal plot regarding Saucy Jack (Rob MacMullen), owner of the sleaziest nightclub on planet Frottage III, killing off each cabaret star who tries to leave his employ for greater ...