Review

SOLDIERS DON'T CRY

"In 1970 when women weren't allowed to fight, six U.S. female soldiers were mysteriously captured and held hostage in a Vietnamese barrack." Presumably this program-cover proclamation is factual, and no doubt there is an interesting story to be told based on those facts, but Layon Gray's rambling ...

OF MICE AND MEN

Revivals of classic plays often mean the audience has seen several previous productions, as have the actors, so the demons of comparison and competition are at work, not always to the production's advantage. John Steinbeck's play, based on his novella, is basically a witness to the social conventions ...

As You Like It

Presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the BAM Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, NYC, Jan. 18-30.

AT THE BROADWAY CAFÉ WITH SUPERB & FINE

Walk into any café or Starbucks on Melrose, and what do you typically see? Drones of actors sitting around tables contemplating their place in a city overwrought with creative genius. While this scenario isn't atypical by any means, neither is John Christy Ewing's drama about two post-middle aged ...

OKLAHOMA!

As classic musicals go, Rodgers and Hammerstein opuses aren't known for the durability of the books. By contemporary sensibilities, the corn sometimes feels as high as the elephant's eye. The King and I and South Pacific librettos have aged the best; Oklahoma! might be better if it weren ...

THE ORANGE GROVE

Tom Jacobson obviously insists on giving himself a brand new narrative challenge to overcome with each of his plays. Whether the work is spoken entirely in Rabelaisian couplets, written as a chronological palindrome, or, as with this piece, fashioned so that several characters speak at once, Jacobson is never easy ...

THE NINA VARIATIONS

By the end of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, Konstantine Treplev has become a moderately successful writer while Nina has seen her dreams of being a great actor fade into a mediocre reality. It has been two years since they have seen each other, and, in the play's climactic ...

TAKE ME OUT

Baseball is still America's pastime. Even though football and maybe even basketball draw bigger audiences on television, baseball, because of its 162-game schedule and relatively inexpensive ticket prices, is where families can gather to root for their favorite teams and players. It's truly a team sport, in which ...

AFRICAN GOTHIC

If Shakespeare was right when he gave Antony the line, "The evil that men do lives after them," Reza De Wet's play, in a sensate production directed by Tamsin Rothschild, proves a valid point, in a monstrous way. Sussie (Christel Smith, also the producer with Tony Lepore) is discovered ...

LIFE: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

The original Guide for the Perplexed is a lengthy treatise on scriptural terms by Moses Maimonides (1135–1205), the great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. But the only middle age about which Paul Magid, the author of this show, wishes to zanily philosophize is his own as he turns ...