…but the musical numbers are so expansive, inventive, subversive, so side-splittingly funny that one quickly catches one’s breath. This is, after all, a musical, and as a musical, Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop triumphs. The audience leaps to its feet as Larry Owens’s Usher fittingly ends the endlessly self-referential play with its title, popping […]
Man as Machine: A Review of “In the Penal Colony”
The machine at the center of Kafka’s In The Penal Colony carves a man’s unnamed crime into his back until, in a moment of epiphany heralding death, he realizes what he has done. It’s a story heavy on exposition, the bulk of the text consisting of a detached, almost pedantic account of the workings of […]
Sweet Sorrow: A Playdate Review of Romeo and Juliet
Who would have thought proposing Romeo and Juliet as a Tinder date would get a girl ghosted? I mean I get it. To someone looking for a casual hookup what could be a bigger red flag? Here’s a guy who wants to vanish in the morrow and here’s a play where two people who just […]
An Ontological Argument: Max and Kirill Review “Crushing Baby Animals”
Who better to review a play about two headbutting artists than two headbutting critics? Max Raab and Kirill Antonin Zakharov talk cookies, sadomasochism, and the ontological argument in their joint review of Crushing Baby Animals, an immersive theatre piece running at The Plaxall Gallery in Long Island City, Queens through July 21. Max: The problem […]
A Modest Proposal, or Why I Did Not Attend the Hollywood Fringe Festival
The first thing that struck me on my virgin tour of Los Angeles last October was the homeless problem. On a cab ride from LAX to DTLA (that’s LA International Airport and Downtown Los Angeles for those of you unused to the Yanks’ fondness for acronyms), I counted no fewer than seventy-three tents, most of […]
Playdate Reviews The Last Croissant
You can tell a lot about a person by their sense of humor, or lack thereof. When “Doug” messaged me on Tinder and I mentioned I was only in town for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, he must have smelled easy prey. Little did he know he would find himself scowling through The Last Croissant, a […]
Deep Underground: A Review of Mine 9
There is a scene in the haunting early minutes of Eddie Mensore’s impressive Mine 9 that deftly captures the plight of the American laborer in just a few strokes: Forced to choose between working in unsafe conditions or shutting down a dangerous mine, the miners unanimously choose the former. It’s a scene reminiscent of the […]
What They Did: A Review of “What We Do”
An hour before the premiere of “What We Do,” directed by Polina Ionina and presented by The How, I was dragging my feet and running late. Then an ominous text arrived. Dad was in the ER. The past year had seen a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, a broken leg, a crippling cellulitis infection, and now back […]
The Fringe Play as First Date: A Review of “The Buffalo Play”
Conventional wisdom has it that plays make lousy first dates. You sit beside someone you’ve only just met, avoiding eye contact and conversation–a terrific start! To which I reply: It depends on the play. If it’s as original, thought-provoking, and wildly entertaining as The Buffalo Play, which premiered last night at the Tank’s intimate 56-seater, […]
An Englishman, an Irishman and an American Wake Up in Plato’s Cave
Whatever political realities may have prompted Animus Theatre Company’s captivating revival of Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch over Me, the universally human dimensions of the play are what ultimately justify its extended sentence. The unrelenting image of two, sometimes three, men chained to a wall burns itself into the brain in the course […]