“Exagoge,” inspired by the oldest known Jewish play, is a wildly ambitious, complicated but largely accessible new work of immersive theater: a play, opera, and Passover seder all in one – and all in just 100 minutes, which (if you know seders) is itself an achievement. There is much else besides its comparative brevity to recommend this latest work by the reliably erudite Edward Einhorn and his Untitled Theater Company No. 61., which began at La MaMa in the middle of Passover and is running through May 12 (two weeks past the holiday.) The play, which is thought-provoking in itself, &nbs ..read more

Below are the nominations for the 12th annual Off Broadway Alliance Awards. The awards will be announced May 30th, and the ceremony will take place June 18th, at Sardi’s. The Alliance has also announced special awards, including Legend of Off Broadway Awards, Friend of Off Broadway, and three posthumous Off Broadway Hall of Fame inductees: playwright Christopher Durang, theater critic Michael Feingold and producer Edgar Lansbury. Don’t know the difference between the Off Broadway Alliance Awards and the Off Broadway League’s Lucille Lortel Awards; between the Drama Desk Awards and the Drama C ..read more

The children’s book author Dare Wright is billed as the inspiration for this unusual theater piece, although her name is never mentioned on stage. Actually, nothing is mentioned on stage. “Small Acts of Daring Invention” is completely wordless. For all its wordy title, it’s also hard to put into words exactly what it is. It’s sort of mime, although without Marcel Marceau’s clown makeup or graceful movements; not quite object theater, although there is a plethora of puppets; too literal to be an art installation, although the set is elaborately designed and appointed; too abstract to be a biog ..read more

“Here There Are Blueberries” turns the real-life discovery of an ordinary-looking photo album into a riveting detective story, with the characters gathering clues to unravel a series of mysteries, including one of the greatest unsolvable mysteries in history: the Holocaust. It’s the latest extraordinary documentary theater from Moises Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project, running at New York Theater Workshop through June 16. Elizabeth Stahlmann portrays archivist and historian Rebecca Erbelding of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who receives the album from somebody who says he found i ..read more

Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” has won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Moisés Kaufman & Amanda Gronich
’s “Here There Are Blueberries” and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities” were the Pulitzer Drama finalists. Vinson Cunningham, theater critic of the New Yorker Magazine, was also a finalist in the Pulitzer for Criticism. From my review of “Primary Trust”: You might think of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” at the outset of “Primary Trust,”  when a genial William Jackson Harper as Kenneth describes for us his quaint (fictional) hometown of Cranberry, New York, with its Ma ..read more

Nominations for the Tony Awards and for the Drama Desk Awards were among the theater awards announced last week; winners of the Lucille Lortel Awards were announced and feted last night; winners of the Pulitzer Prizes, including for drama,  will be announced this afternoon. Over the next six weeks, we’ll learn the winners of the half dozen or so major New York theater awards, culminating in the Tony Awards on June 16th. Meanwhile, new theater is being made every day. May 2024 New York Theater Openings The Week in New York Theater Reviews Catching Silhouettes. “Catching Sil ..read more

 Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “The Comeuppance” won Outstanding Play and nicHi douglas‘ “(pray)” won Outstanding Musical at the 39th Annual Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Achievement Off-Broadway, tonight. Gabby Beans won lead performer in a play for “Jonah” and Natalie Venetia Belcon lead performer in a musical for  Buena Vista Social Club. (Check out my New York Theater Awards 2024: Calendar and Guide) Click here for full list of 2024 Lucille Lortel Award Nominations.  Full list of award winners: Outstanding Play The Comeuppance Outstanding Musical ..read more

“Grenfell” is documentary theater about an infamous 2017 fire in a 24-story public housing project in London called Grenfell Tower that killed 72 people. Subtitled “In the words of survivors,” the show uses verbatim accounts by survivors and from an official public inquiry to make the ironclad case that the catastrophe was a direct result of greed, neglect, incompetence and British Conservative social policy.  Grenfell is an ongoing injustice. Seven years later, nobody has been held accountable; nobody is in jail.  “This was never ‘just a play’,” said Phyllida Lloyd, the c ..read more

Theater in Chinatown used to mean gangland shoot-outs – both on the screen and in the balcony of the neighborhood’s many movie theaters, which had names like Sun Sing and Pagoda, and were hangouts for the local gangs starting in the 1960s. None of those theaters still exist. “Music Palace was the last one standing,” closing on June 30th, 2000, explains a storyteller and performer named Mandarin Wu, one of the five terrific cast members in “Catching Silhouettes,” a different kind of theater. Part immersive, site-specific theater, part walking tour, part dance-theater, it’s subtitled “An Oral H ..read more

Watch one- or two-minute videos from each of the five musicals nominated for the 2024 Tony Award for Best Musical: “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Illinoise,” “The Outsiders,” “Suffs” and “Water for Elephants.” Hell’s Kitchen from my review: “Alicia Keys’ lively, tuneful musical is not her musical biography, nor, despite the title, is it about the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood where she grew up. It’s really a jukebox musical, which is to say, an efficient delivery system for Alicia Keys’ songs – two dozen of them, although three of them are newly composed for the show. Yes, Alicia Keys songs ..read more