FOLLIES ***1/2

BLUEBIRD ***

THE SUBMISSION *1/2

'DREAMS OF FLYING DREAMS OF FALLING'  ***1/2

THE MOUNTAINTOP  ***

RELATIVELY SPEAKING **1/2

CHINGLISH **

VENUS IN FUR ***

GODSPELL *1/2

BONNIE & CLYDE **1/2

THE ROAD TO MECCA

PORGY & BESS***1/2

WIT****

 By Isa Goldberg/Chief Theater Critic
Cynthia Nixon
“Cancer is the only thing I ever wanted.” Jason (Greg Keller) announces confidently. That is the conversational banter professor Bearing hears on her deathbed from her ex-student, now a research doctor at the university hospital where she is being treated.

Back in New York: ‘The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess’
  By Isa Goldberg/Chief Theater Critic

Set in fictional Catfish Row, South Carolina in the late 1930s, the opera “Porgy and Bess,” returns to Broadway for the first time in decades. Updated and streamlined, it’s now a mere 2 ½ hours instead of 4. With major cuts to the music, recitative transformed to spoken dialogue, characters eliminated, and substantive changes to the central role of Porgy, the production is irking the purists.

    A Long and Winding ‘Road to Mecca’
    By Isa Goldberg/Chief Theater Critic
Quoting Albert Camus, the English teacher (Carla Gugino) exclaims, “Rebellion starts with just one man or woman standing up and saying: No. Enough!” In “The Road to Mecca,” playwright Athol Fugard explores that “rebellion” in terms of one septuagenarian’s survival.

Rosemary Harris      By Patrick Christiano
The luminous Rosemary Harris is a joy to behold in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s handsome production of Athol Fugard’s poetic tale, The Road to Mecca. The play directed by Gordon Edelstein is set in 1974 at the home of an elderly widow, Miss Helen (Harris), and the story focuses on her uncertainty and her struggle to live alone in a rural spot of South Africa’s remote Karoo region.  The drama probes the challenges of the creative spirit in a climate infused with a lack of tolerance for anything different. The atmosphere in this remote area is dominated by a go to church every Sunday mentality and a limiting mindset.

           By Patrick Christiano
The world premiere engagement of a new play by Nick Starr, One Thousand Blinks, opened January 17, 2012 at 59E59 Theaters. The drama directed by Malinda Sorci is billed as a Sci-Fi thriller, but comes off as a thought provoking enigma instead. Starr is a prolific writer, who was an Artist in Residence at The Center Theatre Group in Los Angles, and his new play raises provocative issues about survival and control.

     By Patrick Christiano
Canadian hip-hop theater artist Baba Brinkman has returned to the SoHo Playhouse with The Canterbury Tales Remixed,  following a successful run at the theater this past fall of his The Rap Guide to Evolution. In his current hip-hop show Binkman, who has toured his work worldwide including the Edinburgh Fringe, directs an assorted mix of three of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales interwoven with some pieces of the epic poems, Gilgamesh and Beowulf.  The resourceful evening is a shrewd blending of hip hop and poetry for a clever effect.  Unfortunately the huge video background competes with his performance almost dominating the proceedings.  

                            By Isa Goldberg / Chief Theater Critic
There are lots of reminders in “Follies.” Some of them are wonderful.
Sally and Ben and Buddy and Phyllis are a throwback to the swinging couples of the early 70s, which is when the show premiered. When we meet them in this revival of the Stephen Sondheim/James Goldman classic, the middle-aged ex- chorus girls and their husbands are reunited to celebrate their lives as Ziegfeld Follies-like dancers in the theater, now on the eve of destruction. Evoking the Golden Age of Broadway, “Follies” vamps on that lavish theatricality.

Jackie Hoffman’s “A Chanukah Charol” or I’m the greatest kvetch!
Photo: Barry Gordin                 By Sandi Durell

Patrick Stewart thought he had the holiday season covered with “A Christmas Carol.”  Nah, it was only part of the story. It takes a self-loathing Jew to complete the episode; specifically Jackie Hoffman. Who else could take a good hard look at herself, display her flaws and unashamedly trash herself in front of an audience - -  she’s one-of-a-kind. Charles Dickens would turn over if he got a glimpse of this 50 laugh-a-minute show, as Hoffman brings her own brand of Ghosts of Chanukah Past, Present and Future into focus.

“Stick Fly” aligns the upper class in any color

         By Sandi Durell

It’s difficult to really like many of the characters in Lydia R. Diamond’s comedic play because they’re haughty, full of themselves and true to form as well-to-do upper middle class folks can be. However, this family is African American with money and family history, showing that color doesn’t hold much water if you’ve got the bucks.