Wednesday, September 17, 2025
The New York Philharmonic began the 2018-2019 season in light and ended in darkness with the world premiere of David Lang's opera prisoner of the state. The NYP commission, conducted by Music Director Jaap van Zweden, performed June 6-8 as part of the orchestra's Music of Conscience series, explored the long tendrils of totalitarianism - and an opera born out of hate is brilliant. prisoner of the state is a meditation on Beethoven's only opera Fidelio (1805), whose titled character infiltrates where her wrongfully incarcerated husband is held and saves him from execution. Written during the Napoleonic wars, Beethoven never hid his passion for freedom. Lang removes
Reviews
The Day I Became Black at The SoHo Playhouse
The Day I Became Black is a heart opener, a mind shifter, a bridge builder. Bill Posley's life-storytelling is the antidote to desensitizing discourse overload. Today we are inundated with concepts, theories, verbiage writ large and Bill cuts through the noise with an honest memoir that makes you want to hold hands with complete strangers. My plus one, Elizabeth, said it was healing theater and I agree - Posley has a potent curative gift. It's like he is laying theatrical hands on you and raising you from the complacency couch. He achieves this feat through the power of laughter, joy and
New York Opera Fest: LOTNY’s ‘Owen Wingrave’ by Benjamin Britten
The Metropolitan Opera season is over and summer festivals featuring opera (Bard, Caramoor, Mostly Mozart, not to mention Saratoga Springs and Tanglewood for long weekends) are months away, the New York Opera Fest takes place all over town through June 30. The schedule features operas from its Baroque origins through the present. On May 9-11 at the GK ArtsCenter , little opera theatre of NY (LOTNY) presented the NY premiere of Benjamin Britten's Owen Wingrave, written for television in 1971. Yes, opera was part of pre-cable television, and Britten wasn't the hard sell the Met now treats his as. Based on a short short by
Mobile Unit’s THE TEMPEST at The Public Theater
The stormy start to May has served as a fitting setting for the debut of The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, that washed up on its home shores near Astor Place after a three-week, 17 stop tour to correction facilities, homeless shelters, libraries and community centers across all five boroughs of New York City. The Mobile Unit really puts the “public” in The Public Theater, whose prestigious productions continue to sell out, garner audience and critical praise and conquer both the commercial (anyone heard of a little historical musical about a dead politician called Hamilton?) and
BEETLEJUICE the Musical on Broadway
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! Cheering his name three times from the rafters wouldn’t be nearly enough to glorify this utterly fantastic stage adaptation. Praise the dark forces that conjured such a demonic delight! Its wild antics and grotesque yet glittery depictions of the underworld have restored lightness, cheek-aching laughter (as well as glimmers of unexpected depth) and unabashed, over-the-top, go-for-broke fun back to Broadway that hasn’t been this good since The Book of Mormon took over the town. It is a crowd-pleasing wonder that’s as irresistible as it is playfully offensive, just like the namesake character, who could have only been
‘Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie’ at Ars Nova Greenwich House
A show that's sold old since previews is pretty much reviewer-proof, but, if possible, try to catch Mrs. Murray's Menagerie at Ars Nova at Greenwich House (27 Barrow Street, NYC). Created by The Mad Ones and Phillip James Brannon, Brad Heberlee, Carmen M. Herlihy and January LaVoy, the 90-minute send-up ends its run on May 11. Mrs. Murray's Menagerie is a fictitious 1970s children's television show - an idea already loaded with potential. Rather than do the show, the script and director Lila Neugebauer bring it to life with songs and guest appearances by its heavily licensed and franchise puppet cast members. (Not
Numbness: Chapter 2 at New Ohio Theatre
Laura Butler Rivera & Michael Leonard. Photo Credit: Mathew Dunivan NUMBNESS: CHAPTER 2, breach birthed into being by One-Eighth Theater is a quick firing collage of absurdist clues to find your way through the maze of each moment. Reality, rules, linear, logic are to be left at the door. You're invited into the circle to witness the circusy atmosphere of new ways of thinking, from behind the comfort of the plastic splash sheets provided. It's eccentric neccessary nonsense. Can you joyfully jump into the contagious insanity or will you stay comfortably numb? Black Water by Sylvia Bofill and Yovo by Robert Lyons are the text trampolines
Entangled at Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre, A.R.T./New York Theatres
ENTANGLED is the most relevant work you can witness in the 21st century. It deposits you into the epicenter of the hurricane, the whirlwind, the tsunami and keeps you churning as all around you the fabric of the world tears apart. It is an ode to humanity and it's porcelain fragility. Charly Evon Simpson and Gabriel Jason Dean break your heart with their seismic words as they interrogate the fallout of mass shootings. It's a chilling piece that navigates the wide canyons existing between people and how desperate we are to connect, but fail to find each other. It's a
FRUITING BODIES at Theatre Row
FRUITING BODIES, a new play by Sam Chanse, is a call to the wild parts of ourselves that have been starved of oxygen. It's a hunt to find the elusive, the dangerous, the long buried...The familiar family drama finds a different setting away from the dinner table to the forest floor with it's mercurial mycology. It's a thought provoking transformation play where the troubled characters enter the shifting forest, the unknown, and emerge somewhat altered. There are secrets to be revealed, hero's to be tested and dream fragments to confront. The Ma-Yi Theater Company takes us mushroom hunting into the
SOCRATES at THE PUBLIC THEATER
Lecture, exhortation, dissertation, harangue. These are all synonyms for “talking”, which is what the subject of actor/director/playwright Tim Blake Nelson’s new play Socrates --- now playing at The Public Theater extended through June 2nd as the anchor of Onassis USA Festival 2019: Democracy is Coming --- is best known for. In fact, he made a life, death and immortality out of being a relentless orator, so much so that a man born in 470 B.C.E. is still a topic of modern tongues and his tradition of thought, theories and philosophies are taught as required curriculum at any liberal arts school