A look at two new musicals that opened recently off-Broadway: The New Group’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” and Roundabout Underground’s “Darling Grenadine” (critic’s pick!).
All tagged Pershing Square Signature Center
REVIEW: Lynn Nottage’s “By The Way, Meet Vera Stark”
“By The Way, Meet Vera Stark”, a smart satire that takes a piercing look at the damage done by early Hollywood representations of people of color, and the legacy that echoes forth today. With a terrific cast and Lynn Nottage’s is incisive and engaging writing, this play is an easy critic’s pick.
REVIEW: Edie Falco in “The True”
In “The True”, playwright Sharr White dramatizes the 1977 Albany Mayoral primary election from a domestic, interpersonal perspective. Edie Falco is fiercely magnetic as real life, foul-mouthed political operative Polly Noonan, but the play itself is rarely compelling and suffers from sedentary staging and unrealistic expository conversations that explain complex—and fundamentally uninteresting—political dynamics.
REVIEW: “Peace for Mary Frances”
“Peace for Mary Frances”, a new play by Lily Thorne, receives a world premiere production by The New Group starring Lois Smith as a fading matriarch of a very dysfunctional family, waiting to die in home hospice. Hyper-realistic, brimming with both tedium and spasmodic explosions of family feuds, death isn’t always the most compelling experience to observe, but that turns out to be the point.