Travesties by Tom Stoppard at the American Airlines Theater

After multiple attempts, a few great performances by actors I love, one turtle, and lots and lots and lots of talk of Dada, Tom Stoppard's work is officially not for me.

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Fireflies by Donja R. Love at the Atlantic Theater Company

Okay, look, I get it, two-handers are tough. You have two characters with which to tell your story, and you have to somehow tell this story with as little exposition as possible. You have to show, not tell. Are you listening, Donja Love? Love's current play, Fireflies , tells the story of a married African American couple in 1963. He's a preacher, traveling the southern part of the country to speak at the funerals of other African Americans who have died due to racial terrorism. (When the play begins, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Birmingham has just occurs.) She's a doting and devoted housewife who goes so far as to write her husband's speeches and sermons for him. But what her husband, Charles, doesn't know is that she secretly smokes, she wants to abort the baby she's carrying, and she writes explicit letters to a woman she's in love with whom she only met once, briefly. Oh, and did I mention she, Olivia, has PTSD a...

I Was Most Alive With You by Craig Lucas at Playwrights Horizons

There's something incredibly exciting (for me) about going to a show at Playwrights Horizons. I don't know what it is--maybe it's because two of my favorite theater-going experiences ever were there, Mr. Burns and The Christians, and every time I enter those doors on 42nd street, I think, "will this be another play just like those great ones?" Sadly, they rarely tend to be these days (although, for all their faults, I enjoyed Mankind and Log Cabin .) And for as ambitious as Craig Lucas' new play, I Was Most Alive With You is, I can't help but say, "c'mon, Craig, less is more." Lucas sets out to write a play loosely based on the Book of Job, highlighting one man's suffering. This man, Ash, who is Jewish, is a successful TV writer (apparently the writer of the longest-running show of all time? No, he's not Matt Groening) who is a recovering addict and let's not forget, did time for domestic abuse. (His Gentile wife, Pleasant, ...

Mean Girls at the August Wilson Theater

I love the movie Mean Girls . It's a perfect funny and smart movie with an amazing that transcends the "teen movie" label. And now it's a musical. I can see why screenwriter Tina Fey thought it was a good idea to turn it into a musical. In addition to Mean Girls being a very strong property, it has captured the zeitgeist and fourteen years later people still say things like "Four for you, Glen Coco" and "fetch" and "is butter a carb?" Yours truly even has one of those phrases on a t-shirt. The love for this movie alone would turn the musical into a big, fat hit. But something is missing. I'm at loathe to say that lightning doesn't strike twice because that's not quite the problem here. No, I think there are two major problems with Mean Girls . The first being the score by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin isn't strong enough to a make case to turn this movie into a musical. No song is particularly strong or memorable...

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