The 2008 Tony Award nominees were just announced, and looking over the list we’ve got to admit that it was a pretty good year for Broadway, at least in terms of quality. The phenomenal rock musical Passing Strange picked up seven nominations, including Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Lead Actor (Stew, pictured). Also competing in the Best Musical category are the tepidly received Cry-Baby, the harmless Xanadu, and the underdog Latino musical In......

Photo courtesy Carol Rosegg. Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine is an expressionist parable about a miserable bean counter named Mr. Zero who, after twenty five years at the same desk, is replaced by the titular technological marvel. For Rice, the roar of the twenties was the sound of capitalism crushing workers' souls; his play would go onto inspire Tennessee Williams and presage Death of a Salesman. Now a musical adaptation of Rice's play,......

Photos © Joan Marcus. Elevator Repair Service [ERS] is rightly regarded as one of New York’s most innovative theater companies. Led by Artistic Director John Collins, who moonlights as a sound designer for The Wooster Group, the ensemble creates irreverent, idiosyncratic performances that wrest free from the straightjacket of naturalism with an absurd humor and colorful physicality. Their 2006 "workshop" production of Gatz was a high-water mark – performed over the course of seven hours......

In the past several years, writer and performer Mike Daisey has become widely known as one of the most compelling artists working in the solo monologue format first trailblazed by the late, great Spalding Gray. If you're not familiar with Gray's work, you'll be forgiven if the word 'monologist' makes your eyelids droop, but in the right hands the form is as riveting and rewarding as the best ensemble theater. And Daisey's hands are assuredly......

Photo courtesy Gerry Goodstein. How bad does a show have to be to become good? That’s the question posed by self-described “part-time conceptual artist” John Borek, who has recently revived the notorious 1983 Broadway flop Moose Murders in Rochester. The murder-mystery farce by Arthur Bicknell, which takes place one dark and stormy night at an isolated lodge, closed after 14 performances and widespread critical derision; the term “Moose Murders” has since become a Broadway euphemism......

Besides winning an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1984 for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, F. Murray Abraham's long and distinguished career includes unforgettable performances in plays like Angels in America, Waiting for Godot, and the original Broadway production of Terrence McNally's The Ritz, to name just a few. You can currently catch the magnetic actor on stage in a trio of one act plays by Ethan Coen called Almost an......

Pictured left to right: Garrett Lombard, Denis Conway and Tadhg Murphy. Photo courtesy Pavel Antonov. In The Walworth Farce, Enda Walsh’s pitch black comedy currently in from Ireland at St. Ann’s Warehouse, all the world’s a stage in a squalid council flat, and all the men and women merely amateur players. Dinny (Denis Conway), a heavyset man with an air of menace, is the author of a deliriously farcical play that he and his two......

Photo: Diego Bresani You don’t have to wait until summer to catch sweet some rays out on Fire Island; playwright Charles Mee and a troupe of 108 actors and musicians have brought the beguiling little beach community to Tribeca, where they’ve transformed a cavernous space at the 3LD Art and Technology Center into a beach party of epic proportions. The wholly immersive experience begins as soon as you step inside the theater and realize that......

Photo © Gabe Evans Edward Albee, who turned 80 last month, has been enjoying a well-deserved center stage spotlight since last fall, when Second Stage produced a vital revival of The Zoo Story, which was coupled with a newly penned prelude called Homelife. A new play, Me, Myself and I, was well received in Princeton last January, while The Occupant, another new work, will premiere next month. Now two of Albee’s earliest exercises, the interconnected......

Since first appearing on film in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Wallace Shawn has become one of Hollywood’s most distinctive character actors, familiar to audiences for his striking performances in everything from The Princess Bride to The L Word. But theatergoers also know another side of Wallace Shawn; the relentlessly daring playwright whose work challenges conventional ideas about theater, power, sex, class, and, most unsparingly, liberal complacency. Tomorrow night Shawn will be participating in an “evening of......

The hunt for a bathroom in Central Park gets even more desperate for the next week, as a troupe of Irish actors have commandeered the public bathrooms in Central Park's Bethesda Terrace to present their play Ladies & Gents. The noir thriller is acted out near the sinks and urinals, while audience members pay $25 a head (sorry) to stand along a row of stalls for the 40 minute play. The audience splits in half......

When asked why she wants to learn Japanese, a character in Kristen Kosmas’s play Hello Failure replies, “I want to chop away at the wilderness of my mind.” One suspects the playwright's reasons for developing her own distinctive theatrical language are the same; and, fortunately, her unique voice has a similar "clearing" effect on the audience. By the show’s end, you may find yourself walking out with a slightly less restless mind, though you may......

In early 2007, The New Yorker writer George Packer published an enthralling article about the desperate plight of Iraqis who had assisted the American effort in their country and were being hunted down as a result, with little or no U.S. protection. Betrayed, Packer's first play, is based on interviews conducted while in Iraq for the sixth time to research his article; the fictionalized account concerns three young Iraqis – two men and a woman......