A Brooklyn TKTS – the discount Broadway and Off-Broadway ticket booth – was recently unveiled at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn at the corner of Jay Street and Myrtle Avenue. Though it won’t be open on weekends like the Manhattan TKTS locations, it will give Brooklyn playgoers the edge on weekdays, when it opens a full four hours ahead of the Times Square TKTS, which is currently operating at the Marriot Marquis while the new......

Wow, this show is bizarre. But bizarre in a way that carries on P.S. 122’s scintillating legacy as a downtown refuge for freaky, outré performance art. Musician/performer Neal Medlyn’s latest rock "tragic-comedy," Unpronounceable Symbol, pays musical homage to Prince, with a live band led by Kiki & Herb’s Kenny Mellman, who co-wrote the show and rearranged a bunch of Prince B-sides for the score. Over the years, Medlyn’s developed quite a cult following with his......

If you’ve ever watched acting so bad it made you want to shove the performer offstage and play the role yourself, Suspicious Package is for you. The creators of this clever little production have spared themselves the headache of dealing with actors by casting the audience and turning them loose on the streets of Williamsburg. It happens for just four people at a time, and when you buy your ticket online you cast yourself in one of the roles, choosing either the producer, the showgirl, the heiress, or the private detective....

Photo of Hecate (Danuta Stenka) and Macbeth (Cezary Kosinski) courtesy Pavel Antonov. It’s hard to imagine a production of Macbeth with more sound and fury than the outré adaptation currently battering audiences on the Brooklyn waterfront in DUMBO. Two parts Shakespeare and one part Ridley Scott, this visionary spectacle is the work of Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna and the TR Warszawa theater company; it’s being staged outdoors in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with......

Hollywood, 1940. As Hitler devours Europe and America inches toward war, a remarkable technology that could prove invaluable to the U.S. Navy is invented by… a sexy movie star and an avant garde composer? Though it sounds more than a little far-fetched, it’s actually a true story, and the subject of Elyse Singer’s multimedia play Frequency Hopping. Staged at 3 Legged Dog, the elegant production deploys a small army of robotic instruments (drums, gongs,......

Do you enjoy ingeniously crafted rock tunes, with brilliant lyrics and arrangements for accordion, keyboard, ukulele, guitar, bass and drums? Do you like pirates? How about puppets? Rum based drink specials? Laughing until your sides hurt? If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you’re ready to set forth on the dread ship Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, the rollicking “pirate puppet rock odyssey” that’s currently docked at Ars Nova....

When we took note of the Health Department’s crackdown on chain restaurants that refuse to display their calorie information, some commenters wondered how movie theaters would be affected. Since the rule applies to any New York City food server with at least 15 locations nationwide, are chains like Regal Cinemas now required to confront moviegoers with the bad news about their concession products (which are, technically, food)? The Life Vicarious did a little digging......

Mike Bartlett’s modest drama Artefacts, in town as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival, peers into the abyss of post-war Iraq society through the eyes of the aptly named Kelly, an indifferent English teenager played with nervy brio by Lizzy Watts. Kelly’s ordinary life with her single mom (Karen Ascoe) is upended by the sudden appearance of the father she never knew, an erudite Iraqi named Ibrahim (Peter Polycarpou) who runs the National......

Photo of The Matchbox Shows by Laura Heit courtesy of the artist. While moviegoers pack theaters for summer blockbusters like Iron Man and Indiana Jones, it’s refreshing to find big crowds flocking to an entirely different spectacle, one celebrating the Victorian-era phenomenon of do-it-yourself “toy theater” kits. The cavernous St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO was packed on Saturday night for the eighth annual Toy Theater Festival, presented by Great Small Works, a company dedicated to......

All My Sons, Arthur Miller’s tragedy about wartime profiteering, will be coming to an undetermined theater on Broadway at an unspecified date this fall. But nothing generates more buzz than when a Hollywood celebrity joins the cast – in this case that boldfaced name is Katie Holmes, who will try to inject a little integrity into her career by performing live onstage, just out of reach of her Scientology "chaperone." This year’s been tough on......

Photo courtesy Jim Baldassare. For two decades Rose Mary Woods banged away on her typewriter in relative anonymity for her boss Richard M. Nixon, until, in November of 1973, she found herself testifying in federal court about that time she accidentally erased 5 minutes of White House audiotape. Her little oopsy just happened to omit part of a conversation between Nixon and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman in June 1972, three days after the Watergate......

Preservationists and Greenwich Village community members are reporting that their efforts to stop NYU from demolishing the historic Provincetown Playhouse have paid off – to a certain extent. Andrew Berman, Executive Director of The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, tells us that NYU plans to preserve the facade and structural walls of the theater, but he says many issues remain unaddressed. Founded in 1918 by Eugene O’Neill and other trailblazers, the Provincetown Playhouse was......

It says a lot about Harvey Fierstein's distinctiveness that it's almost impossible to even say the name 'Harvey' without thinking of that endearingly gravelly voice. Whether you know him as Homer Simpson's assistant Karl, Robin Williams's brother in Mrs. Doubtfire, or Hairspray's Edna Turnblad, the Brooklyn-born actor's uninhibited, self-assured persona is thoroughly his own. Now the four-time Tony winner is back on Broadway with A Catered Affair, the musical adaptation of the 1956 film......

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......

The historic – but not landmarked – Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village could be the next building to make way for NYU’s ongoing expansion, which will devour six million square feet of space in New York in the next 25 years, if all goes according to plan. The theater is widely regarded as the birthplace of 'Off Broadway.' The local community board is open to NYU’s proposal (see renderings here), but some preservationists are trying......

Yesterday a Manhattan judge ruled that socialite Tricia Walsh-Smith, the scorned and furious wife of Philip Smith, could continue slandering her husband via YouTube as long as she stopped filming the series in the luxury apartment Smith owns. The 77-year-old president of the Shubert organization is in the midst of a nasty divorce proceeding against Walsh-Smith and, per their prenuptial agreement, is trying to evict her from the Park Avenue residence. Walsh-Smith, a British-born playwright......

If more NYU kids were like John Waters, the university’s downtown super-saturation would at least be a bit more colorful. In a recent interview with Details, Waters took a nostalgia trip back to his NYU days, when he, uh, did a lot of tripping: Back then you weren’t very interested in school. Who lasted at NYU longer, you or Woody Allen? I bet Woody went longer, because I think I was there from September to......

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......

Several years ago writer/performer Christen Clifford, whose second child is due in November, wrote an essay called BabyLove that was named one of the “5 Most Shocking Personal Essays” in Nerve.com’s 10th Anniversary issue. The subsequent stage adaptation, in which Clifford stars, is a funny and unflinching look at love life after pregnancy, exploring everything from masturbating with an infant in earshot to postpartum sex and the "eroticism of breastfeeding." After performances at last year's......

Actress/playwright/trophy wife Tricia Walsh-Smith is in the midst of a nasty divorce from Philip Smith, her husband of ten years and president of the Shubert Organization, the largest theater owner on Broadway. And in what will hopefully be a new trend in marital strife, she’s documenting the emotional turbulence with a simultaneously funny and cringe-inducing YouTube masterpiece entitled One More Crazy Day in the Life of a Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. SPOILER:“Oh, another thing:......

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......

(L to R): Melissa Paladino (E-V), Elena Chang (Mikah Monoch), Maureen Sebastian (J’an Jah), and Temar Underwood (General Dan’h Madrin). Photo by Jim Baldassare Theater geeks, comic book nerds and Sci-Fi aficionados, alert! You’ve got one week left to blast into a hyperspace of dorky delights: Fight Girl Battle World, a lighthearted romp through your favorite genres by the boisterous Vampire Cowboys theater group. The photo above speaks volumes about the breezy production, which......

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......

Joined by a small cadre of adventurous theatrical renegades, Michael Gardner has helped turned Williamsburg's Brick Theater into one of the city's most reliable sources for smart, funny, and surprising performance. Gardner is currently presenting a revival of his 1999 stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, starring Brick co-founder Robert Honeywell as the book's rather tortured main character. Performed in the theater's backstage area, which has been transformed into a book-cluttered, candlelit......

Photographs by Carol Rosegg The above photograph from Paradise Park might lead you to believe the two hour production is a kinetic, exhilarating carnival ride. But just as the anticipation leading up to a day at Six Flags, New Jersey quickly dissipates into an irritable, misanthropic funk, an evening at Charles Mee’s Paradise Park leaves you strapped into a roller coaster that lurches forward only at rare intervals. This, of course, is what Paradise......