By Samuel L. Leiter   The trickle of Shakespeare-to-musical comedy adaptation business that began on Broadway in the 1930s with The Boys from Syracuse and Swingin’ the Dream has swelled over the years to where it’s now something of a flood. Just last week there was a...

      by Samuel L. Leiter   Despite this show’s poorly punctuated slogan, “There’s smoke, and fire,” anyone worried that Come Light My Cigarette might expose them to secondhand smoke can breathe easy; tobacco—even of the herbal variety—has no role in it. There are, though,...

        by Samuel L. Leiter   Ovo, which means “egg” in Portuguese, is about the cycle of life, or at least that’s the loose theme around which this typically eye-popping incarnation of the Cirque du Soleil franchise revolves. Like other Cirque productions (this one’s...

          by Samuel L. Leiter   Horton Foote, the admired Texas playwright who died at 92 in 2009, wrote so many worthy plays it’s rare for a season to pass without at least one being revived. The latest is The Traveling Lady, a bittersweet romantic piece, now at...

      by Samuel L. Leiter Sometimes in the world of theater reviews we stumble across the good fortune of having pieces by two different esteemed critics, allowing us to see comparative and contrasting viewpoints—always an intriguing experience. This is one such time and, if...

    by Samuel L. Leiter   Film buffs, especially those who know the 1942 movie classic Casablanca and something of its backstory, will get a kick out of Casablancabox, Sara Farrington’s decidedly clever and ambitious multimedia piece, wonderfully staged by her husband, Reid...

      by Samuel L. Leiter   “Where was the helicopter?” asked the gentleman snaking his way out of my row at intermission at Miss Saigon. “It’s in the second act,” quickly replied my companion. Ah! Some people do actually go to Broadway musicals to sing the scenery. And he...

        by Samuel L. Leiter     Stephan Wolfert’s Cry Havoc! is a deeply impressive one-person play about the horrors of war. It isn’t, however, so much an anti-war play—the morality or necessity of war itself isn’t being questioned—but an outcry against what war...

  . . .  or My Dinner with André the Giant     by Samuel L. Leiter   It’s hard to conceive of any more unlikely pairing for a play about two familiar, real-life figures than Samuel Beckett, the distinguished Irish playwright, poet, and novelist of existential despair, and...

        by Samuel L. Leiter   Long, quiet, moody stretches are punctured by pockets of laughter in the Playwrights Realm’s production of The Moors, emerging playwright Jen Silverman’s surrealistic, feminist approach to mid-19th-century, Brontë-esque life on the bleak...

    by Samuel L. Leiter     A large, upside down American flag—considered a signal of distress—hides the stage from view. As the muffled words of President George W. Bush are heard in the background, two soldiers, one in formal uniform, the other in fatigues, take it down...

          by Samuel L. Leiter   A wall is very much in the news these days; however, the crumbling, vine-covered one that fills the upstage area in the New York premiere of Robert Holman’s Jonah and Otto—which debuted in Manchester, England, in 2008—has nothing...

    by Samuel L. Leiter   Justice Smith, the wiry 21-year-old actor playing the feral, 14-year-old Bobbie in Yen, Anna Jordan’s potent, if uneven, prize-winning British drama at the Lucille Lortel, is giving what is surely the most physically explosive performance on any New...

        Editor’s Note: Theater Pizzazz has the rare privilege of offering separate reviews of Made in China by two of our esteemed critics. The following is Samuel L. Leiter’s review. After enjoying this one, we invite you to read Joel Benjamin’s review...

    by Samuel L. Leiter     I tried hard to count how many dancers appear in Confucius, the visually beautiful, dramatically stultifying dance drama now enjoying a four-performance visit at the David H. Koch Theater. I did this because the 90-minute piece itself gives you...

  Here they are! Take a look at the Best Five of the 2016 Season in Theater and Cabaret. It’s the end of 2016 . . . hard to believe it raced by so quickly with all its turbulence. Theater Pizzazz writers, in both theater and cabaret, were extremely busy seeing many, many shows. Each one...

    by Samuel L. Leiter   Life Is for Living: Conversations with Coward seeks to capture the emotional sensibility and rapier wit of Noël Coward, and their reflection in the work of others, in this 70-minute bonbon of a cabaret show, world premiering at 59E59’S intimate Theater...

      by Samuel L. Leiter   One of the last places you might be prompted to think of Donald Trump would be during a revival of Oliver Goldsmith’s beloved 1773 comedy, She Stoops to Conquer. But that’s just what happens when young Charles Marlow, too shy when he first meets...

          by Samuel L. Leiter   It’s been a long time since I saw an audience enjoy itself at a show as much as the one at the first press preview for I Like it Like That, a sketchily written, broadly acted, but rousingly joyful, jukebox musical reminiscence of...

    by Samuel Leiter     In 1960, the six-volume Engeki Hyakka Daijiten, still Japan’s most comprehensive theatre encyclopedia, noted that there were at least seven dramatizations (there actually are more), in different genres (including noh, kabuki, and bunraku), of the...

  by Samuel L. Leiter   A reverential hush blanketed Rose Hall at Lincoln Center as over 1,000 spectators waited patiently for the opening program of the Kanze Noh Theatre to begin. The subdued atmosphere was not unlike what one would experience at noh in Japan, unlike the more...

        by Samuel L. Leiter   In Ike Holter’s entertainingly relevant Exit Strategy, set in Chicago’s rundown Tmbldn (sic) High School, a volatile African-American senior named Donnie (Brandon J. Pierce, charismatic) rails about what inner city students have to...

    By Samuel L. Leiter     Rising young playwright Tarell Alvin McRaney’s Head of Passes, which the playwright says was inspired by the Biblical story of Job, is an occasionally potent but structurally awkward play set in a former bed and breakfast in the wetlands of...

    By Samuel L. Leiter     Carlos Gesualdo (1566-1613)—a contemporary of Shakespeare’s—may be the most famous composer I never heard of. An Italian nobleman who became Prince of Venosa, he was noted for polyphonic mastery as represented by his three books of sacred music...

      By Samuel L. Leiter     The latest arrival in what seems like a seasonal festival of LGBT theatre, films, and TV is Off-Broadway’s Southern Comfort, inspired by Kate Davis’s prize-winning 2001 documentary of that title, conceived for the stage by Robert DuSold...