Tag Archives: 59e59

A confusing play about teenage angst, with a twist that seemed to perplex many in the audience.

Few writers can match Neil LaBute's ability to muscle the hateful sides of human nature into full relief.

How close would you be to your neighbors if their politics were the opposite of yours?

In the aftermath of a season of "identity politics," the Olivier Award-winning new play zooms in on a handful of young people whose personal identity politics happen to involve sexual orientation and gender identity, but who could stand in for any and all of us. And it does so with glitz and panache, meaty insight, sinewy dialogue and performances, and top-notch skill from beginning to end.

A typhoon of a performance by Sophie Melville drives toward – and justifies – a wrenching twist. Directed with just-shy-of-frantic energy by Rachel O'Riordan, Sophie Melville's Effie is a raw slice of humanity, baring her ragged soul and bringing us her milieu, a few of the people in her life, and a critical encounter with a war veteran that bends the arc of her history toward, if not justice, a kind of heroism.

Should a mother tell her son the truth of his father's identity?

The first musical from this fabulously inventive puppeteer ensemble may be the troupe's most charming production yet. Brightly gripping, and written and directed in a classic fabulist style, it's replete with innovative marvels of illusion.

Bonds of love are often taken for granted until someone has to say goodbye.

A Victorian-age woman and a modern-day Muslim woman in the UK tell their parallel stories.

Glorious music and wonderful singing more than compensate for a weak story in this comic opera by the first classical composer of African ancestry.