Settling in to watch Water by the Spoonful, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s complicated but neat play about family, drugs, Iraq and a few other things, one must reckon with an unavoidable question: why did this win the Pulitzer Prize?

Ms. Hudes’s play won the prestigious award last spring for its 2011 debut at the Hartford Stage. The production that opened Jan. 8 at the Second Stage Theatre, directed, as in Hartford, by Davis McCallum, is Water by the Spoonful’s New York premiere. Read More

If 2012 wasn’t the year the musical finally died—like the novel, the newspaper industry and Fidel Castro, the art form will forever be on the verge of death—it was certainly a year that confirmed its chronically critical condition. But that doesn’t mean it was a dispiriting year in which to be a New York theatergoer. As the man said, the play was the thing. Read More

It would be an overstatement to say that Amy Herzog has written the ideal contemporary American drama. But whatever the ideal is, it has to look a lot like The Great God Pan, Ms. Herzog’s latest remarkable play, which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons.

Directed by Carolyn Cantor, The Great God Pan is provocative and subtle, slowly, carefully revelatory and sweetly moving. It is nicely acted, crisply, efficiently directed, thought-provoking, funny and insightful. Best of all, it’s only 80 minutes long. (Do not underestimate the attraction to a reviewer of a short play at the end of a long autumn.) Read More

To put it in language the playwright should understand: fuck off already, David Mamet.

This is not simply a reaction to his newfound and aggressively evangelized political conservatism. (Though his hectoring “To those Jews planning to vote for Obama” recitation of manifestly incorrect GOP talking points, published in Los Angeles’s Jewish Journal the day before the election, didn’t endear him to this Jew who was planning to see his plays.) It’s not even that, amid the Hollywood paychecks and political badgering, Mr. Mamet seems to have lost it as a playwright, or lost interest in being one, his last three new Broadway outings having been, in order, a sitcom, an artifact and now a lecture. Read More

It’s a Thanksgiving miracle.

A limited-run, Christmastime-only Broadway show is usually as entertaining as the Channel 11 Yule Log. (See, if you must: Elf.) The latest is another dreaded film-to-stage transfer. And, worst of all, it was conceived as a national touring production, only brought to New York after being schlepped through Detroit, Tampa, Fla., and Hershey, Pa. Read More

“I’ve just decided that if my administration’s going to be anything,” declares Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a auburn-haired orphan is inspiring the New Deal with an Oval Office reprise of her stick-up-your-chin-and-grin anthem, “it’s going to be optimistic about the future of this country!” The moment comes midway through the second act of Annie, which opened in its latest revival last week at the Palace Theatre, but the show is swimming in what turns out to be justified optimism: that an orphan girl will find a family, that FDR will save the country, even that a Republican one-percenter can turn out to be a mensch. Read More

The actress Tracee Chimo—brassy, ballsy, dominating—is a force to be reckoned with in any role. But turn her into a big-haired, big-mouthed, know-it-all Jewish girl—one with a chip on her shoulder, a few years at Vassar and a Birthright-induced fervor for Israel (you know the type)—and she is nearly unstoppable.

This is the inspired casting choice in director Daniel Aukin’s intense, engaging premiere production of Joshua Harmon’s modest but taut Bad Jews, which was scheduled to open last night in a Roundabout Underground production. Ms. Chimo’s Daphna Feygenbaum—called Diana in her suburban youth—spends the 90-minute play stalking the cramped studio apartment of a set, climbing on furniture, readjusting her clothes, smoothing her hair, noshing and wrapping up and cleaning. She is an animal on the hunt, and this is her lair. She is feral. Read More

The most interesting argument in Disgraced—a compelling new play by Ayad Akhtar that opened Monday night at the Claire Tow Theater—comes before the histrionic ones raised by the play’s shocking but predictable climax. Read More

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, George and Martha are still going at it. And the good news is that they haven’t aged a bit.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee’s seminal and searing portrait of a viciously feuding, functionally alcoholic, codependently miserable and mildly delusional married couple, opened Saturday night at the Booth Theatre, 50 years to the day after its Broadway debut. It was last seen in New York only seven years ago, starring Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner, but the new production, which originated at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is a welcome return. Staged with explosive tension by director Pam McKinnon, this Virginia Woolf offers not just marvelous performances and new insights into an old play, but also—and remarkably for a work completed in 1962 that has a running time over three hours—some of the freshest and most thrilling stuff on Broadway. Read More

ONSTAGE, APPARENTLY, EVERY atrocity is entitled to its own atrocity.

Two springs ago, the Roundabout Theatre Company ended its season with one of the worst plays to reach Broadway in the last few years, The People In the Picture, an insipid musical about the Holocaust and family secrets. Now, with Alexander Dinelaris’s Red Dog Howls, New York Theater Workshop is offering a pretentious melodrama about the Armenian genocide and, yes, more family secrets. With any luck, next season will bring a jukebox musical about the Cambodian killing fields, or perhaps a door-slamming sex farce set in Darfur. Read More