Bøger udgivet af BROADWAY PLAY PUB INC (NY)

A loving homage to Eugène Labiche and the High Vaudeville style he was instrumental in establishing a century and a half ago. "Breathless fun! A highly accomplished effort, a smart comic machine that hurdles its characters from one amusingly improbable scenario to another ... HAT simultaneously detonates a dozen tiny plot points like some stage supercollider." -Los Angeles Times "A witty, footloose crowd-pleaser! Dennis McCarthy's appealing new music is redolent of the hurdy-gurdy and D'Oyly Carte. Strand's lyrics exude period feel and extend the comical biz. His ITALIAN STRAW HAT boasts what many others have lacked, an eminently playable text with polished but never stuffy dialogue." -Variety "Exhilarating ... Stylish and inspired ... Lightning-paced entertainment that looks and sounds sensational and keeps us rolling with laughter in the aisles ... This riotous romp is a show for all seasons." -Backstage

GIRLS IN TROUBLE is a striking and ferocious play which dares to explore the controversial history of abortion, through its life-changing affect on women across several generations. This darkly humorous, shocking work is sure to inspire spirited debate. "GIRLS IN TROUBLE is the most thought-provoking (and also the funniest) play I've seen in New York since - well, since May 1997, when I saw (twice) STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, Reynolds's razor-sharp play about race and political correctness ... In GIRLS IN TROUBLE, Reynolds tackles another impossible subject: abortion ... The adjective "Shavian" occurs frequently in discussions of Jonathan Reynolds's work. Old Bernard was in many ways a crackpot; he was certainly a political ignoramus of the first water. But he was an effective playwright because he excelled in dramatizing difficult ideas - ideas, that is, that were difficult because they were at odds with his audience's prejudices and preconceptions. Reynolds is indeed Shavian in this sense. In articles and interviews, he is invariably described as "conservative" or listing rightwards. I have no idea about the nature of his personal political convictions. But GIRLS IN TROUBLE is not a conservative play ..." -Roger Kimball, The Weekly Standard "... GIRLS IN TROUBLE, Jonathan Reynolds's bracing assault on assumptions about the right to choose abortion ... he also goes places intellectually and dramatically that no left-wing dramatist would dare. At times that's thrilling. In a Shavian provocation for the age of Fox News, this play tells three disturbing and loosely connected stories - from the 1960s, the 1980s and the present - about the conflicts surrounding abortion ..." -Jason Zinoman, The New York Times

A visceral, violent, and stunning riff on Büchner's classic WOYZECK. Jose Solo is an Iraq War veteran trapped in post 9/11 New York in this modern American tragedy. "An inventive madhouse of a play ... I was compelled, amused, scared, offended and jolted ... Leonard comes at you head on and with no holds barred, like no one that I know of at work presently in the theater. He is a force to be reckoned with ... a kind of raw, innocent daredevil committed to his own aesthetic." -David Rabe"... this genuinely startling piece of theater lodges under the skin like a needy parasite and burrows away long after the final curtain ... It's not to be missed by those who like theater to hit the back of the gut." -Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune"... haunting and harrowing ... bears the marks of a passionately engaged writer with a poetic soul, a gift for bristling dialogue, a pitch-black comic sensibility and an almost Orwellian view of the world ... based on WOYZECK but utterly contemporary in its reworking ... the kind of catharsis rarely found on the stage." -Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

Sophy thinks she's the holy whore, Miriam runs from the family, and Justin tries to keep them all together. These three cousins with uncanny psychic abilities embark on a strange road trip in order to say goodbye. Family, mysticism, sex, and Judaism. "Brooke Berman's play UNTIL WE FIND EACH OTHER ... has two important things going for it: an intriguing subject matter (the nature of faith) that rarely gets explored in the theater and a clear understanding of the way time and place can be quickly fractured and collaged in live theater ... it's not often that you want to hear more from a play's characters. The six people Berman has created are so distinctive and conflicted that they really keep you guessing. At the heart of this strange but gently mystical 90-minute drama ... are three American Jews ― cousins who are so close they might be siblings, and at the same time so different they might be from far-flung planets. Everyone is searching for something in this play, and while that in itself is nothing new, the talk about love and experience and spirituality is complicated, yearning, honest and embattled. And in true Talmudic style, there are far more questions than simple answers. UNTIL WE FIND EACH OTHER is a play in which everybody is wrestling with angels. And their battles are worth observing." -Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times

A fast-paced musical comedy in which a cast of five Dickens devotees bring hundreds of his best-loved characters to life in 90 minutes of madcap Dickensian mayhem. From Great Expectations complete with flaming bride, to A Christmas Carol in which Tiny Tim rocks the house with a soaring electric guitar solo, DICKENS (ABRIDGED) also features scenes from David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. "Gloriously absurd." -The Daily Mail (London) "Highly original, fast moving and witty." -The Daily Express (London) "[An] irresistible comic romp. " -The Hollywood Reporter "Dickens meets Bill and Ted meets Tenacious D meets Monty Python." -Londonist

Twenty-one-year-old It-Girl Abby and her plucky best friend, Clea, embark on a spur-of-the-moment revenge trip to London - Abby, in pursuit of the young novelist who has cannibalized her in his literary debut and Clea desperately seeking Madonna. "... Brooke Berman's delicious literary comedy ... Twisted obsession is just one of the themes that Berman navigates with skill and humor in this sharp satire. In addition, her eloquent, self-aware characters mull over issues of hero-worship and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, as it relates to fact and fiction: Seeing oneself refracted in a novel can lead to an identity crisis for the subject ... Berman's tale, which wriggles between past, present and the sub-Nabokovian world of the book ... this hip skewering of sexual and literary politics is more than just a pose." -David Cote, Time Out New York

A LIGHT LUNCH is a post-Bush cautionary tale about the price paid for legacy. When a young lawyer from Texas invites a literary agent for lunch in a New York City restaurant, more than a production is on the table. "The gentlemanly playwright A R Gurney casually tosses his own metaphorical shoe ... in the direction of our departing president in his latest politically minded play, A LIGHT LUNCH. Mr Gurney take[s] jovial, self-deprecating jabs at his own foibles, and the follies of the theater business too." -Charles Isherwood, New York Times "A R Gurney's jokey new play, A LIGHT LUNCH, is refreshingly unlike most contempo American political theater. Plenty of laughs, and no shortage of fun moments between the performers. It's a "Lunch" worth chewing over!" -Variety "Gurney has fun mocking theatrical conventions ..." -Backstage "A R Gurney's tasty new play ... A LIGHT LUNCH, his latest work about our soon-to-be ex-President, is a model of political theater. The beauty of it is that its politics and its theater could not be more inextricably bound. Exquisitely self-aware, A LIGHT LUNCH uses the theater - and self-deprecating comments about A R Gurney himself - to make serio-comic points about George Bush throughout the play ... The emphasis of the production ... is on the text of Gurney's play, which is where the focus rightly belongs." -Barbara & Scott Siegel, TheaterMania.com

"A cowbird, according to playwright Julie Marie Myatt, lays its eggs in other birds' nest and never returns to them. Myatt took that notion to her play, also called COWBIRD, and the script intrigued Chris Jansen. `The playwright keeps grabbing you', said Jansen, the artistic director of New Ground Theatre in Davenport. `You think you've figured it out and then you get something else.' Jansen is keeping mum about the plot of COWBIRD... `It's like a puzzle in the end', she said. She hinted that the plot includes adoption and finding an adoptee's biological parents. `It's a very funny play about a somewhat serious subject', she said..." David Burke, Quad City Times

Set against the backdrop of Puerto Rico's struggle with the issue of statehood, a young woman, who speaks no Spanish, moves in with her 105-year-old great grandmother who speaks no English. Both women deal with problems of love - the younger with two new suitors and the older with the ghost of her husband's mistress. "... There is more - much, much more - to José Rivera's new play, ADORATION OF THE OLD WOMAN. But the play's internal engine - its life and humor and earthiness - is driven by the shockingly profane, deeply poetic words of this spiritual old woman. Doña Belen may be the most fascinating character in Rivera's fertile oeuvre ... his plays are infused with the flavor we've come to associate with Latin writing - the rich imagery and lyricism of Federico García Lorca, the earthy sensuality and surrealism of Gabriel García Márquez. But Rivera's concerns are universal. His characters may be brown-skinned, but his subject is the human soul. ADORATION OF THE OLD WOMAN is Rivera's most overtly political play yet. It's a work that combines Rivera's heightened sense of language and visually rich dreamscapes with a deeply felt probing of Puerto Rican independence. It's part ghost story, part political debate. It's magical realism meets a Puerto Rican Crossfire ... if Rivera never really seems to make his - the decision about Puerto Rican self-determination - he has left us with the evidence we need to make one for ourselves. And in that he fulfills what the physician-turned-playwright Anton Chekov said is the writer's chief responsibility: not providing a cure, but correctly diagnosing the problem." -Joel Beers, Orange County Weekly

AS THE BEAVER takes as its premise that Ward and June Cleaver's youngest son, The Beaver, is gay. Joel Drake Johnson then spins this seemingly slight premise into a smart and funny and ultimately enriching exploration of American society and family. "Tell people the initial concept of Chicagoan Joel Johnson's new play AS THE BEAVER - Ward and June Cleaver discover that their younger son is gay - and they'll probably roll their eyes and ask, 'What's next?' But tell people that Johnson doesn't settle for a late-night skit, that he develops a fully realized play that is at once hilarious, challenging and moving, and you'll be doing them a favor. For AS THE BEAVER ... is one of the funniest and cleverest shows to be seen in a long while ..." -Andrew Patner, Chicago Sun-Times "... Happily, Johnson quickly transcends the easy laughs, using his premise to accomplish something considerably more ambitious: he ruthlessly deconstructs the mindless, superficial worldview of 50s and early-60s sitcoms ... The play is often hilarious, thanks in part to the playwright's great ear for formulaic sitcom dialogue ... Just when it looks as if Johnson has exhausted his premise he leaps ahead two decades, from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, to show how Beaver and company are faring in post-Stonewall, Reagan-era America" -Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader

Len Jenkin's surrealistic comedy uses Franz Kafka's story "Ein Landarzt" as a point of departure to explore his personal life and literary works. "The central journey in A COUNTRY DOCTOR - Kafka's physician anxiously pushing through a raging blizzard to reach a dying patient - keeps overtaking the other travelers, giving them nightmares. The visceral treats of the piece are many and fine. Makes you want to stick your thumb out and hop aboard for the wild ride." -New York Post "Jenkin, over the course of the play's seventy-five minutes, give us virtually the entire Kafka short story in sequential fashion. And he turns the story into a comment on modern man's existential condition through the Guest, and most interestingly, on Kafka's own psychological-sexual torment as reflected in his writings. It's an intellectual-literary tour de force of amazing density." -Star and Tribune (Minneapolis)

Machiavelli's 16th-century comedic classic. Callimaco wishes to bed Lucrezia, though she is the wife of the aging Nicia. Consequently trickery and deceit are in order if Callimaco is to obtain his desire. A plan is hatched involving a plant, the "mandragola," with supposedly magical powers. Nicia is fooled, but will Lucrezia prove as gullible? "So you don't think Machiavelli had a sense of humor? Then go see the rollicking production of his comedy MANDRAGOLA at the Shakespeare Theater ... MANDRAGOLA, adapted by Peter Maloney, is filled not only with Machiavelli's rather questionable wisdom, but with a surprising amount of wit ... If comedy seems an unlikely métier for Machiavelli, the action of MANDRAGOLA is of the any-means-to-an-end variety ... These days, when Machiavellian strategy is being taken all too seriously, it's refreshing to laugh at the old boy." -J. Wynn Rousuck, The Sun, Washington, DC "A naughty comedy by that great Italian Renaissance guy, Machiavelli ... performed with great flair and precision ... a very funny, bawdy play ... a farce about lust, both physical and financial ... A hilarious and lively visit to the streets and gutters of 16th century Florence." -Jane Horwitz, WTTG TV, Washington, DC "Machiavelli's realistic and unflattering opinion of human nature, expressed most notably in his classic The Prince, is given full voice here, but to obvious farcical effect." -American Theater "In this Renaissance sex-comedy human greed is the motor which drives the characters to chase each other around and around during a day and a night in old Florence." -Play Source, Theatre Communications Group