Theater

No Outsider to the Fringe

Lawyer/Playwright: Duel With Duality?

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For Andrew Unterberg, the ultimate daze job comes at night. The riffs of readings, dervish dance of direction, unscripted disagreements, building the barrier of a fourth wall brick by brick ... Playwriting, agrees the full-time lawyer, is a court of a different venue. His venue these days -- evenings -- is the Cherry Pitt, where the young attorney's "The Crow...

Theater

'Spring' is Sprung

Musical star Blake Bashoff revisits family ties for Father's Day

By:

Michael Elkin

"Spring Awakening" slips it to the summer solstice with a splash of cold water as a bracing refresher course in the age-old contretemps over social/sexual intercourse among the young. Adapted from a century-old play by Germany's Frank Wedekind, this new snap on an age-old pair of suspenders is germane and generational in its pull. It rocks and roils, too, with...

Theater

Which Way You Going, Billy?

Maybe on to a Tony Award sweep -- familiar dance ground for some local academy alums and their top-notch teacher

By:

Michael Elkin

Set to spring and soar among the Tony Award seraphim after stepping to the forefront of Broadway's best following this past Tuesday's record-tying nominations (15) announcement, "Billy Elliot" is operating on all jetés. And while this movie-based moving musical about an impoverished young lad from an English coal-mining town burnished into a diamond at dance class has raised the barr...

Theater

Good Morning, Starshine!

'Hair' today ... and a columnist's nonpharmacological trip down memory lane

By:

Michael Elkin

You ask me why I'm just a hairy guy. Go ahead. Ask me. Oh, that picture -- an old photo from my college days in the 1960s, when I had long beautiful hair: shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen. Now it's more "Grey Gardens" than straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided powdered,...

Theater

West Side ... Tsimmes?

It could have been Jews and gentiles meeting at a Hillel mixer at Passover -- and wouldn't Tony and Maria have looked out of place ...

By:

Michael Elkin

"Tonight, tonight, won't be just any night ... " Of course, it's not just any night, Tony; it's Passover. Pass the matzah! And that raises more than four questions concerning the riveting revival of "West Side Story," a story unto itself playing the Palace Theatre on Broadway. Taking in more than a million a week at the box office, could...