The original book to the 1965 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is widely acknowledged as abysmal—but it is solely on the basis of that show and The Apple Tree that Barbara Harris’ towering status as an icon of musical theater rests. Not bad for a show that is frequently dismissed, despite its gorgeous score by Alan 
What people seem to ignore—or shrug off—in our mad for Mad Men times is that the past was not necessarily simpler. Under the lacquer of nostalgia lies a time of community, when grocery store clerks who sold you goods on credit existed in place of self-check-out aisles and neighbors greeted new arrivals with casseroles. But that same 
Manhattan Theatre Club has given theatergoers a lump of coal this holiday season with Close Up Space,a tedious new comedy-drama about editing, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, feminist literature and family failures. That the cast includes pros like David Hyde Pierce and Rosie Perez makes the whole 80 minutes just that much sadder.Book editor Paul Barrow, 
Anyone with a tight budget and a hankering to see Chinglish, David Henry Hwang’s Broadway comedy about how radically—and hilariously—different American and Chinese cultures are, should head to the Off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre, where a scaled-down version of Chinglish called Outside People is being performed. Of course, it’s not playwright Zayd Dohrn’s fault that his 90-minute play was produced the same 
The charming if slight Leo grows gradually less charming as its slightness grows more pronounced over the course of its 60-minute running time. A stylish and snappy silent one-man show conceived by and starring Tobias Wegner, Leo boasts a one-joke premise that finds Wegner sliding around on the stage in various postures that translate into gravity-defying feats of acrobatics 
The worst aspect of the super strain of SARS that is terrorizing the South in Matthew Maguire’s new drama Instinct is that it’s targeting the wrong people. Mothers of triplets are dropping, and kindly old men with basset hounds are falling down dead in their kitchens—but the two couples working at Atlanta’s Center for Disease Control are, 
Plays lit by candlelight are reliably murderous on one’s consciousness—but never more so than in the Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s intimate three-hander The Road to Mecca. Stranding both Fugard’s story and actors Rosemary Harris, Carla Gugino and Jim Dale on a giant stage to chatter away for two-and-a-half hours with a marked lack of dramatic 
Family is a funny thing—especially in Joel Drake Johnson’s The Fall to Earth at 59E59 Theaters. Estranged mother and daughter Fay (Deborah Hedwall) and Rachel (Jolie Curtsinger) fractiously reunite to complete a gruesome task: identify and bring home the body of Kenny, their son and brother. Things immediately get off to a rocky start when Fay and 
Sometimes I love my job. It’s my great pleasure to direct you to Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good), the first must-see of an unusually busy 2012. A mesmerizing, intellectually rigorous, laugh-out-loud funny recreation of Andy Warhol films (including Kitchen), Gob Squad’s Kitchen is smart about a lot of things, but most importantly about the pitfalls 
