Off-Broadway's spring schedule offers up quite the diverse list of shows, from a quirky musical scored by pop maestro Stephen Merritt to a political drama about Southern blacks surviving the Depression.
Downtown, the Public Theater offers several shows in its spring season: We're looking forward to “The Singing Forest”, a Kushner-like opus on memory, America, and Freud by Craig Lucas (“Prelude to a Kiss”). On another stage, Suzan-Lori Parks presents an as-yet unnamed project, her first full-length work since “Topdog/Underdog” in 2001.
A cultural collision can be found in “Things of Dry Hours” at New York Theatre Workshop. Naomi Wallace's drama illuminates the fires of Marxist rebellion that flickered amongst Southern blacks during the Depression.
David Cromer's version of “Our Town”, now at the Barrow Street Theater in the West Village, strips away the decades of drama school cliché to reveal a spare, almost Zen drama about distinctly American neuroses. The superb drama has an open run, but don't dawdle: it's too good to miss.
MCC Theater’s musical “Coraline,” like the recent film, is an adaptation of a fanastical story by British author Neil Gaiman. Wry pop maestro Stephen Merritt (of Magnetic Fields fame) and dramatic mesmerist David Greenspan cast angelic 50-something Jayne Houdyshell as a bored 9-year-old heroine who gets more than she bargained for when she discovers an an Alice in Wonderland–like alternative reality.
Off-Broadway is often synonymous with downtown, but there are plenty of theaters in Hell's Kitchen. New World Stages, a sort of theater-plex, hosts an eclectic menu of pop operas and stage freaks. These genres fuse in “The Toxic Avenger”, a musicalized version of the cult flick about a superhero from Jersey.
The theater nexus need not stay focus in Manhattan. Follow ex-Manhattanites the Wooster Group to St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO. That's where they'll be presenting their latest extravaganza, “La Didione”, a mash-up of a 17th-century opera and a 1960s space-vampire movie.
(Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect a byline correction.)
