The Very Best of NYC Theater

Sistas the Musical, WIT, Judith of Bethulia, Women Center Stage Festival, Jesus Christ Superstar

After a successful run at this summer’s Midtown International Theater Festival, Sistas the Musical is now playing with an open ended run at St. Luke’s Theatre. Based on a series of interviews conducted with black women over a six-year period, the musical is an uplifting journey of a multi-generational African-American family. The play’s narrative is stitched together using songs that perfectly capture the mood and speaks to the issues of each period and time from the days of Jim Crow to the present, covering a range of topics including segregation, the women’s movement, and the meaning of love and control.

Margaret Edson’s WIT continues at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, now through Mar 11. Tony and Emmy Award winner Cynthia Nixon stars as Vivian Bearing, a brilliant and exacting poetry professor undergoing experimental treatment for ovarian cancer. A scholar who devoted her life to academia, she has spent most of her life preferring scholarship to humanity; it’s no accident that she is unmarried and without children, her parents are deceased, and she has no third-party person to contact. Throughout the play she reflects on her reactions to the cycle the cancer takes, the treatments, and significant events in her life as she now faces the irony and injustice of becoming the subject of research.

Charles Busch returns to Theater for the New City with his new comedy Judith of Bethulia for a limited premiere engagement Mar 30 – Apr 28. Judith… is an outrageous and bawdy celebration of the Hollywood Biblical epic. Lepers, whores, eunuchs, centurions, evil generals, youthful poets and a beautiful redheaded widow make Busch’s latest comedy an event worth praying for.

In celebration of Women’s History month, the Culture Project presents its annual Women Center Stage Festival, a dynamic and diverse laboratory for new works by female performing artists. The 2012 festival features more than 40 performances running from Mar 8 through Apr 7 at The Living Theatre. This year’s festival includes performances by Lenelle Moïse, JULIACKS and Kathleen Amshoff, Charity Henson-Ballard, Soomi Kim, Anna Khaja, Rebecca Hart, Heloise and the Savoir Faire, Xenia Rubinos, Dominique Morisseau, Mariah MacCarthy, Eboni Hogan, Caroline Rothstein, viBe Theater Experience, the First Generation Nigerian-American Project, and many more.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s award-winning production of Jesus Christ Superstar sets its sights on Broadway as it opens at the Neil Simon Theatre Mar 22. This version, directed by Des McAnuff, is a fresh take on the groundbreaking rock opera that reinvented musical theatre for the modern age. The story describes the last week of Christ’s life and features a score of Broadway classics, including “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” “Everything’s Alright” and “Superstar.”


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