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Associated Press

Paul Sills, a founder of `Second City, ' dies at 80
Paul Sills, one of the founders of the improvisational comedy group ''The Second City,'' which has turned out some of America's best-known comedians, died Monday. He was ...

LaBute examines the emotional price tag of pretty

It seems all of Broadway is lighting up
In the first scene of “The Country Girl” at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, actor Peter Gallagher stabs a cigarette in the air to make a point or two.

Back Stage

reasons to be pretty reviewed by Leonard Jacobs
While all the characters in Reasons stab each other in the back and heart, none of it surprises or enlightens. It's finally as if LaBute is admitting that his plays demonize women and this is his way of making amends.

Len, Asleep In Vinyl reviewed by Andy Propst
Director Jackson Gay's well-modulated staging always engages, but questions linger well after the end of this surprisingly brief play.

Standing Clear reviewed by Irene Backalenick
Clearly a work in progress, Standing Clear requires some ruthless editing before it can emerge as a worthy statement of New York underground life.

Coming Home reviewed by Ron Cohen
A trenchant look at post-Katrina New Orleans provides the heft for Coming Home, a trio of titular-themed one-acts.

Variety

Marshall, team leave 'Nice Work'
Split due to 'irreconcilable differences'

Paul Sills dies at 80
Was a founder of Second City comedy group

Broadway grosses take tumble
Great White Way awaits tourist season

'Xanadu' skates to West End
Show aims to open in London in spring 2009

Review: Len, Asleep in Vinyl
It may not be a full album, but it has a couple of great tracks. "Len, Asleep in Vinyl," Carly Mensch's enthusiastically slight new play about musicmakers, makes good on its small ambitions quickly, quirkily and with considerable style. Mensch's slick dialogue is an excellent match for Jackson Gay's offbeat directorial style, and the playwright's fisheye-lens characterization keeps things interesting even when the plot stalls. Leads Michael Cullen and Daniel Eric Gold make potentially unbearable characters easy to like with excellent turns as a disappointed punk rock father and a shy hipster son, respectively.

Review: reasons to be pretty
Being made to feel uncomfortable or even repulsed by the behavior of men comes as no surprise in a Neil LaBute play, but being moved by his male characters is more unexpected. In "Fat Pig," the writer's ability to make his audience empathize with the protagonist's crippling cowardice yielded uncharacteristic emotional rewards. In "Reasons to Be Pretty," which completes a trilogy of four-character plays about the unhealthy obsession with physical beauty that began with The Shape of Things," the playwright once again softens his tendency toward cold, clinical assessment with a warming dose of compassion. The result is both absorbing and affecting.

Review: Tooth and Nail @ Lillian Theatre
The notion that "perhaps mentally ill people are actually saner than the rest of us" has become a comfortable artistic trope, regardless of real-life experience to the contrary. That this concept surfaces in comedies is stranger still, unless one looks at the wise madmen who have filled stage and screen as a simple wish that the afflicted were not sick but in fact blessed. In Gena Acosta's "Tooth and Nail," surface craziness is a cover for familial healing. Its tonal shifts between pathos and broad humor don't entirely work, but a plenitude of oddball wit, along with a genial cast, makes this world premiere an enjoyable experience.

Review: The Common Pursuit, Menier Chocolate Factory
Nothing dates so fast as the recent past. That makes reviving Simon Gray's 1984 play problematic. Charting a group of hope-filled undergraduates from 1968 over a decade-and-a-half of increasing disillusionment, "The Common Pursuit" was written to climax in what was then the present. However, even that scene is now more than 20 years old. And in the Menier Chocolate Factory's miscast, inert revival, it certainly feels it.

Bloomberg.com

Neil LaBute's Latest Provocation Whacks Ugly Girlfriend: Jeremy Gerard
We aren't privy to the conversation that sparked the events in Neil LaBute's latest stage provocation, but apparently it took place in a suburban garage and went something like this: ...

Wall Street Journal

Second City Founder Sills Dies
Paul Sills, a founder of the improvisational comedy group "The Second City," has died of complications from pneumonia. He was 80.