“I wanted to laugh! I wanted to love it!” A Review by Jim of The Third Story starring Charles Busch and Kathleen Turner “I wanted to laugh! I wanted to love it!” Last night 6 friends and I (Jim Dykes) attended Off Broadway’s The Third Story , at the Lortel Theatre, written by Charles Busch and starring Charles with former film star Kathleen Turner. Basically, it is an unholy, disorganized mess-- Charles is always a wonderful, campy performer, but as a writer, this time he’s struck out. If The Third Story was a casserole, it should go back in the oven and cook some more. In all seriousness, I've seen much better shows by Charles Busch…this show is an absolute bomb. Audiences (myself and my friends included) love Charles and even the NY Times’ Ben Brantley (an obvious Busch fan) completely softened his words in a review that really should have been a complete pan. This show should have closed opening night, but it’s still doing very good business because of Brantley’s k...

Jim Dykes says 33 Variations is going to be a HUGE Hit!": “It’s a HIT! Buy Your tickets NOW!" Last night I went to the FIRST performance of the new Moises Kaufman play 33 VARIATIONS starring Jane Fonda on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre . I knew by the middle of Act One that we were watching a HIT…even though it was the only first public preview, which is like a dress rehearsal with an audience. The story is compelling, the staging is complicated but interesting, and the performances are FIRST-rate. Kaufman is a genius…he’s taken a subject revolving around a specific point of history involving a classical music composition two centuries old, and woven a quite interesting story together with a modern story. The play is about a musicologist, Dr. Katherine Brandt (Fonda) who has spent her life specializing in Beethoven to a point where he dominates her conscious and sub-conscious life. As the play opens, we find Brandt has been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’...