Skintight NYC Reviews and Tickets

“Can keep you laughing but also manages to be ultimately serious in exploring the meaning of love. What makes it work is the creation of characters whose quirks are meat for the excellent cast...Aukin milks steady, abundant humor out of the situations...He knows when to accent pauses to provide maximum comic effect, and excels by making the most out of bits of acting business...More successful than Harmon's earlier and less tightly constructed ‘Bad Jews’.”
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“A witty but muddled satire of cultural fixation on youth and beauty...Menzel is in her element here...lending Jodi’s frenetic insecurities a comedic air that grows progressively more natural...Not much happens in ‘Skintight,’ whose characters seem like particularly well-spoken archetypes behaving just as you’d expect them to, under Aukin’s steady direction. Nor does Harmon dig too far beneath the surface-obsessed world he only obliquely mocks.”
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"The main draw for this production is the presence of Idina Menzel, who, in a rare non-singing role, has a great time playing Jodi...There may be a defense for Elliot's philosophy but 'Skintight,' filled with one-dimensional characters and specious arguments, makes a damn shallow case for it...Harmon has a way with snappy lines...Maybe it’s best, particularly for those of us over 40, to think of 'Skintight' as just mindless summer entertainment."
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“Entertainingly surveys the ways in which our notions of beauty and age shape and shade all our relationships. Harmon lightly wrestles with these ideas employing the same piercing humor and humanity that made his earlier plays so enjoyable and thought-provoking. This effort is of a part, but remains too skin-deep to make the same impact...This play offers little resolution, only more questions, and a steady stream of laughs—enjoyable, but largely forgettable.”
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“Another clever and insightful, if occasionally repetitive and overwrought, drama of family relationships...Aukin guides the characters with an assured hand...But it’s difficult to accept Jack and Jodi as father and daughter; they lack...connection...Trey is so over the top...like he’s from a different play...Harmon delves into the nature of superficiality but doesn’t dig quite deep enough, although he still comes up with another entertaining night at the theater.”
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"That set-up sounds like a soap opera. But the characters here are all plausible archetypes. And Harmon skewers the vacuous cult of beauty sustaining Elliot’s world with caustic precision...Harmon offers no competing idealistic vision, and his material starts to wear thin after the interval. But 'Skintight,' nimbly directed by Daniel Aukin, is still a bracingly cynical well-made play."
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"A mashup of quirky, bittersweet, sluggish and hilarity...Sharply portrayed with flashes of humor by Idina Menzel...Menzel has an astute flair for comedy and one might almost feel a tinge of compassion for her character, if she weren't so caustic and egotistical...While director Daniel Aukin keeps the humor high and Harmon's dialogue is right on target, the plot moves into a serious vein...Laughs are abundant but the plot often hangs still in mid-air."
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"Harmon’s writing is funny and observant and the cast is game (I especially liked Menzel and Wetherall), each one climbing or descending the long stairway in amusing ways specific to their characters, but Elliot delivers an unnecessarily long monologue about his cravings, spelling out what we already know, and by the end, I felt the evening had been as fleeting as a Calvin Klein affair."
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