Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Playwright John Guare has given us many enjoyable nights in
the theater with such works as The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of
Separation and A Free Man of Color (click here to read my …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 09:07AMSaturday, June 15, 2013
People— actors and theatergoers alike—can’t seem to get enough of Macbeth. The talented young Scottish actor James McAvoy took it on earlier this year in London A new production
starri…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 02:46PMWednesday, June 12, 2013
The question is the same every year: should the Tony Awards be a celebration for
Broadway insiders and their fellow travelers (like me) or should the televised
ceremony be basically a …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 08:35AMSaturday, June 8, 2013
Off-Broadway shows usually come and go more quickly than big
main-stem Broadway productions (unless those productions are duds or feature
big Hollywood stars who sign up for limited runs or …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 08:34AMWednesday, June 5, 2013
Nostalgia for the 1950s, the childhood years of the baby boomers,
will probably hold strong as long as the boomers do. But, as the TV series “Mad Men” has shown,
ruminations about …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 02:13PMSaturday, June 1, 2013
Anyone with even the slightest awareness of the young pop
star Justin Bieber and his recent antics knows that the mix of celebrity and
adolescence can be a toxic combination.
So it’s…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 02:03PMWednesday, May 29, 2013
“Smash,” which ended its two-season run on NBC this past
Sunday night, was like that friend you’re embarrassed by and are always thinking you should drop because she just doesn’t kno…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 07:47AMSaturday, May 25, 2013
For years now, the sociologist Richard Florida has been
preaching that young people in what he calls the creative class don’t want to
just sit back and be fed their culture, they want to g…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:32PMWednesday, May 22, 2013
Who knew that Russians would be so hip this spring? The Encores! series just finished its season with a
production of Rodgers and Hart’s gangsters-and-Russian ballet musical On Your
Toes. …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:19PMMonday, May 20, 2013
It’s another can’t-find-time-to-blog weekend for me but
rather than turn the ghost light on yet again, I’m going to give a brief shout
out to a new trend I've noticed: the fancy insert…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 07:17AMWednesday, May 15, 2013
Even if Nora Ephron hadn’t written it and Tom Hanks weren’t
starring in it, Lucky Guy would probably be a hit. For the play, now running at the Broadhurst
Theatre, tells the story …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 02:11PMSaturday, May 11, 2013
Performers who’ve made their name in musicals often jump at
the chance to show that they can do straight dramatic roles as well. In just the past year, Norbert Leo Butz and
Nathan La…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:57PMWednesday, May 8, 2013
Let me make two things clear right at the beginning of this
post. The first, as regular readers know, is that I hate audience participation. The second is that I absolutely loved Here Lies L…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:48PMSunday, May 5, 2013
Even if you were born and raised in New York, as both my
husband K and I were, you've probably had fantasies of living “the real New
York life.” Of course the definition of what
that is …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:37AMWednesday, May 1, 2013
You don’t even have to be a theater lover to know that the
Tony nominations were announced yesterday. There were, as usual, the fairly predictable nods. Hollywood heavyweight Tom Hanks
got…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:26PMSaturday, April 27, 2013
I know. I know. This is two Saturdays in a row that I've turned on the ghost light, signaling a temporary pause in these posts. But what can I tell you? It's a crazy time and I'm seein…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:17PMWednesday, April 24, 2013
Transposing Shakespeare to a different locale or time period
no longer earns a director the automatic cool points it once did. In fact,
doing so has become almost as ho-hum as a standing ova…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 01:04PMSaturday, April 20, 2013
It's crazy time on Broadway—six shows opened this past week and five more are due next week before the season officially closes on April 25—and so I should be here writing like a madwoma…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 12:52PMWednesday, April 17, 2013
People who love musicals really seem to love The Last Five
Years. In fact, those who saw the original 2002 production are still singing its
praises. And there have reportedly been over 3,500…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 06:40PMSaturday, April 13, 2013
It may not be politically correct to say this but I’m
getting tired of drag queens. Not the real people but the theatrical versions
of them that keep turning up in Broadway musicals in far…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 12:28PMWednesday, April 10, 2013
It’s always sad to hear that a show is closing prematurely.
And that’s true whether or not you had a good time when you saw it. Cause I’m
feeling badly for the cast and crew of Hands o…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 12:21PMSaturday, April 6, 2013
If you’d asked, I’d have said that one-person shows were my
least favorite form of theater. So it’s been truly surprising to find that some
of the shows I’ve most enjoyed this season…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 06:13PMWednesday, April 3, 2013
Fairy tales ain’t what they used to be. Books like “Confessions
of an Ugly Stepsister” and “Glass Slippers & Jeweled Masques” have brought
an edgier, and even erotic, vibe to t…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 12:03PMSaturday, March 30, 2013
Even before it opened the Pershing Square Center complex last year and
turned it into a prime hangout for theater lovers, the Signature
Theatre Company was beloved for focusing an entire sea…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 11:56AMWednesday, March 27, 2013
Honky, the provocatively named comedy now running at Urban
Stages, kicks off with a not very funny incident: a black kid is killed for his
sneakers and sales spike at the Nike-style company …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 11:43AMSaturday, March 23, 2013
Passover begins on Monday evening and although My Name is
Asher Lev opened four months ago and has extended its run at the Westside
Theatre through
Sept. 1, it’s hard to think of a b…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 11:29AMWednesday, March 20, 2013
The expectation we have for playwrights is the same as we
have for parents: that they should love all their children equally. Of course they don’t. Both tend to have a soft spot for …
Linked From Broadway & Me at 11:18AMSaturday, March 16, 2013
Sometimes you just need a good laugh. At least that’s how I’ve been feeling over the
past couple of weeks as I’ve gone from one disappointing show to the next. I usually ta…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 11:01AMWednesday, March 13, 2013
Maybe I’m just in a cranky mood. Because I’ve seen nearly
two dozen show so far this calendar year and I can count the ones I’ve liked on
one hand, with a few fingers left over.
…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 04:50PMSaturday, March 9, 2013
Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly is a small play in almost
every way. It’s a two-hander and all the
action takes place on a single set, a rundown boathouse near a farm
in Lebanon,…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 10:39AMWednesday, March 6, 2013
Well, I guess it’s official:
I am truly not a John Doyle gal. The Scottish- born director has earned all kinds of kudos from critics
(most notably the New York Times’ Ben Brantley)…
Linked From Broadway & Me at 10:32AM