All stories by Ben Brantley on BroadwayStars

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Critic’s Pick: Review: A Magnificent Road to Ruin in ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ by Ben Brantley

This three-hour-plus portrait of the creation and destruction of the house of Lehman, directed by Sam Mendes, is an endlessly absorbing epic tragedy.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:03PM
Thursday, March 21, 2019

Critic’s Pick: Review: An All-Star Team in the Temptations Musical ‘Ain’t Too Proud’ by Ben Brantley

This shrewdly assembled show, directed by Des McAnuff, considers the interchangeability of a crew of Motown’s finest, though there’s plenty of star shine, too.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM
Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Critic’s Pick: Review: Hearing the Roar of Racism in ‘White Noise’ by Ben Brantley

In her enthralling study of interracial relationships, featuring a brilliant Daveed Diggs, Suzan-Lori Parks parses the lies we live by.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM
Sunday, March 17, 2019

Review: A Road Trip Crosses Centuries in ‘Anything That Gives Off Light’ by Ben Brantley

This meandering work of musical stand-up theater, from the TEAM and the National Theater of Scotland, probes the past and present of two nations.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:22PM
Monday, March 11, 2019

Review: Isabelle Huppert Is a Nightmare to Remember in ‘The Mother’ by Ben Brantley

In Christopher Hampton’s translation of Florian Zeller’s Freudian chamber play, Ms. Huppert confirms her reputation as the most fearless of actresses.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM
Sunday, March 10, 2019

Review: Anxious Teenagers Learn to ‘Be More Chill’ on a Big Stage by Ben Brantley

Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz’s cult sci-fi musical about high school paranoia arrives on Broadway with its wholesale klutziness intact.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM
Thursday, March 7, 2019

Critic’s Pick: Review: Phoebe Waller-Bridge Gives New York a Fabulous ‘Fleabag’ by Ben Brantley

In her priceless one-woman play, the writer and performer summons the pleasures and pain of being young, single and sexually compulsive.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM
Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Review: This ‘Daddy’ Has Issues. A Pool and Alan Cumming, Too. by Ben Brantley

Jeremy O. Harris, the author of “Slave Play,” has written another sexually and racially charged work, but one that ends up overwrought.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM
Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Review: Lost on a Magical Mystery Tour in ‘Alice by Heart’ by Ben Brantley

This directionless new musical, set in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and a London subway station, challenges its audience’s willingness to make believe.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM

Brantley in Britain: In Revelatory Revivals, Women Sing Through the Pain by Ben Brantley

West End productions of “Company” and “Caroline, or Change” have the heart and fire that sometimes felt missing in earlier incarnations.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:10PM
Monday, February 25, 2019

Critic’s Pick: Review: ‘Marys Seacole’ Puts Biodrama Through a Kaleidoscope by Ben Brantley

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s sparkling new play, about the Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole, reinvents a dramatic trope as a dizzying hall of mirrors.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:45PM
Monday, February 18, 2019

Brantley in Britain: At the London Theater, a Fear of the Foreign and Familiar by Ben Brantley

Revivals of work by Pinter and Miller — and a play about an Englishman roped into an Italian horror movie — ponder mortal anxiety in the age of Brexit.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:18PM
Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Review: ‘All About Eve’ Gets the Vampire Treatment from Ivo van Hove by Ben Brantley

This London adaptation of the Oscar-winning satire, starring a misused Gillian Anderson and Lily James, is like a horror movie without a pulse.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:24PM
Monday, February 11, 2019

Brantley in Britain: How She Survives: Strategies for Women on London Stages by Ben Brantley

Cate Blanchett, Laura Linney and Katherine Parkinson are three heroines in search of elusive selves in plays by Martin Crimp, Rona Munro and Laura Wade.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:42PM
Sunday, February 10, 2019

Reviews: ‘Mies Julie’ and ‘Dance of Death,’ Love and Madness in Strindberg by Ben Brantley

Two productions at the Classic Stage Company channel the electric ambivalence of August Strindberg.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:54PM
Monday, January 28, 2019

Review: In ‘Joan,’ a Photographer Tries to Focus Her Past by Ben Brantley

Stephen Belber’s time-traveling drama, starring Johanna Day, connects the dots of woman’s conflicted existence during six decades.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 01:12PM
Thursday, January 24, 2019

Critic’s Pick: Review: Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano Go Mano a Mano in the Riveting ‘True West’ by Ben Brantley

In this unsettling revival, directed by James Macdonald, two fine actors find the existential terror in Sam Shepard’s portrait of battling brothers.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:24PM
Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Review: In ‘Eddie and Dave,’ Van Halen Gets a Makeover by Ben Brantley

Amy Staats’s tale of the rowdy rise (and fall and rise and fall) of the rock band lets women loose in the glam metal boys’ club.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:18PM
Thursday, January 17, 2019

Critic’s Pick: Review: Reckoning With Medical Betrayals ‘Behind the Sheet’ by Ben Brantley

Charly Evon Simpson’s quietly commanding play chronicles gynecological experimentation on American slave women in the antebellum South.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:54PM
Tuesday, January 15, 2019

An Appraisal: Even From Afar, Carol Channing Served Up That Broadway Wow by Ben Brantley

How her outsize presence — and that “Hello, Dolly!” cast album — helped entice a burgeoning theater critic to New York.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:54PM
Sunday, January 13, 2019

Review: ‘On Blueberry Hill’ Looks Back in Radiant Regret by Ben Brantley

Sebastian Barry’s imbalanced new play, set in a Dublin prison, confirms its writer’s gift for finding the holiness in the everyday.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:06PM
Wednesday, January 9, 2019

The Demolition Artist: 3 Critics Debate Ivo van Hove by Ben Brantley, Elisabeth Vincentelli and Jason Zinoman

Visionary stylist or one-trick pony? With “Network” on Broadway and “All About Eve” on the horizon, the multimedia-mad stage director is ready for his close-up.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 04:24AM
Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Obsession, Mourning and Migration at Under the Radar by Ben Brantley and Jesse Green

Offerings at the festival include a riff on “Uncle Vanya”; a “Frankenstein” adaptation highlighting a mother’s grief; and an intimate tale of displacement.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 04:54PM
Monday, January 7, 2019

Review: Marin Ireland Brings Down the Halfway House in ‘Blue Ridge’ by Ben Brantley

Marin Ireland blazes furiously as an emotional terrorist in Abby Rosebrock’s emotionally congested comic drama, set in a Southern rehab center.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 11:04PM

Theater Reviews: Hate, Hope and Healing at Under the Radar by Ben Brantley and Jesse Green

An eclectic opening weekend included sketches and songs by Nigerian women, two unsettling monologues and a punk-rock reminiscence (with mixtape to follow).

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:18PM
Tuesday, December 11, 2018

‘Clueless: The Musical’ Review: The Film’s Charm Is Replaced by Sparkle by Ben Brantley

Amy Heckerling’s amiable but limp adaptation of her classic 1995 film suggests a peppy fan club putting on its own makeshift show.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:18PM
Monday, December 10, 2018

Review: In ‘The Prisoner,’ Peter Brook Ponders Crime and Punishment by Ben Brantley

This gnomic tale from the fabled director portrays a man expiating a patricide outside a prison’s walls.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:06PM
Sunday, December 9, 2018

Critic’s Pick: ‘The Jungle’ Review: Migrants’ Heartbreaking Search for Home in Calais by Ben Brantley

This extraordinary, London-born work of immersive theater places its audience at the fraught and energetic center of a migrant camp in France.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 11:04PM
Thursday, December 6, 2018

Critic’s Pick: Review: An Electrifying Bryan Cranston Is All the Rage in ‘Network’ by Ben Brantley

Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1976 film presents a pricelessly demented affair between a has-been anchorman and the cameras that love him.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:48PM
Tuesday, December 4, 2018

The Best Theater of 2018 by Ben Brantley and Jesse Green

It was a year when classics were reincarnated in deceptively modest interpretations, conventional story forms were tossed aside and strong voices roared.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 04:48AM
Sunday, December 2, 2018

Critic’s Pick: Review: Reliving a Childhood Interrupted in ‘The Tricky Part’ by Ben Brantley

Martin Moran’s radiant memoir of a play recalls an experience of sexual abuse with a sense of luminous mystery.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:18PM

All that Chat

2024-2025 BROADWAY SEASON
Jun 05, 2024: Home - Todd Haimes Theatre
Jul 11, 2024: Oh, Mary! - Lyceum Theatre
Jul 30, 2024: Job - Hayes Theater
Sep 12, 2024: The Roommate - Booth Theatre
Nov 14, 2024: Tammy Faye - Palace Theatre
Dec 12, 2024: Cult of Love - Hayes Theater
Dec 19, 2024: Gypsy - Majestic Theatre
Mar 17, 2025: Purpose - Hayes Theater
Apr 10, 2025: Smash - Imperial Theatre
TBA: Titanic
TBA: Ragtime