All stories by James Wilson on BroadwayStars

Friday, October 20, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Partnership" - 10/19/23 by James Wilson

Last year, New York's invaluable Mint Theater Company presented Chains, Elizabeth Baker's trenchant drama from 1909 about the apparent impossibility of having both a happy marriage and a ful…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 03:58AM
Friday, October 13, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "South" - 10/13/23 by James Wilson

Near the end of South, Florencia Iriondo's autobiographical show, the Argentina-born writer and performer explains, "That constant sense of nostalgia defines me more than any address can." N…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:24PM
Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Pay the Writer" - 8/21/23 by James Wilson

"Pay the Writer" could be this summer's rallying cry for the striking members of the Writer's Guild of America, but it is also the name of Tawni O'Dell's new play about a celebrated writer's…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 05:31AM
Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Toros" - 8/1/23 by James Wilson

Although Toros, Danny Tejera's play currently running at Second Stage's McGinn/Cazale Theater, takes place in a posh suburb in Madrid, the twenty-something characters are metaphorically at s…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 01:07AM
Monday, July 31, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "The Half-God of Rainfall" - 7/31/23 by James Wilson

For basketball aficionados, the all-time great players–LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and others on the deified short list of the NBA pantheon–are not mere mortals. They ar…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 08:03PM
Thursday, June 22, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Rock & Roll Man" - 6/21/23 by James Wilson

Although largely forgotten today, disc jockey and performance promoter Alan Freed is an important figure in popular music history. He is credited with standardizing the term "rock and roll,"…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 06:09AM
Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground" - 6/20/23 by James Wilson

"Great American–not great president." This is how a poll of 75 historians damningly characterized Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1962, not even two years after he left office. Richard Hellesen's …

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:15PM
Monday, June 5, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "This Land Was Made" - 6/4/23 by James Wilson

The narrator and main character of Tori Sampson's This Land Was Made, now running at the Vineyard Theatre, identifies herself as a griot. Simultaneously storytellers, poets, and living archi…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 06:11AM
Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Bernarda's Daughters" - 5/23/23 by James Wilson

In lieu of a playbill or the increasingly more ubiquitous fliers containing a digital QR code, audiences attending Bernarda's Daughters, Diane Exavier's elegiac play currently running at the…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 03:19AM
Friday, May 19, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "The Fears" - 5/18/23 by James Wilson

Construction noise, profanity-shouting pedestrians, non-stop emergency-vehicle sirens, and the booming music of pedicabs can certainly pose an obstacle for individuals hoping to find quiet s…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 03:59AM
Monday, May 15, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Romeo and Juliet" - 5/14/23 by James Wilson

"For never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." Thus concludes one of Shakespeare's best-known and most-performed plays. In the boisterous, gag-filled production pres…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 05:48AM
Monday, May 8, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Sorry for Your Loss" - 5/8/23 by James Wilson

"You think things are one way, but they can be another way." This reversal of expectations is a recurring theme throughout Michael Cruz Kayne's Sorry for Your Loss, the new one-person show p…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:01PM
Sunday, May 7, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Oliver!" - 5/6/23 by James Wilson

There have been numerous hit Hollywood animated family films that include serious or dramatic content and some that even feature death. In the Walt Disney classic Bambi, the young deer must …

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 06:30AM
Friday, May 5, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "shadow/land" - 5/4/23 by James Wilson

The press materials for Erika Dickerson-Despenza's new play at the Public Theater request that the title, shadow/land, be documented using lowercase letters. In the first thirty minutes or s…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 06:18AM
Monday, April 24, 2023

Talkin' Broadway on Broadway Review: "Prima Facie" 4/23/23 by James Wilson

As modernist playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw demonstrated, theatre has the power to rattle the cultural consciousness and shine the spotlight on pressing contemporary social and political…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 05:58AM
Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "White Girl in Danger" - 4/10/23 by James Wilson

In his Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jackson skewered the predominantly white theatre industry through the main character's effort to create a "big…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 01:48AM
Sunday, March 19, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Drinking in America" - 3/19/23 by James Wilson

In September 1986, Lily Tomlin took Broadway by storm in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Jane Wagner's play that explored, among other topics, women's issues and se…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:07PM
Thursday, March 16, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Arden of Faversham" - 3/16/23 by James Wilson

In adapting Arden of Faversham, the anonymously written domestic tragedy from 1592, Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat explain in a program note that they intended to merge the tragic and far…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 08:21PM
Saturday, March 11, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "I Love My Family, But..." - 3/11/23 by James Wilson

I Love My Family, But..., the amiable new revue at the Huron Club at SoHo Playhouse, is composed of sixteen musical snapshots focused on a presumably typical family in, as the script states,…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 01:44PM
Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "1 + 1" - 3/1/23 by James Wilson

Eric Bogosian's 1 + 1, now in a production by The Black Box at SoHo Playhouse, appears in the long tradition of plays about Hollywood. Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime, David Mamet's Sp…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:27PM
Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "The Seagull/Woodstock, NY" - 2/28/22 by James Wilson

The most successful adaptations of classic works allow audiences to see familiar texts in a new light. For instance, black odyssey, which opened this week, affords a spirited journey through…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 10:04PM

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Letters from Max, a ritual" - 2/28/22 by James Wilson

Don't let the subtitle fool you: Sarah Ruhl's Letters from Max, a ritual is very much a play. The production currently at New York's Signature Theatre centers around two sharply drawn charac…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 08:32AM
Sunday, February 26, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "black odyssey" - 2/26/22 by James Wilson

There is something magical happening on East 13th Street in Manhattan. Marcus Gardley's black odyssey, now playing at Classic Stage Company, is an adaptation of Homer's epic poem, but audien…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 10:30PM
Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "A Bright New Boise" - 2/21/23 by James Wilson

Perhaps my favorite play of the last year is Samuel D. Hunter's A Case for the Existence of God, an exquisite drama that plumbs the depths of a friendship between two men in Twin Falls, Idah…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:31PM
Monday, February 6, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Lucy" - 2/6/23 by James Wilson

Lucy, Erica Schmidt's new play, now in its world premiere production by Audible Theater at the Minetta Lane, begins with a mother of a six-year-old girl (and a baby on the way) interviewing …

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 09:01PM
Sunday, January 22, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Memorial" - 1/22/23 by James Wilson

... it was quite illuminating to learn the full backstory behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial through Livian Yeh's Memorial, which is currently playing at A.R.T New York Theatres in a produ…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 08:29PM
Thursday, January 19, 2023

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Sugar Daddy" - 1/19/23 by James Wilson

Stand-up comic and television writer Sam Morrison knows comedy. He has performed on "The Drew Barrymore Show" and has written for Bravo's reality television program "Blind Date." He also is …

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 07:24PM
Monday, December 12, 2022

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Merrily We Roll Along" - 12/12/22 by James Wilson

It hasn't even been four years since the last professional revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along. Roundabout Theatre Company presented Fiasco's pared-down prod…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 07:35PM
Thursday, December 8, 2022

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "A Child's Christmas in Wales" - 12/8/22 by James Wilson

Adapted and directed by Charlotte Moore, the musical pageant includes a cast of six immensely appealing performers who give life to a host of Welsh denizens, including a group of mischievous…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 08:41PM
Sunday, November 27, 2022

Talkin' Broadway on Broadway Review: "KPOP" 11/27/22 by James Wilson

It's part backstage musical, part jukebox-bio show, part multimedia extravaganza, and a large part arena-concert spectacle. The components do not cohere nearly as effortlessly as they do in …

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 06:36PM
Sunday, November 20, 2022

Talkin' Broadway Off-Broadway - "Sandra" - 11/20/22 by James Wilson

[David]Cale's newest solo play, Sandra, currently running at the Vineyard Theatre, stars Marjan Neshat as a forty-something-year-old woman caught in a web of international intrigue, mysterio…

SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 07:03PM

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 01, 2025: Glengarry Glen Ross
Apr 10, 2025: Smash - Imperial Theatre
TBA: Titanic
TBA: Ragtime