Digital innovation continued this year, but experiencing plays in isolation grew tiring. Then came an in-person season as exciting as a child’s first fireworks.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:48AMWith a childlike sense of discovery, Stephen Sondheim found the language to convey the beauty in harsh complexity.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:36PMIn Lynn Nottage’s bright new comedy, cooks at a greasy spoon dream of remaking the menu — and their lives.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:36PMAlice Childress’s 1955 play about power and race in the theater is a satire and a tragedy that deserves to be a classic.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:32PMThe tabloid press and the monarchy used the Princess of Wales for their own purposes, and now a new Broadway show does the same.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 07:54PMJocelyn Bioh’s new comedy about making movies in Nigeria throws some side-eye on Hollywood as well.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:18PMIn this bizarrely cheery adaptation of the Academy Award-winning film, suicide among young gay people proves difficult to sing about.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:03PMA new play by Simon Stephens has hearty performances but a nearly undetectable pulse.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:18PMAnna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play about the aftermath of the Rodney King case gets a cast of five in an updated Off Broadway revival.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:06PMAn electrifying revival of the 2003 musical, featuring a titanic performance by Sharon D Clarke, follows the money to the source of American inequality.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:12PMDouglas Carter Beane’s winky fantasia finds Pinocchio, Puck and other unlikely characters meeting cute in a storybook setting.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:06PMDeirdre O’Connell brilliantly lip-syncs the testimony of a woman abducted by a white supremacist in a play by Lucas Hnath.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 08:24PMBeneath the dry words of an F.B.I. interview, a new play unearths a world of interior terror.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:06PMSquabbling siblings, familiar stereotypes and a chorus of amens: A new play aims for the pleasures of Broadway’s traditional family sitcoms.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:18PMThe exuberant queenhood-is-powerful pageant about the wives of Henry VIII was shut down on opening night by the pandemic. Now it’s back, and it totally rules.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 09:54PMIt takes 15 minutes or less in each segment of “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts” for the bard of male moral decrepitude to skewer his subjects.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:54PMThe streaming part of the ceremony actually did a better job conveying the electricity of being in a theater than the CBS special billed as “Broadway’s Back!”
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:18PMDespite an evening split between streaming and TV, the message on Sunday night was clear: Broadway is back.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 06:42AMFor the undocumented immigrant teenagers in Martyna Majok’s unsparing, unsentimental new play, home is a heartbreaking lesson in betrayal.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 06:18PMIf you think Ngozi Anyanwu’s new play is a straightforward romance, think again.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:18PMIn the last installment in his 12-play series, Richard Nelson asks how his characters, and the theater, got where they are today.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 04:18PMThree new plays in experimental styles test the uptown possibilities of truly downtown theater.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:06AMAntoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s play about young Black men in peril inaugurates the new season with unexpected joy.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 06:06PMJoshua William Gelb turned a small space in his small apartment into a blueprint for streaming during the pandemic. But what happens as real venues open again?
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:06AMJocelyn Bioh reshapes a comedy of clever women, frail men and harsh revenge into one of love and forgiveness, just when New York needs it.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 10:06PMHaving revamped “Oklahoma!” into a dark X-ray of itself, Daniel Fish rethinks another Golden Age classic with “Most Happy in Concert.”
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:12PMNew York Stage and Film provides an unlikely haven for inquiring writers of new plays and musicals.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 03:12PMPlays about writers, including “Mr. Fullerton,” a new potboiler probing Edith Wharton’s love life, too often undermine the real brilliance of their subjects.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:32PMJames Lapine’s book shows how he and Stephen Sondheim invested two years of work to burnish their musical from an avant-garde near-disaster to a mainstream classic.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:12AMIn new versions of “The Designated Mourner” and “Grasses of Many Colors,” Wallace Shawn brings moral horror right to your ear.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 06:32PMAnn Dowd stars in a contemporary rewrite of Ibsen’s play that forces a community, played by the audience, to make a series of fateful choices.
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