Monday, September 15, 2014
There was for a time, in what we call the golden age of Broadway, a genre known as “the drawing room comedy”. A select few of the major playwrights of the day wrote them, dressed…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:04PMTuesday, August 26, 2014
This new two hander by Laura Eason opened July 31st but I was not available to see it during the press previews, so I apologize for reporting to you on it at this late date. Its run has been…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:28PMMonday, August 4, 2014
Full disclosure: I have known and represented John Kander, Fred Ebb and Chita Rivera since before they all three knew each other. As a young agent at the Music Corporation of America, I was …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:08AMMonday, July 28, 2014
The Atlantic Theatre Company, nestled in its own theatre in a church on East 20th Street, has come up with a winner in Between Riverside and Crazy, a taut and tingling family drama replete w…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:29AMFriday, July 25, 2014
Bert Berns was an American song writer and producer in the 1960s. An original sixties rock ‘n roller and writer of soul, he made a mark in popular music, particularly with “Here …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:45AMMonday, July 21, 2014
Erasmus Fenn is a stage magician turned novelist turned playwright, whose first play, Drop Dead Perfect, has been brought to Theatre at St. Clement’s off Broadway, through the combined…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:15AMWednesday, July 2, 2014
Penelope Skinner’s very dark comedy The Village Bike first appeared in 2011 at the Royal Court’s Upstairs Theatre in London. In 2012 it played the Sheffield Theatres, what we wou…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:58AMThursday, June 26, 2014
In recent times playwrights have been inviting us into worlds we would never know without them. Harvey Fierstein has set Casa Valentina in a camp in the Catskills to which certain men like t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:53AMWednesday, June 25, 2014
The mission of the Mint Theatre, operating out of a tiny black box theatre on West 43rd Street in an office building, is to unearth, to present and preserve forgotten plays of merit. In note…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:45PMFriday, June 20, 2014
The new musical If/Then, by the same creative team that brought us the prize winning Next To Normal five years ago, is once again an imaginative and impressive piece of work. Written by Tom …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:21AMFriday, June 13, 2014
I find it remarkable that a “well made play” which originally opened on Broadway in 1938 for a moderately successful run of 207 performances should have such an impact on an audi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:43AMTuesday, June 10, 2014
Sir Alan Ayckbourn was in New York this past weekend polishing up his staging of the three evenings of theatre he has brought us to officially welcome the delights of spring. The weather tur…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:38AMFriday, May 30, 2014
One of the joys of a long life in theatre is that you get to visit old friends whom you first met decades ago. Cabaret is a true case in point, for back in the middle of the last century (19…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:32AMTuesday, May 27, 2014
It’s been several years since Gerard Alessandrini dusted off his skewering sword with which to parody working actors, writers and other well intentioned theatre folk. Now, in the curre…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:56AMTuesday, May 20, 2014
The first ladies of the New York stage have been having a rough time of it of late. They have been finding rich and meaty roles in plays that come close, but don’t make it to the finis…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:15AMMonday, May 19, 2014
Each year, the Drama League bestows awards on all sorts of worthy talents who have contributed to the season just passed. On May 16th, I attended this year’s luncheon, the social event…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:36PMTyne Daly has found herself a rich and demanding role, and she inhabits it with all of her considerable talent in peak condition. The role is Katherine Gerard, who first appeared in public i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:13AMThursday, May 15, 2014
If you like country music, bluegrass, lowdown rock and lots of gospel, you’ll find yourself moved by Jeanine Tesori’s score which was first heard off Broadway in 1997 in a well r…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:37AMTuesday, May 6, 2014
Every once in a while a play is announced for Broadway production with names attached to it that are not familiar to me. Such a case is The City of Conversation by Anthony Giardina, with a c…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:53AMThis “revue of a lifetime” is a good idea, well intentioned, occasionally very well executed, but unfortunately off its mark as often as it is on. Conceived and written by Stephe…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:25AMMonday, May 5, 2014
It’s alarming to have to report that Eric Coble’s two hander which starred Estelle Parsons and Stephen Spinella closed Sunday night after 16 performances on Broadway. A battery o…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:48PMAnnapurna is a mountain that rises some 26,000 feet in the northern part of Nepal. It was once climbed by two men who just made it to the peak, only to make one fatal mistake on their way …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:06AMFriday, May 2, 2014
Harvey Fierstein has recently joined Thomas Meehan and James Lapine on the A list of writers whom the establishment calls upon to crank out a book for a new musical, replacing Terrence McNal…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:38AMThursday, May 1, 2014
For those of you who remember, and cherish, the original Rocky film that made an instant star of Sylvester “Sly” Stallone, here’s what you have to know. Thomas Meehan, St…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:54PMMonday, April 28, 2014
At the Belasco Theatre on Broadway, Neil Patrick Harris is giving the performance of the season in a role that stretches into someone not even remotely related to “Doogie Howser, MD…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:59AMFriday, April 25, 2014
The current revival of Martin McDonagh’s play, its first shot at Broadway after two off/Broadway incarnations in the late 1990s, makes clear one fact. That is that Daniel Radcliffe, th…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:41AMTuesday, April 22, 2014
Jean-François Regnard is not a name that has been on everyone’s lips in recent years. But leave it to comic playwright David Ives to resurrect him and use one of Regnard’s plays…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:00PMMonday, April 21, 2014
As you enter New York’s Circle in the Square, you are faced with the stage floor transformed into a small cabaret in which a jazz trio is entertaining some 30 or 40 people seated at ta…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:57AMI had the feeling, while watching the new Susan Stroman-Woody Allen musical, that it might have been conceived during something like the following conversation: SS: “Woody, I’…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:00AMFriday, April 18, 2014
Moss Hart’s autobiographical “Act One” was an instant best seller when it was published by Random House in 1959, and it has remained in print ever since. The book was cri…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:37AMTuesday, April 15, 2014
It is so extraordinary to see the name of one man above the title of a show, listed as Producer. Unless that man is Cameron Mackintosh, the Florenz Ziegfeld, Harold Prince, David Merrick of …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:16AM 
