Hadestown The Musical (pro-shot movie release)
What sheer joy! The people who put together the pro-shot of Hadestown got pretty much everything right. They captured the full experience of Hadestown, of course with the usual video vs li…
What sheer joy! The people who put together the pro-shot of Hadestown got pretty much everything right. They captured the full experience of Hadestown, of course with the usual video vs li…
I saw Fallen Angels on Broadway and then watched it on BroadwayHD, which I joined just to see it. (I wonder how many new subscribers they got due to Fallen Angels.)Fallen Angels is silly a…
The romance at the center of the Flux Theatre Ensemble's new show Fear & Wonder juggles coming-of-age issues, religion, homophobia, hypocrisy, and deep, deep love in a story that is th…
This year we acquitted ourselves quite nicely. Liz: 17 Sandra: 18Wendy: 22 Wendy Liz Sandra Best Play: Liberation, Bess Wohl √ …
Becky Shaw: I found Becky Shaw's first production unconvincing. Playwright Gina Gionfriddo treated her characters as components of her ideas rather than three-dimensional humans. She gave …
Broadway keeps chugging along, and so do we. Yes, awards are silly, even stupid. Yes, the choice of Pink is bizarre. But predicting winners is fun, and a yearly review of Broadway is always …
We all already know the plot of How My Grandparents Fell In Love from the title. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl isn't interested. Boy plies charm to win over girl. Girl starts to fall i…
Miracle on South Division Street, by Tom Dudzick, will be at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street from April 14 to May 10. I have had the pleasure of seeing Miracle a number of times, includi…
On March 23 and 24th, MasterVoices presented yet another fabulous musical evening. Actually, make that a particularly fabulous musical evening. Musical Director Ted Sperling juxtaposed F…
In 1962, when the New York Philharmonic moved from Carnegie Hall to the brand-new Lincoln Center, famed Conductor Leopold Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) to play at C…
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" so opens Charles Dickens' novel, "A Tale of Two Cities," and while this blog post has nothing to do with the French Revolution, we would…
The title Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear (written by Alex Lin; directed by Joshua Kahan Brody) is immediately intriguing. Unfortunately, the play does not live up to the title. Yes, th…
Some quick thoughts on shows I didn't review: Gruesome Playground Injuries:Â Known theatrical truism: If you get a chance to see Kara Young, see Kara Young. Gruesome Playground Injuries…
The immensely entertaining Gotta Dance!, a creation of American Dance Machine presented by the York Theatre, includes some 17 dance numbers from such classic musicals as A Chorus Line, Sweet…
In a world where the vicious cynics of Succession kept a chunk of the world enthralled for years, you might think that the vicious cynics of the musical Sweet Smell of Success could…
While Richard III has been done 21 times on Broadway, Richard IIÂ has been done only seven, most recently in 1957. (Source: ibdb.com) It is certainly less interesting. Richard III is a gra…
In the early 1930s, Sally Carson, an English writer and dancing teacher, spent time in Germany. She then wrote Crooked Cross, which focuses on the insidious growth of Nazism, first as a nove…
Punch completely blew me away, as it did the people I saw it with. A wild, disaffected young man, Jacob, punches another young man, James, for no particular reason. That one punch kills J…
Torera vividly depicts the life of Elena, the daughter of the housekeeper in the house of a great torero, who desperately wants to be a bullfighter. The son of the torero is Elena's best …
At the start of This Is Government, written by Nina Kissinger and directed by Sarah Norris, three young adults sit in a drab congressional office (nicely realized by Daniel Allen). Against t…
Roughly a third of the way through The Essentialisn't (great title), writer-director-performer Elisa Davis quotes Wikipedia: "Essentialism is the view that every entity has a set of attribu…
Kelly Bishop writing a memoir--doesn't that sound exciting? The stories she must have! The gossip! The attitude! Nah. The Third Gilmore Girl is a short, polite, mildly interesting boo…
It's easier to enjoy Twelfth Night, or What You Will, the inaugural production at the newly redone Delacorte, if you accept that it's not exactly Twelfth Night. The show is lively, funny, a …
While the subtitle of this book calls Elaine May "Hollywood's Hidden Genius," it also gives full attention to May's theatrical career, which has included writing, acting, and directing. May …
It could have been worse. It could have been better. Sandra got a very respectable 18 correct. Liz and I tied with 13. It was a fun Tonys ceremony. Happy New Season! (BTW, the √s are…
Lenon Hoyte (Aunt Len) was the founder and proprietor of Aunt Len's Doll and Toy Museum in Harlem. She died in 1999. In the amazing Harlem Doll Palace, which just finished a run at the HERE …
In the late 1970s, The Public Theater presented the Yale Rep production of Sganarelle: An Evening of Molière Farces. It was a wonderful evening. One performer was particularly good: Mark…
Jan and Nick, a young married couple, have just moved into an apartment in the East Village. It's 1977, they're in their mid-20s, and they've been together 7 years. Their marriage is happy b…
Adam Szymkowicz's entertaining The Fat Cat Killers combines an incompetent-criminals comedy with a take-down of capitalism. Rather than building on or complementing each other, the two co…
Although we have not previously shown great acuity in Tony prediction, here we are again. Hope springs eternal! This year's list of Tony nominees reveals a healthy, exciting season. Looking …
From the press release for We Do The Same Thing Every Week: Dick and Jane are bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon. A six-foot tall cat shows up, and hijinks ensue. Later, elsewhere, Dick and J…
Caryl Churchill is not in love with the sound of her own voice. (Many playwrights are, along with many people in every walk of life.) While Churchill has a tremendous amount to say, her writ…
That the American justice system is worse than broken--dangerous, dishonest, racist--is not news. Some innocent people have been coerced into confessing, others have accepted plea bargains r…
I am not a fan of Arthur Miller's. But I like to revisit works to see if I've missed something. Having recently reread Death of a Salesman and seen the The Village Theater Group pro…
In Garside's Career, written by Harold Brighouse before the first World War, Peter Garside is a skilled mechanic and avid Union member in 1914 Midlanton, England. He has just completed a uni…
The delightful NAATCO-Play on Shakespeare all-femme, all-Asian-American production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline only runs through Feb. 15. If you are a fan of first-class theatre that is…
Mrs. Loman, Barbara Cassady's sequel to Death of a Salesman, starts right after Willy's funeral. Linda Loman, her sons Biff and Happy, and next door neighbor Charley and his son Bernard gath…
When the curtain came down on Act 1 of Gypsy, my friend Susan said, "She's so wrong and she's so good." Excellent summation! I was one of those who greeted Audra's casting with, she's miscas…
Based on both the reviews and word of mouth, I went into Target Margin's "re-envisioning" of Show Boat (here called Show/Boat: A River) with low expectations. Sadly, it lived down to them.Â…
A built-in weakness in some comedies of ideas is that one side of an argument may simply be right. As someone who believes strongly in vaccines, I thought Eureka Day might have to wrestle…
 I reviewed Women Writing Musicals on Talkin' Broadway. One of the stranger parts of aging is watching time go from "now" to "then" to "retro" to "no one on Jeopardy knows the answer."…
In the new book Women Writing Musicals, Jennifer Ashley Tepper and Applause Theatre & Cinema Books rescue one important part of theatre history: women writing musicals. And it is full of jui…
Last month I had the pleasure of attending the TRU (Theater Resources Unlimited) benefit. The TRU mission: TRU was formed to promote a spirit of cooperation and support within the general t…
Last week, the wonderful MasterVoices presented the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band. In 1927, its book, about a war over cheese tariffs, was written by George F. Kaufman with a pretty sa…
Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) wrote 30 plays, a few of which were produced on Broadway, along with screenplays and poetry. Nowadays he is known--when he is known at all--for having written Green Gr…
What is honor? That's a particularly relevant question as we head into the election. Is honor reputation? Or is it something between a person and herself? What value does honor have? Do most…
The American Classical Orchestra (ACO), described by its founder/conductor as "our labor of love," utilizes period instruments to better produce classical pieces as the composers composed th…
Annette is winning at life. She has just negotiated a major promotion; her boyfriend Charles is attractive, considerate, and wealthy; their major life challenge is whether to stay in the Upp…
One is not supposed to focus so much on trees that you miss the forest, right? I get that. But what if they're really big, ugly, focus-grabbing trees? I suspect that Client-Attorney…
There's a little gem playing at the Wild Project through September 28th. One set, 80 minutes, with terrific and compassionate writing (Matthew Freeman), directing (Jessi D. Hill), and acting…