All articles from Broadway & Me
It is such a relief to have discovered that the young playwright Bubba Weiler is not a one-show wonder. I was knocked out by his debut Well, I'll Let You Go when I saw it last year (click he…
The love-hate relationship so many of us have with technology in general and AI in particular purports to be the main subject of Andrew Stein’s Disruption, which opened this week at the Pe…
Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, the new musical now playing downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, is a patchwork quilt of other musicals: one swatch a revenge plot like the…
To celebrate the 20(!) summer reading lists I’ve posted over the years, I’m highlighting what I’ve most enjoyed about putting them together: finding, reading and sharing novels and sho…
Happy Semiquincentennial Weekend! Or at least I hope it is being so for you. This is a stranger summer than usual for me. My building has scheduled work to be done on our terraces and so…
Maybe it’s because I live with a musician but ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll, the new play with music by Eisa Davis that opened this week at the Vineyard Theatre, struck a deeper cho…
Shows get revived for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they were under appreciated in the past. Or they may have something particularly relevant to say about current events. A director may have…
One of the things we theater obsessives love to do is argue about which is the greatest American play. I'm a Tennessee Williams stan and so I always try to get A Streetcar Named Desire into …
Just about everyone"and here I mean most of the critics"seems to have something bad to say about Dog Day Afternoon, the new Stephen Adly Guirgis adaptation of the 1975 movie about a bank …
Most of the reviews for Cold War Choir Practice devote most of their word count to laying out its multi-pronged plot which includes Soviet spies, former Black Panthers, Regan-era conserva…
Ever since Sophocles put the fall of the House of Oedipus onstage, the theatrical canon has been chock-a-block with unhappy families. And that makes sense because they make for good drama. B…
Maybe it's the current dystopic state of the world but I had a hard time with Bug, the revival of Tracy Letts' 1996 play that opened this month at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Fried…
As usual, I'm late with a list of the shows I most enjoyed in 2025 but I'm going to share it anyway and since I am late, I'm also going to cut right to the chase. There were musicals I liked…
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 ...from me and some of our mutual friends:
Getting others to see the world in a certain way and then convincing them to do almost anything to preserve that point of view requires a toolbox of skills that include charisma and a ferven…
Happy Thanksgiving!Â
It's been a crazy month. An avalanche of shows have been opening both on and off Broadway. I've seen 20 of them over the past four weeks"some good, some just OK, a fe…
The only thing small about Kyoto, the latest import from Britain that opened this week at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse theater, is its one-word title. Everything else is outsized: the …
One-person shows are popping up everywhere. And it makes sense that they should. They're comparatively cheap to put on since by definitiion there's only one performer to pay and the cost…
Every once in a while I see a show that is filled with smart ideas, and that is interestingly directed and well-performed and yet still leaves me cold. Over the past week or so I saw two …
Theater lovers have been celebrating the 10th anniversary of Hamilton this year, and well we should. Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical about the Founding Fathers made seeing musicals cool again, …
Once again I seem to be late to the party. Other bloggers, critics and influencers have been putting out lists of the things they most want to see in this new theater season since mid-August…
Well, here we are: it's Labor Day Weekend already. And every year since I started writing here, I've marked this unofficial end of summer"and the real start of the fall theater season"wi…
The New York Times recently published a fancy interactive list of what it considers to be "The Best Movies of the 21st Century."Â The editors say they assembled the list by asking more th…
It's often said that imitation is the highest form of flattery but sometimes it's just a knock-off of something more original. And I'm afraid the latter seems to be the case with Ginger Twin…
We've already had our first heat waves of the season"the temperature hit 101° in Central Park this past week!"which is a sure sign that summer is here. But for almost 20 years now, the su…
In most tellings of the myth about the ill-fated love story between Orpheus and Eurydice that famously has him going to the underworld to bring her back from the dead, he gets top billing an…
This is a slightly different post than I use write but maybe like me, you have wondered why the nominators for so many different theater awards seem to love the actress Kara Young so much th…
Several years ago, I reported a piece on the Smithsonian's "American Popular Song" album, which was intended to be a collection of the best rendition of each song in the Great American Songb…
A new genre has been developing over the past few years, one that in tribute to the post-war change in British theater I've been calling "angry young women plays."Â Â
These new works mo…
The 2024-2025 theater season ends on Sunday with the dual openings of the musicals Dead Outlaw and Real Women Have Curves. And I'm exhausted. But it's the kind of good exhaustion that com…
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The ever present tension between art and commerce moves centerstage in three recently opened off-Broadway productions"Irishtown at the Irish Repertory Theatre, I'm Assuming You Kn…
Bob Martin burst onto the Broadway scene back in 2006 with The Drowsy Chaperone, a loving send-up of Broadway musicals that ran for 674 performances, was nominated for 13 Tony awards and won…
As everyone knows, big name movie and TV stars have been invading Broadway this spring (click here for a rundown of who is doing what) and theatergoers are paying big bucks for the bragging …
Even though these are crazy times, I don't know how I let last week's anniversary of Broadway & Me slip by. I started writing here on Feb. 14, 2007, which means it's now been 18 years (a…
A thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts is prominently displayed on the cover of the program for My Man Kono, the new show that Pan Asian Repertory Theatre opened this week at A.R…
History, they say, is written by the winners and the winners in Jordan Harrison's thought-provoking new play The Antiquities are the artificial intelligence entities that the play imagines w…
When the Palestinian playwright Khawla Ibraheem began working on her one-woman show A Knock on the Roof a decade ago, it was a 10-minute monologue. Now the show, which is currently playin…
Some theater-goers lust after seeing big-name stars and there will be plenty of them for those folks to see in the upcoming spring season, from theater-grown ones like Idina Menzel in Redwoo…
It's that time of year when people like me who are lucky enough to see lots of shows are supposed to look back and draw up a list of the ones we consider to have been the best. But that's al…
Wishing you a theatrically merry little Christmas…
Leslye Headland has developed a following for her acclaimed Netflix series "Russian Doll" and for "The Acolyte," the Disney Channel's latest installment of the "Star Wars" saga. And if Cult …
There are lots of marquee-names in Shit. Meet. Fan., the naughtily-titled comedy that is currently running at MCC Theater. But the show's true star may be its set, a duplex apartment that sc…
As everyone knows, musicals are the mainstays of Broadway and four big ones opened over the last two weeks. But I've been so busy running out to see them"and seeing other shows too (if you h…
People have been trying to put Louis Armstrong's life onstage ever since that master jazzman died in 1971. My BFF Phil took me to a backers' audition for one attempt to build a musical aroun…
Hurricanes have wiped out entire communities along the west coast of Florida. Wildfires are burning up over 400,000 acres in northern California. Drought has pushed water levels in the Missi…
You're unlikely to find anyone who doesn't have a strong opinion about Sunset Blvd., the latest revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton's musical adaptation of Bill…
"RuPaul's Drag Race" is now in its 16th season and its Emmy-winning celebration of gay and trans culture has spawned a half dozen spin-offs and scores of international versions. And now its …
This October has turned out to be a crazy time for those of us trying to keep up with all the fall show openings. I'm currently scheduled to see more than a dozen of them over just the next …
It kind of makes sense that so many people are drawing comparisons betweenThe Hills of California, the new Jez Butterworth play that opened this week at the Broadhurst Theatre; and Gypsy, th…
