Saturday, November 19, 2011
More than just a joyous musical revue, "Cotton Club Parade" is permeated with a sense of legacy, of hometown performers honoring a fabulous past while creating their own ecstatic present.
SOURCE: Backstage at 06:19AMThursday, November 17, 2011
Director Richard Eyre's insistence on naturalistic acting rooted in emotional truth pretty much does the current Broadway production of Noël Coward's archly delirious comedy in.
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:00AMTuesday, November 15, 2011
I was looking forward to composer Nico Muhly and librettist Stephen Karam's new opera, so it's with great disappointment that I have to report that it's an awfully wan piece of work.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:55AMMonday, November 14, 2011
The New Group brings downtown provocateur Thomas Bradshaw to the world of uptown theater, but his peculiar mix of sincerity and satire is no more persuasive here than it was Off-Off-Broadw…
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:00AMThursday, November 10, 2011
Is there anyone else in show business today who can levitate an audience the way Hugh Jackman is doing right now in his not-exactly-one-man musical show at the Broadhurst Theatre?
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:00AMWednesday, November 9, 2011
Husband-and-wife team Jim and Ruth Bauer's exhilarating experimental musical examining the lives and loves of four European bohemian friends during the first half of the 20th century bloom…
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:00AMThis 1956 Ethel Merman vehicle has a new star in the wonderful Elizabeth Loos, who delivers pure delight as she sturdily supports this rather flimsy, cut-rate show on her highly capable sh…
SOURCE: Backstage at 06:32AMSunday, November 6, 2011
Michael John LaChiusa has written a strong score for this musical about the first woman to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, a role in which Mary Testa triumphs.
SOURCE: Backstage at 08:00AMThursday, November 3, 2011
With Rachel Griffiths and Judith Light stepping seamlessly into the tight five-person ensemble, Jon Robin Baitz's compelling family drama remains both grandly entertaining and deeply perce…
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:30AMThe cabaret icon's sunny disposition should be an ideal match for Jerry Herman's songs, but her startling inability to connect with lyrics left me unable to join in the audience's enthusia…
SOURCE: Backstage at 06:42AMWednesday, November 2, 2011
Though intelligent and well-intentioned, Andrew Hinderaker's new play on the subject of male suicide is bedeviled by an unbelievable premise and gerrymandered playwriting.
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:00AMSunday, October 30, 2011
Tennessee Williams' absurdist meditation on mortality, loneliness, and the general triviality of human existence, is in director Jonathan Warman's hands an outrageously entertaining grote…
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:34AMSaturday, October 29, 2011
Musicals Tonight!'s concert staging of this 1962 Mel Brooks–Charles Strouse–Lee Adams Broadway flop has a few moments but is too shaky, unfocused, poorly adapted, and woefully …
SOURCE: Backstage at 03:58AMThursday, October 27, 2011
David Henry Hwang's latest play is a smart and uproarious comedy examining the difficulties in bridging the different cultures of contemporary China and America.
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:30AMTuesday, October 25, 2011
This "new American musical" from Charles Strouse and Leslie Lee about Martin Luther King Jr.'s formative years neglects to tell us that it is really a piece of reworked children's theater.
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:01AMFriday, October 21, 2011
Look out, Elaine Stritch: You've got competition for the most glamorous golden-years gams in town, and French chanteuse Yvonne Constant is currently flashing them with style at the Metropo…
SOURCE: Backstage at 05:03AMThursday, September 29, 2011
There are few theatrical sights more dispiriting than watching a group of seriously talented, highly professional actors plowing their way through a rankly amateur show.
SOURCE: Backstage at 04:49AMTuesday, September 27, 2011
If you have any doubt about the magnitude of the loss we suffered when playwright Lanford Wilson died this past March, this heart-stopping Keen Company production makes it all too abundant…
SOURCE: Backstage at 08:00AMFearless, whip-smart, and hyperarticulate, Jeff Talbott's incendiary political comedy-drama asks hard questions about our supposedly post-racial world and will likely make audiences uncomf…
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:00AMMonday, September 26, 2011
Paper Mill Playhouse deserves great credit for turning this troubled property into something that could have a long life. There's still work to do, but I smell a hit.
SOURCE: Backstage at 04:56AMSunday, September 25, 2011
Even if the Pearl Theatre Company doesn't quite sound all the notes of Eugene Ionesco's "anti-play" that laments the limits of language, it's well worth your time and attention.
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:30AMFriday, September 23, 2011
Charles A. Taylor's 1903 melodrama is very much a compendium of clichés, but Alex Roe's impish direction and a strong cast make it fly by in a breeze of entertainment.
SOURCE: Backstage at 08:00AMThursday, September 22, 2011
Actor-author Troy Deutsch is clearly a font of talent, even if his two-hander about a pair of estranged and disaffected high school seniors in rural Minnesota is full of incompletely reali…
SOURCE: Backstage at 08:00AMThursday, September 15, 2011
In an interview, playwright Dan Klores notes that his maiden effort, last season's "Little Doc," was "a disaster" and "a great learning experience." I'd say the learning curve was not a sh…
SOURCE: Backstage at 08:00AMWednesday, September 14, 2011
Rita Gardner's tribute to the venue that nurtured her cuts its nostalgia with a lightly acerbic wit and mint-fresh song stylings, making for a marvelous hour.
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:22AMMonday, September 12, 2011
Director Eric Schaeffer deserves credit for working hard to address the numerous problems with his Kennedy Center production of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's towering musical classi…
SOURCE: Backstage at 08:00AMMonday, August 29, 2011
With this powerful and original work, director Jonathan Bank and his Mint Theater Company strengthen their case for Teresa Deevy as a formidable and too-long-lost voice in Irish theater.
SOURCE: Backstage at 07:00AMTuesday, August 23, 2011
You've got to hand it to him: Chris Phillips has nerve. It's not everybody who would put his own versions of iconic Tennessee Williams characters on stage in serious dramatic scenes.
SOURCE: Backstage at 04:43AMMonday, August 22, 2011
Author-performer Tayo Aluko's one-man show about the great Paul Robeson is at its best when it is being most political, but it's less successful as a portrait of the artist.
SOURCE: Backstage at 06:07AMDirected with sensitivity and intelligence by playwright David Auburn and acted to a fare-thee-well by a dynamite cast of six, Tennessee Williams' rarely produced foray into situation come…
SOURCE: Backstage at 02:49AMSaturday, August 20, 2011
I haven't the foggiest idea of what author-actor Peter Welch thinks he's up to with this two-hander, but as Noël Coward once sang, 90 minutes is a long, long time.
SOURCE: Backstage at 12:00PM 
