Tuesday, October 2, 2018
When Bob Dylan’s management team first approached playwright Conor McPherson to create a theater piece using Dylan’s songs, the Irish playwright didn’t exactly leap at the …
SOURCE: Variety at 01:09PM“Tootsie,” a jaunty new stage musical adaptation of the 1982 movie comedy that starred Dustin Hoffman, has a real degree of currency to it, and it’s not because book writer Robert Horn…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:54AMMonday, October 1, 2018
Trailing clouds of glory from runs at London’s Old Vic and on the West End, Conor McPherson’s Depression-era treatment of classic Bob Dylan material vividly transforms individual songs i…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:36PMThursday, September 27, 2018
“I am a fish and snooker is my sea,” says Dylan Spokes, an aspiring marlin of a player in “The Nap,” the delightfully loopy comedy by the “One Man, Two Guvnors” playwright Richar…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:06PMThe personal is political. Politics is personal. Few plays understand either statement as fully as “Antony and Cleopatra.” In showing us the private lives of politicians — the grea…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:09PMTuesday, September 25, 2018
Love the boots! The sexy black ones that Tony winner Janet McTeer (“Sorry For Your Loss,” “Ozark”) dons to play the actress Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Hamlet are …
SOURCE: Variety at 10:12PMThursday, September 20, 2018
With the midterm elections looming, Sharr White’s bruising political drama about real-life machine politics in 1977 Albany lands at an opportune moment to educate us on how the real pros u…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:18PMEdouard Louis’ childhood memoir “The End of Eddy” — “an autobiographical novel” — has become an international bestseller, his recollections of growing up gay in a gray,…
SOURCE: Variety at 12:14PMWednesday, September 19, 2018
The late actress Sarah Bernhardt shocked theatergoers when she decided to play the title character in “Hamlet” more than a century ago. Janet McTeer, the actress who currently pl…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:28AMWednesday, September 12, 2018
What’s the collective noun for a group of Betties? Based on Jen Silverman’s play, “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties,” perhaps “a rage of Betties” would suit. When these five…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:18PMTuesday, September 4, 2018
Andy Karl knows a thing or two about Broadway musicals based on movies after playing the UPS guy in “Legally Blonde,” the Italian Stallion himself in “Rocky,” and the…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:18PMTuesday, August 21, 2018
It’s one thing to be told that the Off Broadway musical “Be More Chill” is a viral hit on the internet. It’s quite another to experience the hype live and in the room…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:36PMEvery night, just as Summer: The Donna Summer Musical is ending, the party’s just beginning. That’s how it feels, anyway, when the rousing curtain call — a buoyant, full-cast rendition…
SOURCE: Broadway Direct at 07:11AMMonday, August 20, 2018
It was Monday morning in a Manhattan recording studio, and the cast of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical knew they’d made magic. The performers and musicians had all gathered on their first…
SOURCE: Broadway Direct at 04:59PMThursday, August 16, 2018
When the 1990 movie comedy “Pretty Woman” catapulted Julia Roberts to stardom, it was widely reported that Disney and late director Garry Marshall had tweaked J.F. Lawton’s downbeat pr…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:06PMMonday, August 13, 2018
Producer Ken Davenport has racked up an impressive collection of Tony Award nominations (and a couple of wins) for shows like “Once on This Island,” “Kinky Boots,” and “Spring Awak…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:06PMThursday, August 9, 2018
Technology plays a major role onstage in “Be More Chill,” the high school-set musical that uses a brain altering super-computer — masquerading as a popularity drug —…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:18PMTuesday, August 7, 2018
Since starting his tenure on “So You Think You Can Dance” 10 seasons ago, Spencer Liff has choreographed Broadway productions from “Falsettos” to “Hedwig and th…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:24PMMonday, August 6, 2018
Yes they can-can — they can transform Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 absinthe-tinged fantasia “Moulin Rouge!” into a socko stage spectacular. The story’s been strengthened in this splashy…
SOURCE: Variety at 01:24PMFriday, August 3, 2018
From his unhinged Hamlet to a sympathetic Richard III, Mark Rylance has always been a great re-inventor of Shakespeare’s key roles. Now, returning to the Globe in “Othello” after a few…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:01AMTuesday, July 31, 2018
Kwame Kwei-Armah and Shaina Taub’s musicalized “Twelfth Night” is the kind of outdoor summer theater that transcends bad weather. Even if the skies crackle with lightning and showers…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:48PMMonday, July 30, 2018
This might sound familiar to film buffs: A lying and philandering U.S. president suffers a debilitating stroke and is furtively replaced by a body double, who then foils the plot by honoring…
SOURCE: Variety at 05:48PMThursday, July 26, 2018
It’s really hard to laugh when somebody’s holding a gun to your head. That’s the way this Go-Go’s feels in “Head Over Heels,” an over-written, over-designed, and generall…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:42PMWednesday, July 25, 2018
Zachary Quinto’s got a big role on his bucket list — and it’s in a stage musical. Listen to this week’s podcast for free below and at Apple Podcasts: On the latest episo…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:15PMTuesday, July 24, 2018
Here are lyrics from a song in the new musical “This Ain’t No Disco” that creatives Stephen Trask (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) and Peter Yanowitz hope will make us yearn for the g…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:24PMMonday, July 23, 2018
In “Straight White Men,” Young Jean Lee’s cutting but deeply humane satire about straight white male privilege and pain, Armie Hammer, Josh Charles and, in an especially heart-…
SOURCE: Variety at 11:37PMThursday, July 19, 2018
Fifty years after his play “Forty Years On,” Alan Bennett is still pining for the England of old. Just as his first play lamented the slipping standards of an old public school and, by e…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:38PMFriday, July 13, 2018
In Judaism, death is followed by the sitting of shiva. For seven days, seated mourners reflect on their loss. The ritual recurs throughout “The Lehman Trilogy,” playwright Steffano Massi…
SOURCE: Variety at 03:46PMThursday, July 12, 2018
In “Mary Page Marlowe,” Tracy Letts, the Tony-winning actor (“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) and Pulitzer and Tony-winning playwright (“August: Osage C…
SOURCE: Variety at 10:18PMThursday, July 5, 2018
Ashes to ashes, Dusty to Dusty. Almost 20 years after her death, the loss of Dusty Springfield still stings on these shores. Sniffles ring out at the end of Jonathan Harvey’s jukebox music…
SOURCE: Variety at 09:56AMTuesday, July 3, 2018
“Imperium” builds Rome in a day. Robert Harris’ trilogy of novels charts the city’s slide from a great civilization to a grim imperial power, as democracy buckles and dictatorship di…
SOURCE: Variety at 02:48PM 
