Wednesday, March 28, 2012
There’s no one who enjoys clever stagecraft more than I do. But I’m old-school enough to believe that everything that appears on a stage—the acting, the set, any coup de theatre�…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:21AMSaturday, March 24, 2012
Once, the new musical that opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre this week, may be the sweetest show to open on Broadway in years. And I had worried about that. My theatrical t…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:25AMWednesday, March 21, 2012
The best new show in town right now is at Lincoln Center. But I’m not talking about the mighty War Horse, which even after a year is still packing them in at the Vivian Beaumont, or …
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 05:55PMSaturday, March 17, 2012
Jean Genet was the enfant terrible of French writers. And, as a convicted thief and a defiantly openly gay man, he reveled in his status as an outsider. So it was perfectly in characte…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 09:42AMWednesday, March 14, 2012
If you see The Total Bent— which, if you haven’t done, you’ll have to rush to do because it closes this weekend—you may or may not see the same show I saw. For The Total Bent, the la…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:53AMSaturday, March 10, 2012
All great playwrights strive to make the people who see their plays think as well as feel. And with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams now gone, Edward Albee is not only our greatest…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMSaturday, March 3, 2012
Whenever I’ve had the good fortune to talk to young playwrights, Paula Vogel’s name always seems to come up. They’ve all read or seen her work. Most have been inspired by i…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 04:11PMThursday, March 1, 2012
A bumper crop of talented young playwrights has popped up over the last few years. Annie Baker, Tarell Alvin McCraney and Amy Herzog have all had plays produced by major companies, rec…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 09:04AMSaturday, February 25, 2012
Almost everything is new and sleek at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the sprawling, reportedly $70 million, theater space on 42nd Street that starchitect Frank Gehry designed to be th…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 03:58PMWednesday, February 22, 2012
Why write a play unless you have something to say? The story of Jayson Blair, the young African-American reporter whose fabricated and plagiarized stories set-off a scandal…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 09:08AMSaturday, February 18, 2012
Nearly every writer starts off imitating someone else. Then if the novice has talent, he or she eventually develops his or her own unique voice. In the old days, young playwright…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMWednesday, February 15, 2012
Since yesterday was Valentine’s Day, my husband K and I took some time out to celebrate the great good luck of being able to share our love and lives with one another.
But&nbs…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMSaturday, February 11, 2012
The producers of the show now known as The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess announced this week that their controversial remix of the classic musical about lovers in a poor black fishing co…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 05:25PMWednesday, February 8, 2012
Does it make me a heretic to say that I’m not yet sold on “Smash”?
NBC has certainly done everything it can to push its new series about the making of a Broadway musical, including buy…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMSaturday, February 4, 2012
The trouble with seeing the revival of a groundbreaking play is that the ground has already been broken—and has probably been well trod. Trying to recapture the impact of the thing is like…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 04:40PMWednesday, February 1, 2012
One of the big mysteries of the recent theatrical past is why Margaret Edson hasn’t written more plays. Wit, the first—and only one—she wrote was the surprise hit of the 1998-199…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMSaturday, January 28, 2012
People have been going to the theater to see stars since Thespis broke out of the chorus in the 6th century, barnstormed the cities of ancient Greece and gave his name to the acting professi…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMWednesday, January 25, 2012
Every once in awhile, I like to venture outside my theatergoing comfort zone. One of the surest ways for me to do that is to see a play by the comfort-be-damned playwright Young Jean L…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 07:59AMSaturday, January 21, 2012
There are some plays that you out-and-out love. And then there are others that you feel you ought to admire. The latter is the way I feel about Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMWednesday, January 18, 2012
My good friend Andrea recently came to New York for the first time in four years and, of course, she wanted to see a Broadway show. After some research— reading the Times and talking…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 07:59AMWednesday, January 11, 2012
The Soviet Union was the bogeyman that threatened what Superman used to call “The American way” when I was a kid. It lost the gig when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Since the…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 09:59AMSaturday, January 7, 2012
Despite recent balmy temperatures, the winter frost is beginning to settle in. The new year isn't even a week old and two shows have already announced that they’re folding their tents beca…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMWednesday, January 4, 2012
What are they teaching in drama schools and playwriting workshops?
I ask because so many playwrights today seem to think all they need is snappy dialog and then voilà, they hav…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 07:59AMSaturday, December 31, 2011
If you read as many “10 Bests” lists as I do around this time each year, it quickly becomes obvious that the lists say a whole lot more about the people making them than they do about an…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:32AMWednesday, December 28, 2011
Let’s be honest: what I think about Bonnie & Clyde isn’t going to matter one bit because the show has already posted its closing notice and will be moving out of the Gerald Schoenfel…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:59AMSaturday, December 24, 2011
No post today but, instead, heartfelt wishes that you and yours have a holiday filled with love, laughter, the company of good friends... and, maybe, some good theater too.
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:55PMWednesday, December 21, 2011
Somewhere Lorraine Hansberry must be smiling. When A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1959 on, she was the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadw…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:39PMSaturday, December 17, 2011
The shrinks who psychoanalyzed Broadway’s best back in the early ‘60s must have been doozies. How else to explain the fact that two of the most high-profile flops from that period …
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMWednesday, December 14, 2011
The first thing I noticed when my husband K and I walked into the Longacre Theatre to see David Henry Hwang’s new play Ch’ing•lish was the unusually large number of Asian faces in the …
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 06:13PMSaturday, December 10, 2011
No post today. My husband K and I are having our apartment painted. The painters arrive early on Monday morning and so we've spent the last few days packing up things (it's amazi…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:57AMWednesday, December 7, 2011
Repertory companies were once mainstays of the theater but,
with rare exceptions like Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, they’re become
rarities nowadays. It’s just too expensi…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 06:59AM 
