Tuesday, August 11, 2020
“Not to put any pressure on you, but the entire American theater is depending on you to be smart.” Thus spoke Kate Shindle, president of Actors Equity, to the cast of “Godspell,” the…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 03:33PMTuesday, July 28, 2020
Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s “Your Blues Ain’t Sweet Like Mine” premiered at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey in 2016. The cast (with one replacement) re-assembled last week for …
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 09:08PMThursday, July 9, 2020
How’s this for minimalism: Playwright Duncan Macmillan’s instructions for the staging of “Lungs” specifies a bare stage with no scenery, no furniture, no props, no mime and no costum…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 01:42PMFriday, June 19, 2020
Since its premiere in 1949, when it won all six of its Tony Award nominations (and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” has had four Broadway revivals, …
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 04:22PMSunday, May 31, 2020
A column by Ginia Bellafante in the Metropolitan Section of the Sunday May 31 New York Times about last week’s Central Park incident between bird-watcher Christian Cooper, who is black…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 10:06PMTuesday, March 31, 2020
With no Theatre to cover due to this nasty fellow… …I’ll share a few excerpts from “It’s Better Than The Movie,” my work-in-progress anecdotal memoir: July 1956: I was an apprent…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 04:26PMTuesday, March 10, 2020
All ten of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle plays are not created equal, but just as the non-star players on a championship team are essential to its success, so are all the plays in…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 02:45PMWednesday, March 4, 2020
Composer-lyricist Meredith Willson’s 1960 musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” was inspired by an exaggerated tale about the exploits of real-life Titanic survivor Margaret Tobin Brown…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 01:42PMTuesday, February 11, 2020
The first quarter hour of “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice” depicts Bob and Carol at The Institute at Big Sur, a ‘new age-y’ retreat, where the thirty-something couple is converted…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 12:22PMMonday, February 3, 2020
Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982. Loosely based on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” it was originally staged by the off-Broad…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 03:05PMTuesday, January 28, 2020
If, as hypothesized, there are only seven basic plots, it is a sure bet that Shakespeare used them all. (I count four in “Hamlet” alone.) It is no wonder, then, that playwrights through …
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 12:12PMTuesday, January 21, 2020
It seems that one-actor stage presentations have increased in number over the past decade or so. And as critical attention to them has grown with that proliferation, the quality level has ri…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 11:15PMTuesday, January 14, 2020
Many a fine play is waylaid by shoddy acting and/or directing. (Recall your last misbegotten Shakespeare.) Conversely, a lesser theater piece can be enhanced by superior efforts in those cat…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 03:17PMTuesday, January 7, 2020
Ken Ludwig’s 1980s farce “Lend Me a Tenor” revolves around two operatic tenors being mistaken for one another in costume and makeup for the same role. The play is funny…or not, depen…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 03:56PMTuesday, December 31, 2019
Want to be like the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players? Just pick a niche-market art form and become a world-class expert at it. Founded in 1974, NYGASP’s performance-ready repertory …
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 03:45PMMonday, December 16, 2019
A conundrum/problem/challenge: How to describe a Broadway musical that pretty much exceeds familiar superlatives in pretty much all its facets. Well, let’s try, by first thanking Alanis Mo…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 04:30PMThursday, December 5, 2019
If it is true, as often stated, that there are only seven basic plots from which all plays are derived, one of the seven certainly involves conflicted parent-offspring relationships. Think …
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 04:22PMTuesday, November 26, 2019
“Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” comes by that official title honestly. Having gone through several revisions since its debut as a TV special in 1957, the show depends for its su…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 02:23PMMonday, November 11, 2019
The overture to “Guys and Dolls” is unique in that it is scripted as well as orchestrated. It is a street scene collage danced – acted-out really – by the ensemble: floozies, society…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 12:27PMThursday, November 7, 2019
Two recent adaptations of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” both titled simply “Cyrano,” play fast and loose with the 19th-Century French playwright’s masterpiece. At Two Ri…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 10:16PMTuesday, October 29, 2019
Two things to know about “Lily,” the world-premiere play at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch. First, Christopher Daftsios’s play is constructed like an orderly three-part fa…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 10:38AMFriday, October 25, 2019
It is generally conceded that “Period of Adjustment” is Tennessee Williams’s only full-out comedy, but “The Rose Tattoo” could claim a close second, especially as the second half…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 01:48PMMonday, October 14, 2019
How long after seeing some musicals does it take to get a song out of your head? I’m stuck with “NYC” a full week after every “Annie,” and “Goodbye to blueberry pie” after “G…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 04:15PMWednesday, August 21, 2019
You needn’t be familiar with 20th Century Russian – Soviet Union, that is – history in order to appreciate D. W. Gregory’s “Memoirs of a Forgotten Man.” While a sense of that h…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 02:06PMSunday, August 11, 2019
The theme of the mysterious stranger who arrives on the scene and changes people’s lives has long been a staple of American fiction, never more than it was in the 1950s. That decade produc…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 04:54PMFriday, July 26, 2019
Let us clarify up front: the title of Jacqueline Novak’s 90-minute theater piece is not an invocation to prayer. Rather, it refers to a position oft identified with the performance of oral…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 02:55PMThursday, July 18, 2019
The best element of the musical “I Spy a Spy,” running through September 21 at the Theatre at St. Clements, is its music. Sohee Youn’s diverse score is mostly easy-to-take rock and jaz…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 08:09PMMonday, July 1, 2019
The Stratford Festival in Ontario routinely employs the talents of two Theatre geniuses, separated in their endeavors by four centuries. The earlier is, of course, William Shakespeare, aroun…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 12:09AMTuesday, June 4, 2019
The Broadway theater season, which ends in late April, culminates with the American Theatre Wing’s Antoinette Perry Awards – the Tonys. For the 2018-19 season 42 nominators considered 34…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 12:24PMThursday, May 30, 2019
A lot of stuff in plays happens offstage. Not just unsavory events, but things that are easier to tell than to show. (The plot of the play reviewed here last week, “Happy Talk,” turns on…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 02:59PMSunday, May 19, 2019
There is a limit to how much can be revealed about The New Group production of Jesse Eisenberg’s “Happy Talk,” without crossing into spoiler territory. That there are five characters i…
Linked From sceneonstage.com at 05:09PM 
