Tuesday, May 28, 2013
A phoenix has risen on Broadway. Out of the ashes of a very pleasant TV Special by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, once thought of as enchanting, but now considered something of …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:08AMThursday, May 16, 2013
In 1949 Clifford Odets, after years of cashing in on his early successes with the Group Theatre, returned to Broadway with The Big Knife, which was to be his bitter comment on the price he …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:47PMTuesday, May 14, 2013
Cicely Tyson now joins Laurette Taylor in the small pantheon of actresses who have given us monumental performances onstage; Ms. Taylor of course, for her Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:57AMTuesday, May 7, 2013
I feel I’ve had to do almost as much research as the actors who perform in the Lincoln Center Theatre’s production of Richard Nelson’s Nikolai and the Others. That’s …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:25AMMonday, April 29, 2013
Playwright Jonathan Tolins has managed to take material that could have inspired a campy gay play limited in its appeal to those whose idea of first class entertainment is a Saturday night s…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:41AMThursday, April 25, 2013
The Divine Miss M has finally, after forty years, found her way to a Broadway stage in a legit play which could be called The Divine Miss M, but isn’t, because that title was already…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:37AMLyle Kessler’s career has been pretty well defined by an early play of his, Orphans. There have been other plays, but nothing that created the stir that this one did. It’s bee…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:38AMMonday, April 22, 2013
Douglas Carter Beane, prolific playwright with a comic twist, brought Broadway a revised book to Cinderella just weeks ago, and here he is again with an original play about another kind of…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:08AMThursday, April 18, 2013
Richard Greenberg is a prolific playwright whose Take Me Out established him some years ago as a welcome new voice. That play about the locker room aspects of a baseball team and the coming …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:18AMMonday, April 8, 2013
The Golden Age of musicals on Broadway has been over for several years now. I think on that we are all agreed (by “all” I mean those of us who were around to revel in it, to appr…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:05AMWednesday, April 3, 2013
Anita Loos, the charming and talented screenplay writer and novelist, was having a sort of mid life crisis in her career and in her personal life in 1946. Ms. Loos was 58 years old at the …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:53AMFriday, March 29, 2013
I knew Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster were featured in this musical, but the rest of the cast were not familiar to me. I knew Neil Pepe, the artistic head of the off Broadway Atlantic…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:32AMWednesday, March 27, 2013
For reasons of his own, Jonathan Bank, the artistic director of the very useful Mint Theatre, seems determined to single-handedly deliver the playwright Teresa Deevy from oblivion to renewe…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:53AMMonday, March 11, 2013
Picture yourself stuck in a run down 100 seat movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts in the summer of 2012. You are hidden from view, and you cannot speak, so for 3 hours you must …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:58AMMonday, February 11, 2013
Twenty years ago, the writer David Ives arrived on the New York theatre scene with a bang when his evening of short comic plays opened off Broadway, where they remained for some 600 plus per…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:11AMFriday, January 25, 2013
This musical pastiche, put together with bits and pieces of a dozen old musical comedies, opened 9 months ago at the Imperial on Broadway, and it’s very much still there, doing busines…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:18AMFriday, January 18, 2013
It was interesting to see William Inge’s Picnic and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on successive nights. Both first arrived on Broadway in the mid-fifties, both rece…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:48AMTuesday, January 15, 2013
William Inge is one of those mid-20th century American playwrights who started late (he was 30 when his first play, Come Back, Little Sheba arrived on Broadway). It was a success, and ulti…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:06AMSaturday, December 29, 2012
As we approach the fiscal cliff (by the time you read this, we might be over the edge), as we battle the sleet and the hail and the snow and the rain, there is one oasis that puts all that u…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:15AMMonday, December 17, 2012
Every now and then Terrence McNally, one of America’s prized and prolific playwrights, having been off the boards for a season or two, sits down to write a play that isn’t about …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:56AMFriday, December 14, 2012
Edward Albee’s master work has always been treated with great reverence, and is always talked about in hushed tones, indicating it is profound and probing in ways that few other domest…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:40AMMonday, December 10, 2012
The Heiress is one of those well made plays from the 1940s that takes its time to tell its absorbing story of Catherine Sloper, a lady living a very dull life in her father’s house on …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:17AMFriday, December 7, 2012
Daniel Swee is casting director for Lincoln Center Theatre and for the revival of Golden Boy at the Belasco on Broadway, he has helped the management and director Bartlett Sher assemble a st…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:45AMWednesday, December 5, 2012
It’s taken seven years to bring John LaChiusa and Sibylle Pearson’s musical, based on Edna Ferber’s novel, to fruition. The Dallas Theatre Center has presented it, so h…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:38AMMonday, November 26, 2012
Here we have another dysfunctional family just in time for the holiday season. This one, in the play with the title I have trouble remembering, is by a gifted writer named Nick Payne. His …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:44AMTuesday, November 20, 2012
Kathie Lee Gifford as book writer, lyricist and part time composer, has spent twelve years creating material, polishing it, pruning it, having a look at it in two regional productions, [Si…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:28AMSunday, November 18, 2012
You don’t have to be a Chekhovophile to enjoy Christopher Durang’s riff on everything Anton Chekhov ever wrote, but it helps. This master parodist and satirist has been away from…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:57AMFriday, November 16, 2012
Amanda Green and Lin-Manuel Miranda ought to sue. I have no idea whether or not their lyrics are first rate because I still haven’t heard them, even though I was there at a recent …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:32AMThursday, November 15, 2012
This musical, based on Charles’ Dickens final, unfinished novel, enjoyed a run of over 600 performances in 1986-7 but has only popped up here and there intermittently these past 25 yea…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:42AMTuesday, November 13, 2012
The new play, Grace, at the Cort on Broadway, is a revelation. For starters, it makes it clear that Paul Rudd is far more than a dimple and a charming smile. The lad can act, and though he&#…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:47AMMonday, November 12, 2012
The Roundabout is offering us some very large scale productions this season, and Cyrano de Bergerac at the American Airlines Theatre is certainly one of them. Edmond Rostand wrote it in 1897…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:36PM 
