Today is Sunday, December 22, 2024 Broadway Baby Birthdays: Ralph Fiennes Andrew Lippa
What is a play? There are many definitions, of which this one (from the Merriam-Webster website) is a representative example: A composition in verse or prose intended to portray life or char…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:48PMPanama Hattie, the third show in the York Theatre Company's Cole Porter-a-thon, is a mixed bag that is ultimately great fun. Simon Jones, Kylie Kuioka, Stephen Bogardus, Klea Blackhurst, An…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:18PMTired of the news? Depressed by the weird meanness of humans? Maybe you need a mini-vacation. Maybe you need to bask in the weird wonder of humans. Jayson Dominguez and the Wheel of DeathP…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:18AMThe production of Macbeth at the Classic Stage Company (CSC), directed and designed by John Doyle, is a streamlined affair. It runs 1:40 without an intermission; it has a cast of only nine …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:33AMOnce upon a time, Broadway was full of larger-than-life stars (often women) easily identified by their distinctive voices and mannerisms. Gwen Verdon. Carol Channing. Ethel Merman. Elaine St…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:03PMWhen a set of twins (Eve and Evan) press the wrong doorbell on Halloween, they are forced to fight for their lives against a manipulative, mean, and hungry witch. Can they save themselves? C…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 04:24AMI bought my first Ben Bagley record, Irving Berlin Revisited, for 69 cents at a flea market in New Jersey a million years ago. Albums those days cost around four dollars, so it was quite a …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:48PMLaughing Liberally: Make America Laugh Again, an evening of left-leaning stand-up comedy, provides a bubble of shared beliefs, politically correct (and occasionally incorrect) commentary, …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:03AMWhen Keith Hamilton Cobb first took an acting class, he wanted to play Titania from A Midsummer Night's Dream. His acting teacher said no. Cobb continued to make creative suggestions; his t…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:48AMMy latest essay is up at Art Times:The holy grail of New York theater is a rave review in the New York Times. It doesn’t guarantee success (and a pan doesn’t guarantee failure), but a …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:42PMOnce upon a time, not all that long ago, I watched certain political plays with a sense of distance, deeply sympathetic to the characters and deeply grateful that those awful things weren't …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:12PMIn Series A, the first part of Summer Shorts at 59E59, all three plays circle around death. This is a lot for a 90-minute evening.The first show, Interior, is the most fully realized of t…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 01:12AMYa gotta love Annie Golden. She has a sweetness to her, with a wild voice and a slightly goofy vibe. For a creative team to decide to shape a musical around her--even going so far as to name…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:36PMTom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth plays with language and slapstick, presents fascinating mini-versions of two of Shakespeare's masterpieces, vividly depicts the importance of …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:36PMLadyship, the new show by twins Laura Good and Linda Good, exemplifies how difficult it is to write a good musical. There is so much here to like: some beautiful songs, an original story, an…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:42AMIt's hard to know what to write about Illuminati Lizards From Outer Space since I was unable to hear ~70% of the lyrics (100% if more than one person was singing). I don't know if it was wh…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:12PMThis isn't exactly a review because I wasn't able to see the whole show. But here are some thoughts based on what I saw. The rhythms of African-American casual conversation fit beautifully …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:54PMWell, two of us did okay: Liz and Sandra each had 17 correct predictions. I had decided to be iconoclastic, which was a bad idea: 11 correct predictions. THE WINNERS Liz Sandra …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:03AMI have seen enough mediocre-to-bad high-concept productions of Shakespeare's plays to shudder at the very idea of "high-concept." Then along comes Mac Beth, the amazing Red Bull Production …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:06PMI suspect that there is a good play inside Jesse Eisenberg's Happy Talk, currently at The New Group at the Signature Center. The ideas and the situation are intriguing, and there is humor …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:04AMBest MusicalAin’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations Beetlejuice Hadestown The PromTootsie Liz Wollman: Hadestown. Seriously, can we please celebrate a creative team …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:24PMTrisha Lee works as a cleaner in a hospital in Sparkton, Texas. She is a church-going Christian. She adored her late husband. The focus of her life is her 14-year-old daughter Jolene. Or is …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:12PMOne of the themes of the gorgeous and heart-breaking Caroline, or Change, the story of an African-American maid working for a Jewish family in the 1960s South, is that "change come fast, ch…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:54PMWhat an odd show is Lady in the Dark. Consisting largely of three dream sequences, it lacks forward propulsion and is frequently overdone and/or pointless and/or flabby, particularly in the …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:42PMAs you probably already know, in the old days theatre critics wrote their reviews right after seeing the performances. In fact, as the shows ended, the critics ran up the aisles to maximize …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:25PMMy sister once said that, while the worst men are incredibly sleazy, the worst women are incredibly stupid. In the world premiere of The Pain of My Belligerence at Playwrights Horizons, wri…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:49PMMarc Blitzstein's 1937 "play in music," The Cradle Will Rock, uses theatre as a political soapbox. Its scathing depictions of the hypocrisies of capitalism, religion, and other societal icon…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:00PMJohn Webster wrote The White Devil in the early 1600s, and 400 years later it remains relevant and great fun. Red Bull director Louisa Proske underlines its timeliness with a modern-dress p…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:30PMMasterVoices (formerly known as the Collegiate Chorale) has a long history of presenting wonderful evenings of song and theatre, and Night Songs and Love Waltzes fit right in. (There's also …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:09PMFirst, behold the title: If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, sparkling with energy. Next, the structure: playwright Tori Sampson's dynamic, emotional play riffs on folklore, Afric…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:58PMI've had a challenging and satisfying few hours chewing on the ideas and questions posed by Gus Schulenburg's new play Operating Systems, which I saw this afternoon. The description of the…
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