1,087 stories from Show Showdown
Becky Shaw: I found Becky Shaw's first production unconvincing. Playwright Gina Gionfriddo treated her characters as components of her ideas rather than three-dimensional humans. She gave …
Broadway keeps chugging along, and so do we. Yes, awards are silly, even stupid. Yes, the choice of Pink is bizarre. But predicting winners is fun, and a yearly review of Broadway is always …
We all already know the plot of How My Grandparents Fell In Love from the title. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl isn't interested. Boy plies charm to win over girl. Girl starts to fall i…
Miracle on South Division Street, by Tom Dudzick, will be at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street from April 14 to May 10. I have had the pleasure of seeing Miracle a number of times, includi…
On March 23 and 24th, MasterVoices presented yet another fabulous musical evening.
Actually, make that a particularly fabulous musical evening.Â
Musical Director Ted Sperling juxtaposed F…
In 1962, when the New York Philharmonic moved from Carnegie Hall to the brand-new Lincoln Center, famed Conductor Leopold Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) to play at C…
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" so opens Charles Dickens' novel, "A Tale of Two Cities," and while this blog post has nothing to do with the French Revolution, we would…
The title Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear (written by Alex Lin; directed by Joshua Kahan Brody) is immediately intriguing. Unfortunately, the play does not live up to the title. Yes, th…
Some quick thoughts on shows I didn't review:
Gruesome Playground Injuries:Â Known theatrical truism: If you get a chance to see Kara Young, see Kara Young.
Gruesome Playground Injuries…
The immensely entertaining Gotta Dance!, a creation of American Dance Machine presented by the York Theatre, includes some 17 dance numbers from such classic musicals as A Chorus Line, Sweet…
In a world where the vicious cynics of Succession kept a chunk of the world enthralled for years, you might think that the vicious cynics of the musical Sweet Smell of Success could…
While Richard III has been done 21 times on Broadway, Richard IIÂ has been done only seven, most recently in 1957. (Source: ibdb.com) It is certainly less interesting. Richard III is a gra…
In the early 1930s, Sally Carson, an English writer and dancing teacher, spent time in Germany. She then wrote Crooked Cross, which focuses on the insidious growth of Nazism, first as a nove…
Punch completely blew me away, as it did the people I saw it with. A wild, disaffected young man, Jacob, punches another young man, James, for no particular reason. That one punch kills J…
Torera vividly depicts the life of Elena, the daughter of the housekeeper in the house of a great torero, who desperately wants to be a bullfighter. The son of the torero is Elena's best …
At the start of This Is Government, written by Nina Kissinger and directed by Sarah Norris, three young adults sit in a drab congressional office (nicely realized by Daniel Allen). Against t…
Roughly a third of the way through The Essentialisn't (great title), writer-director-performer Elisa Davis quotes Wikipedia:
"Essentialism is the view that every entity has a set of attribu…
Kelly Bishop writing a memoir--doesn't that sound exciting? The stories she must have! The gossip! The attitude!
Nah. The Third Gilmore Girl is a short, polite, mildly interesting boo…
It's easier to enjoy Twelfth Night, or What You Will, the inaugural production at the newly redone Delacorte, if you accept that it's not exactly Twelfth Night. The show is lively, funny, a …
While the subtitle of this book calls Elaine May "Hollywood's Hidden Genius," it also gives full attention to May's theatrical career, which has included writing, acting, and directing.
May …
It could have been worse. It could have been better. Sandra got a very respectable 18 correct. Liz and I tied with 13. It was a fun Tonys ceremony. Happy New Season!
(BTW, the √s are…
Lenon Hoyte (Aunt Len) was the founder and proprietor of Aunt Len's Doll and Toy Museum in Harlem. She died in 1999. In the amazing Harlem Doll Palace, which just finished a run at the HERE …
In the late 1970s, The Public Theater presented the Yale Rep production of Sganarelle: An Evening of Molière Farces. It was a wonderful evening. One performer was particularly good: Mark…
Jan and Nick, a young married couple, have just moved into an apartment in the East Village. It's 1977, they're in their mid-20s, and they've been together 7 years. Their marriage is happy b…
Adam Szymkowicz's entertaining The Fat Cat Killers combines an incompetent-criminals comedy with a take-down of capitalism. Rather than building on or complementing each other, the two co…
