Monday, May 25, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Good question!Forgive me Blogger, for I have sinned. It has been two years since my last post.Actually I feel compelled to finally add something since the sight of that random April 2013 ent…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:46AMTuesday, April 2, 2013
Terry Teachout reflects on the latest TCG list of Top Ten Plays Produced in American nonprofit theatres:
it's easy to forget that the latter-day dominance of the small-cast
play is a fair…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:55AMTuesday, March 5, 2013
Sorry no blogging this past weekend. But I did write a mini-review of the Pearl's Henry IV for Time Out. (Warning: contains spoilers from 1597!)
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:41AMSunday, February 24, 2013
Brecht's Epic He/She: Taylor Mac as Shin Te and Shui Ta.
Taylor Mac is giving the performance of the year down at La MaMa in The Good Person of Szechwan. And unfortunately most of you will…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:44PMSunday, February 17, 2013
You thought attending the theatre was entertainment? It's hard work! But if you abide by the following proscriptions, you will make playgoing pleasanter for you and all around you.
First, d…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:56AMSunday, February 10, 2013
If I told you that Ethan Hawke was enlisting playwright friend Jonathan Marc Sherman to adapt Brecht's Baal for him to star in (and direct) so he could sport a Billy Idol 'do, wheeze aw…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:27PMSunday, February 3, 2013
If only the current Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof featured something as jarring and surprising as a "Ghost Skipper" floating in and out of the background. Despite the understanda…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 02:58PMWell that was some "hiatus," wasn't it? Where were we...
For the few of you that might still be tuning in, welcome back! Sorry for the prolonged, um, "intermission." My excuse is simp…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:04PMTuesday, August 7, 2012
As has been apparent since the Tony Awards, The Playgoer has been taking the summer off. But I do indeed intend to resume blogging during the fall in some form. What does that mean? Shifting…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:14PMSunday, June 10, 2012
For Twitter followers: the blogcast doesn't update there, but there have been some extra bonus tweets (@theplaygoer)
11:10 Once Best Musical. What can I say. I didn't see it coming. And I'm…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 08:04PMSaturday, June 9, 2012
...is on!
Yes, sorry we've been absent here a long time. But help nurse Playgoer back to life by visiting and taking part in the traditional Tony Live Blogcast here tomorrow night starting …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:54PMTuesday, May 1, 2012
They're out there.
Random thoughts:
First I recklessly tweet that Once would not even make it to opening night on Broadway, now it leads the pack with 11 Tony nominations. Go figure. (And…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:14AMWednesday, April 4, 2012
My latest for Time Out: Willy Holtzman's The Morini Strad at Primary Stages.
The takeaway: "Tuesdays with Morrie for the WQXR crowd."
By the way, forgot to mention in the review that this …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:10AMTuesday, March 27, 2012
Kudos to producer Jordan Roth for simplifying the rush ticket policy for at least one Broadway show:
A limited number of lower-price general rush tickets will be available for every perform…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:41AMFriday, March 23, 2012
Time we had a little humor in the Mike Daisey affair...
A writer named Jason Mick, at the Daily Tech site, criticizes, as I have, the things that Daisey got wrong or made up. Then he adds:
…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:57PMMonday, March 19, 2012
Orson Welles in 1939, when he was still a stage and radio star, pre-Citizen Kane. From a new exhibit of Golden Age Hollywood color photos at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.
Kinda looks…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 03:04PMSunday, March 18, 2012
"We do not and cannot fact check our artists; we're a theater, not a news organization. The vast majority of what occurs on our stages is fiction. If we didn't believe fiction could reveal…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:04PMFriday, March 9, 2012
From NYPL, an online Noel Coward archive with bio and lots of photos. Take a tour and add a little style to your weekend!
The Lincoln Center Performing Arts branch will also have an on-site…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:03AMTuesday, March 6, 2012
For Time Out this week I review Eugene O'Neill's 1920 Broadway debut play, Beyond the Horizon. A title long familiar to me from theatre history books, nice to finally see it in this Irish Re…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:03AMSaturday, March 3, 2012
Are you sitting down? The crowd-funding site, Kickstarter, will soon be able to boast a bigger arts-funding treasure-chest than the National Endowment for the Arts.
Or, at least, so boasts …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 05:09PMThursday, February 23, 2012
So I'm up early today and I decide to tune into "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and what do I see a commercial for? Manhattan Theatre Club! No, not one of those 15-second blips at the end of t…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 07:54AMFriday, February 17, 2012
"Stage-acting, she feels, is a true test of discipline for someone who is used to flying by the seat of their pants 'in that you've got to say this here and you must put that prop there. Yo…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:19AMThursday, February 16, 2012
Looks like 9-5 employed adults are finding it just as hard there as here to get a decent theatre ticket discount:
While young people have access to youth ticket discounts (and so they shoul…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 10:06AMMonday, February 13, 2012
Yesterday, the fundraising website Kickstarter reached a milestone when not one, but two of its clients passed the million-dollar threshold.
I mused last year upon the opportunities here fo…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 03:22PMSaturday, February 11, 2012
Patrick Healy's lede for today's front-page NYT story on the 10,000th(!) performance of Phantom says a lot:
“The Phantom of the Opera” will make show business history on Saturday with th…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 01:35PMTuesday, February 7, 2012
Nick Cohen in the Literary Review (UK) offers some useful ways to think about censorship in the 21st century:
We cannot puncture our own myth that we are fearless seekers after truth, even …
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 05:30PMMonday, January 30, 2012
Normally I find any pop culture take on theatre to be oddly distorted. But, catching up with a recent SNL rerun this weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to find not one, but two very f…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 05:06PMThursday, January 26, 2012
Steve Waters in the Guardian sings the praises of the short play:
So what is a short play, exactly? Is it simply defined by its length? I ask because as a form it's under-discussed and und…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 11:22AMThursday, January 19, 2012
Something interesting happening on the Rialto right now: a number of recent Off Broadway successes will be descending upon available theatres this spring just in time for Tony Time. (That ti…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:39PMFriday, January 13, 2012
English playwright David Edgar has a good, long essay in the Guardian on the UK's arts funding crisis and especially the crisis in how to argue for the arts in a time of official, imposed "a…
SOURCE: The Playgoer at 12:20PM 
