1,428 stories by "Ben Brantley"
The most visually magical productions are often those in which the stage is a blank canvas.
Audra McDonald plays Bess with confidence and conviction in a production that is otherwise lacking, anxious and confused.
How I wish that "Bluebird," though efficiently directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, had left more of the revelations to Simon Russell Beale's face and fewer to the script.
John Doyle's production of "Ten Cents a Dance," at the Williamstown Theater Festival, is a beautiful, brooding collage of Rodgers and Hart songs.
Maybe they should call it "Sublet." The young ensemble members who inhabit the new production of Jonathan Larson's "Rent" never seem to feel truly at home.
In the theater, as in life, a kiss is hardly just a kiss. Whether bestowed on the lips, the cheek, the hand or any other part of the anatomy, the simple application of the lips to someone el…
Les 7 Doigts de la Main, a troupe from Montreal, performs acrobatic feats of derring-do in "Traces," at the Union Square Theater.
Cate Blanchett, Richard Roxburgh and Hugo Weaving star in the Sydney Theater Company revival of "Uncle Vanya" at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Women without knickers kept showing up on the stage the other day, in two different theaters. And, honestly, I wasn't hanging out in those hole-in-the-wall clubs in Soho, land of gentlemen's…
"Betty Blue Eyes," the musical at the Ivor Novello Theater based on the 1984 film "A Private Function," captures the the writer Alan Bennett's sensibility in its portrayal of the age of aust…
Howard Davies's production of "The Cherry Orchard" at the National Theater is a handsome but exceedingly busy production in which every other line, it seems, is annotated with some exaggerat…
"London Road," at the National Theater, and "Loyalty," at the Hampstead, are two productions based on actual events, but only one finds the truth.
The novelist Katharine Weber brings many famous and glamorous names to her memoir, including that of her grandmother's lover, George Gershwin.
Timing is everything in comedy. Well, that and location, as "One Man, Two Guvnors," Richard Bean's smash play at the National Theater, demonstrates.
There's Shakespeare as a straightforward, youth-infused interpretation of "All's Well That Ends Well," at the Globe, and then there is the Vegas-as-Venice version of "The Merchant of Venice,…
Implicit in the Belarus Free Theater troupe's production of the international hodgepodge "Eurepica. Challenge" at the Almeida Theater in London is the message that Belarus isn't alone in mak…
Neither "Ghost," a musical based on the 1990 movie, nor a re-imagining of "A Woman Killed With Kindness," on stage in London, offer much for audiences to latch on to and take with them.
Plays in London this summer have startling moments in which they connect with us in ways that feel almost embarrassingly intimate.
Through youthful eyes, Shakespeare can seem every bit as relevant and engaging as the young stars who regularly appear on the cover of People Magazine.
The purported scoundrels in the British phone-hacking scandal give the edge in amorality to the power-brokers, secret-hoarders and blackmailers portrayed in "Luise Miller," Friedrich Schille…
One of the pleasures (and pains) of going to the theater for many years is watching actors get older and grow up - or not, as the case may be.
The buzzed-about production of Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" at Wyndhams' Theater appeared to be a sitcom from the age of Thatcher.
Kristin Scott Thomas stars in Ian Rickson's terrific new production of Harold Pinter's "Betrayal."
Kevin Spacey and Dominic West are putting their classical training on display like peacocks spreading their tails.
Three different but equally theatrical productions in London provide a kind of catharsis for theatergoers who are fed up with the hypocrites who rule their worlds.
