The theater world lost two giants this summer, Zelda Fichandler, co-founder of Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage and a heroic pioneer of the regional theater movement, and James Houghton, found…
SAN DIEGO " The Old Globe's staging of "Love's Labor's Lost" proves that it is possible to fall in love with a production at first sight. John Lee Beatty's scenic design transforms the outdo…
Summer Shakespeare. These words can strike fear in the heart of a reluctant theatergoer. Yes, the plays are supposed to be good for you. But semiprofessional productions in which the artisti…
SAN DIEGO " Steve Martin, the beloved comic whose career has branched out in unforeseen directions (bluegrass composer, art collector and curator, playwright) is often described as a modern …
LA JOLLA " Forget about all the TV pundits and op-ed columnists droning on about America's problems. Playwright Ayad Akhtar is the diagnostician the nation needs to interpret its faltering h…
No point in mincing words: Tennessee Williams is the greatest playwright America has ever produced. Yet more and more his reputation seems preserved in amber rather than renewed through reve…
Barbra Streisand didn't give us a foretaste of her Rose in "Gypsy," the classic musical about a formidable stage mother and her showbiz-bound daughters that she has been trying like Sisyphus…
"A Chorus Line" is an ideal musical for the Hollywood Bowl, and this weekend's presentation faithfully staged by Baayork Lee didn't disappoint. The show's presentational style works well …
SAN DIEGO " Feeling overwhelmed by this summer of tumult, when the news seems to go only from bad to worse? I have just the remedy:Â an English novelist who wrote delectable comedies of ma…
"The Last Tiger in Haiti," a new play by Jeff Augustin that's receiving its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, begins in a tent shack in Port-au-Prince that is the home for a group of…
"Beautiful " The Carole King Musical" is that rare Broadway offering " a jukebox musical with a soul. The touring production, which opened Friday at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, reveals t…
Ayad Akhtar's "Disgraced" won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013, but for anyone encountering the work for the first time at the Mark Taper Forum, where the play opened Sunday in a sensati…
The setting for "Big Sky," a new comedy by Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros that opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, is a Ritz-Carlton condo in a deluxe vacation community in Aspen, Colo.,…
"Hamilton," Lin-Manuel Miranda's landmark musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, had its coronation Sunday at the 70th Tony Awards. As expected, the show won for best musical, cap…
The suspense over the Tony Awards is usually about which show will win for best musical, the prize with the most lucrative consequences. But this year we all know that "Hamilton," nominated …
The most memorable acting of the year was a group affair.
On Sunday, the Tony Awards will recognize artists who did exceptional work in the 2015-16 Broadway season. As always, there's a rich bounty of nominated talent to choose from, but the�…
A precious First Folio of Shakespeare plays, one of several on tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library, has arrived at the San Diego Central Library, where it will remain for the next month…
Harold Bloom subtitled his magnum opus on Shakespeare "The Invention of the Human" in recognition of the Bard's unprecedented ability to imagine the lives of others. The question I've…
Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape," written in 1921, still has the tang of an experiment by a relatively young writer testing the frontiers of what the drama can do. Mixing brutal expressionis…
Antonio Salieri, relegated by posterity to the shadows as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's journeyman contemporary, will always have Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" to augment his notoriety, if not his f…
For those who have been tracking the thrilling career of the Belgian-born, Amsterdam-based director Ivo van Hove, the last place you'd expect to find him working is Broadway. But the Flemish…
Last year, the Tony Awards could have adopted the hashtag #TonysSoBritish. This year, the nominees announced Tuesday morning look like the anti-Oscars, so diverse is the roster. There may no…
The historical significance of "Hamilton"'s trove of Tony nominations
Alan Mandell, the evergreen 88-year-old actor, confessed that he might be ready to bid farewell to the stage when I interviewed him last year on the occasion of his performance in the Mark T…