A Broadway history lesson is being delivered these days at the Music Box Theatre, and never has anything this educational been so sensationally staged. All credit to Professor George C. W…
" Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," considered by some to be the greatest American drama, is a marathon of family squabbling. Grueling in the wrong hands, the play's relentle…
OK, theater buffs, get ready to be stumped. From what musical did "I'm Just Wild About Harry" spring? If you answered "Shuffle Along," you either have an encyclopedic memory (and way too man…
What is that indefinable quality that makes an actor a star? Jessie Mueller, who won a Tony in 2014 for her performance in "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical," helped me once again answer t…
In "Sweeney Todd," Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler proved that laughter in a musical could make the adrenaline pump harder. Funny, it turned out, didn't have to be the nemesis of fear. A t…
Homer's "The Odyssey" looms large in Suzan-Lori Parks' "Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)," her entrancingly intimate, anachronistically frolicsome Civil War drama that opened…
Actors are required to kiss all the time in their line of work, but can a smooch really be faked? Passion simulated either becomes real or risks looking contrived and yucky. Sarah Ruhl, the …
Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is far too independent an artist to feel comfortable in the role of African American spokesperson. But she didn't hold back when asked for her thoughts about the …
Before Irish actress Lisa Dwan takes the stage for the "Beckett Trilogy" she has been performing internationally to much acclaim, theatergoers are warned that they are about to be plunged in…
Michael John LaChiusa, the richly talented author of such ambitious musicals as "Marie Christine" and "Hello Again," doesn't gravitate toward frivolity. His sensibility is unabashedly litera…
"The Revisionist," a play by actor-writer Jesse Eisenberg about a pompous, inconsiderate young American novelist who pays a visit to a Polish relative he barely knows, tests an audience's to…
For "A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder," homicidal ambition is the mother of musical comedy invention. This Tony-winning musical, about an acquisitive young man of questionable parentage …
"Casa Valentina," Harvey Fierstein's 2014 Tony-nominated play, couldn't have found more trustworthy hands than those of director David Lee. The West Coast premiere took place Sunday at the P…
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…
Jeff Daniels has returned to Scottish playwright David Harrower's disquieting drama "Blackbird," and his experience in the play has not only deepened but galvanized his performance. Excellen…
Food is complicated, as any dieter can tell you. Eating, even for the naturally slender, is an emotional activity. When the narrator of Marcel Proust's sprawling masterpiece, "Remembrance of…
Success for an actor " yes, even one of the classic Hollywood mold " can be a mixed blessing. For Leonardo DiCaprio, "Titanic" was both the greatest thing that ever happened to his career " …
Lady Macbeth is such a larger-than-life theatrical figure that it's only natural that audiences would like more information about her than Shakespeare is willing to provide. His method, stil…
Broadway, hardly a bastion of diversity, has been starting to see the wisdom in this "Hamilton"-rocked season of bringing new voices to the table. "Eclipsed," by the U.S.-born, Zimbabwean-ra…
Large dumpsters, the kind often seen at construction sites or behind restaurants, play a prominent role in Dámaso Rodriguez's kinetic modern-dress production of William Shakespeare's "Rom…
In the ancient world, long before modern psychology domesticated sex, Eros was considered a fearful, destabilizing, often ruinous force. In "The Mystery of Love & Sex," a recent play by Bath…
"Miss Julie," August Strindberg's 1888 classic, has inspired so many high-profile adaptations " the work has been relocated to Britain, Ireland, America, Russia and (most effectively) South …
God is headlining at the Ahmanson Theatre in the Broadway comedy "An Act of God," but please don't think of this as the Second Coming. This appearance is really more of a tease, an occasion …
This is not a review. Samuel French Inc., the licensing agent representing the Harold Pinter estate in the U.S., has decreed that the Wooster Group's production at REDCAT of Pinter's first p…
History is given a warm theatrical salute in "Fly," a tap-dance-infused drama that tells the story of a group of Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American Army Air Corps fighters who helpe…