695 stories by "David Cote"
Growing up a straight white boy in small-town New Hampshire, I wasn't exactly destined to care about Broadway musicals, much less love them and write essays about how we may be living in a n…
Silence is golden in Bess Wohl's exquisite play set at an upstate meditation retreat where six strangers take (and mostly break) a vow not to speak. But baser metals also emerge from the vac…
Anyone who attends Conor McPherson's Shining City a second time won't be surprised by a certain coup de théâtre at the very end. Those who saw it at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2006 know w…
Drama cannot happen without a controlled release of information that keeps the characters in the room and the audience wanting more. It helps to have vivid dialogue, an unpredictable plot an…
The global neocircus giant Cirque du Soleil does things no else on Broadway can. Its acrobats execute quadruple backflips off a teeterboard, their heels seeming to brush the rigging high abo…
British playwright Nick Payne excels at a subgenre let's call the Science Weepie. He deploys facts to frame or metaphorize the problems of his protagonists, and the collision of data and hum…
Bars are outstanding factories for human suffering"and deliverance. Everywhere from Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh to Louis C.K.'s hauntingly great web series Horace and Pete, watering h…
There's a fiery revival of Tennessee Williams's great drama buried under the truckload of 1990s regietheater clichés that Benedict Andrews dumps all over St. Ann's Warehouse's playing space…
George C. Wolfe s reimagining bursts with joy and style.
The full title of this extraordinary showbiz excavation-renovation masterminded by George C. Wolfe"Shuffle Along or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed"is very …
At the dramatic crux of Tuck Everlasting, a 102-year-old man trapped in a 17-year-old body asks an 11-year-old girl to wait six years until she's legal, at which point she will drink from a …
One's sorely tempted to praise the delightful new musical Waitress using lots of bakery metaphors. After all, its hero is a pastry genius with relationship woes named Jenna (Jessie Mueller).…
The regicide and rebellion of the history plays are on full display in this fine feast of Shakespeare.
From Death of a Salesman to his first show on Broadway, Time Out New York's David Cote ranks Arthur Miller's 10 best plays
Arthur Miller’s penetrating study of the Salem witch trials is expertly adapted to resonate today.
There are two types of audience members attending Ivo van Hove's The Crucible: those who take their seats and, when the curtain rises, wonder, Why's it set in a classroom? and the other half…
For a play about test subjects going through extremes of sadness, lust, joy and despair, The Effect leaves you slightly cold.
Desire is chemical, or so the scientists say. When that special someone draws near, their scent can cause a fuss in the hypothalamus, prompting a rush of dopamine, adrenaline and oxytocin. P…
David Harrower’s hellishly compelling play reaches deep into the psyches of two characters marked by a past experience.
Contrived and gently pretentious, Greg Pierce's Her Requiem is the Off Broadway equivalent of a New Yorker short story (an improvement, I suppose, on all the new plays that seem like Netflix…
There was plenty on offer on Broadway this past year, but one musical took the cake.
Explaining why a thing is funny is hard enough. Trying to account for something you know is hilarious"but then isn't"is tougher still. Case in point: The Roundabout Theatre Company has reviv…
Although the titans Zero Mostel, Jerome Robbins and Harold Prince are reflexively linked to this 1964 classic, there's another, uncredited, father of Fiddler on the Roof. It's Marc Chagall, …
Mamet and Pacino hand over an ungainly and pretentious monologue.
