1,115 stories by "FRANK SCHECK"
In case you didn't know it yet, drugs are bad. That's the not-very-revelatory message of Dael Orlandersmith's "Horsedreams," her "Reefer Madness"- style drama about the evils of cocaine and …
There’s a chill in the air. The tourists are packing the streets. And the Christmas decorations are blanketing the stores. It can only mean one thing. The Radio City Christmas Spectacu…
There’s a lot of love being expressed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Not only by the audience towards Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, the veteran musical stars who have been performi…
With so many playwrights indulging in theatrical navel gazing, it's exciting to find someone who's looking out at the world. That's the case with J.T. Rogers, whose last play, "The Overwhelm…
In the opening minutes of Theresa Rebeck’s new play, four young students nervously await the arrival of a famous novelist who they’ve hired to conduct a series of private seminar…
In the opening number of "Cotton Club Parade," Duke Ellington's "Daybreak Express," the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra re-creates the sound of a railroad train loudly barreling down the tr…
It’s not surprising that Noel Coward’s Private Lives is so often produced on Broadway. This delicious 1930 comedy, which has been seen here no less than four times in the last th…
Language isn't the only thing separating the new theatrical production of "La Strada" from its inspiration. This Spanish-language adaptation of Federico Fellini's classic 1954 Italian film u…
The Tony-winning star shows off her strong interpretive skills in her show at Feinstein's at Loews Regency.
Thomas Bradshaw’s new play Burning is playing at the New Group’s theater on 42nd Street, but it would have been right at home on the old 42nd Street as well. This sprawling, ambi…
'Fragments" is both an accurate and deceptive name for the evening of Samuel Beckett pieces being presented by Theatre for a New Audience. These five short works, collectively lasting under …
There’s a mass seduction going on nightly at the Broadhurst Theatre. In his one-man show Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway, the Aussie performer has the audience eating out of the palm of…
At the start of "All-American," a father coaches his teenager in the fine art of the quarterback sneak as his other child watches in bored silence, smoking a cigarette. As it happens, the wo…
Just in case you didn’t you didn’t get your hippy-dippy fix with the recent revival of Hair, there’s now the 40th anniversary production of Godspell to help you get your gr…
Andrew Hinderaker's "Suicide, Incorporated" is at first wickedly satirical, almost Kafkaesque: It concerns a firm called Legacy Letters, which specializes in crafting suicide notes. Since 80…
Santino Fontana continues to emerge as one of the great talents of the New York stage in Sons of the Prophet, the latest confident from Stephen Karam. As some might remember, it was another …
As musical subjects go, Anna Edson Taylor's hardly the Unsinkable Molly Brown. In 1901, the real-life heroine of Michael John LaChiusa's new show went over Niagara Falls in a barrel at age 6…
The title of the show is "The Fartiste."
There will now be a brief pause; the review will resume after you've stopped tittering.
All right then. You may be surprised to learn that this is …
Jesse Eisenberg certainly hasn’t written an attractive part for himself in his debuting playwriting effort, now being presented by the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. In his dark come…
I don’t envy actress-turned-emerging-playwright Zoe Kazan; it’s hard to write a family play that steers clear of the usual tropes of long-simmering resentment and buried history.…
Titling your play "A Charity Case" is just asking for it, and Australian playwright Wendy Beckett doesn't make it any easier to resist. This play about adoption "from the adoptee's point of …
Cellphones ring incessantly during "Milk Like Sugar," but don't bother to check whether you've left yours on. They belong to the teenage girls at the heart of Kirsten Greenidge's evocative p…
John Cheever was exploring the mores of the American WASP long before A.R. Gurney wrote his first play. So it's fitting that the playwright's debut effort, 1974's "Children," now being reviv…
Miscommunication—of the linguistic, cultural and relationship kind—is the subject of David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish. Receiving its Broadway premiere after an acclaimed run e…
The Reduced Shakespeare Company has managed to distill and find the funny in Shakespeare, the Bible and the history of America. But it seems to have fumbled with "The Complete World of Sport…
