5,771 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
It's early on Election Day, and Oedipus, populist candidate confident that he'll be swept into office, makes two off-the-cuff public promises that will blow up in his face: He will release h…
William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays (10 tragedies, 10 histories, 17 comedies) and 154 Sonnets " 884,647 words in all.He is said to have invented 1,700 words in the English language, including…
PBS tonight broadcasts the production of "Twelfth Night" that reopened the Delacorte in Central Park this summer with a starry cast including  Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh, Lupita Nyong'o, D…
Ken Burns' latest documentary "The American Revolution," launches this Sunday on PBS, ten years after he began work on it, which was just about the time that Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical "Ha…
'If I had to choose between being known while alive or being known while dead, I gotta go with dead," says Gavrilo, the teenager who will soon assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sta…
In honor of Veterans Day, below is a list of ten works of theater depicting military veterans, ranging from Ancient Greek tragedies and Shakespearean history plays to Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes…
NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani turns out to be polarizing in a way even he didn't realize: His Broadway favorites. In a post-election interview with CNN,  he said he used to belt ou…
"The Queen of Versailles," Stephen Schwartz's latest musical, which stars Kristin Chenoweth as the real-life billionaire's wife Jackie Siegel,  comes far closer to Jackie's favorite ch…
The casts of the Broadway shows Buena Vista Social Club, Just in Time, and Ragtime will perform at the 2025 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on November 27, 2025. The 99th edition of the…
Five albums have been nominated for the best musical theater album Grammy Award, all of them of current or recent Broadway shows (the fourth consecutive year that only Broadway cast recordin…
,There are puppets in long-running New York shows like "The Lion King" and "The Little Shop of Horrors," muppets are making their Broadway debut (albeit briefly) in "Rob Lake Magic with spec…
Before the start of this R&B musical comedy about Barack Obama's first term as president, Eli Bauman, its creator and director, bustled out on stage to urge us to ignore what's "out ther…
"This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt," Zohran Mamdani, j…
New Yorkers are electing our 111th mayor today, which seems a good day to look back at mayors who made it to Broadway. I mean as characters (or caricatures), but at least one actually wrote …
By the end of "Kyoto," a play about the effort it took to achieve the first international agreement to address the climate crisis, we come to understand  " perhaps too well " that it w…
With Election Day tomorrow, it was hard to avoid registering the politics in even the most entertaining theater I reviewed this past week.  The insistence on body autonomy was a theme …
Minetta Lane Theater became the home of Audible beginning in 2018 with the mission of turning live theater productions into audiobooks. Their first show was a transfer of the solo play "Harr…
Below is a calendar of New York theater opening* in November, including Tom Hanks starring in a play he co-wrote, Kristin Chenoweth in one of two musicals by Stephen Schwartz, Patrick Page a…
How well were you paying attention to the New York theater in October? Answer this quiz, with ten questions and a bonus, to find out. Loading…
Laurie Metcalf as Sarah in rubber gloves and Micah Stock as Ethan in a face mask stand in front of a lone couch,  making awkward chit-chat until she finally says:"I'm, uh. Sorry about …
This solo play co-written and starring "Severance" actress Jen Tullock is on one level the story of lesbian author Frances Reinhardt, who has written a new book about her abusive childhood i…
Playwright Bess Wohl wants us to know about the time before she was born when "women's lib" was neither pejorative nor ironic. In "Liberation," her warm, funny play opening tonight on Broadw…
"Jewish Plot" starts as an entertaining resurrection of a (fictitious) 19th century play about antisemitism written by an obscure British playwright, and descends into a kind of mad poetr…
Americans like to be scared even during scary times; how else to explain Halloween, a deliberately scary theater festival, and "The Phantom of the Opera," which persists beyond Broadway, wit…
The best thing to say about Bedlam's irreverent, sister-centered  riff on "Pride and Prejudice" is that it demonstrates once again the enduring appeal of Jane Austen's centuries-old ch…
