5,905 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
The finale of "Assistance" is an abused employee's revenge fantasy: A woman curses out her boss, and then dances defiantly as the office around her self-destructs in spectacular fashion: The…
Apartheid was virulent and ignored outside South Africa in 1961 when Athol Fugard wrote "Blood Knot," launching his international career. The American anti-apartheid movement was in full for…
Each Broadway show has a different policy to enable either the general public, or students, or young people, to buy tickets at a steep discount. Anything Goes General Rush: $30 " limited num…
"Bad Kid," David Crabb's one-man show at Axis Theater about his goth-gay Texas adolescence, is vivid and amusing storytelling.
Philip Gawthorne's David Mamet–inspired drama for Mad Dog Theatre Company and the Drilling Company feels as endless as a bad marriage.
There is the William Shatner, long forgotten, who appeared with Spencer Tracy in "Judgment at Nuremberg" and replaced an ill Christopher Plummer as Henry V at the Stratford Festival. There i…
A GPS device turns out not just to be aggressively helpful but also clairvoyant in Eddie Antar's clever, cautionary comedy about our tech-dependent era.
Once young and idealist, now rich, arrogant and corrupted, the main characters of "Merrily We Roll Along," Stephen Sondheim's most reworked flop, could be said to resemble the Encores! serie…
In "Rx," Phil tells Meena that she may be suffering from workplace depression, "which isn't a personal failure; it's a disease." He quickly adds: "We hope." If it is a disease, the giant pha…
Smash, the new NBC TV series about the making of a Broadway musical, is well-timed for theater people, both because it's on Mondays (their standard day off), and because it starts in Februar…
Meet thirtysomethings Sam Gold, Alex Timbers and Thomas Kail, the respective directors of Broadway's Seminar, Peter and the Starcatcher and Magic/Bird.
"Welcome to blood, sex, sorrow and a good party," a young man said cheerfully, as he handed out a drink during the Flea Theater's adaptation of all seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles, a …
The Nixon Rule is named after Cynthia Nixon, who is starring as a literature professor dying of cancer in the Broadway debut of "Wit" 13 years after it opened Off-Broadway and won the Pulitz…
"It's not all that important, of course," the minister says, helping Miss Helen fill out a form to put her in an old-age home. It is one of many shrewd little moments in Athol Fugard's "The …
Is the "Porgy and Bess" currently on Broadway worth seeing? Consider these other questions: Is "Porgy and Bess" racist? Is it an opera or a musical? How important is that goat cart to you? T…
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”- Martin Luther King, Jr. What's on Broadway? Long-running shows, shows about to close, and shows about to open.…
At around 16 years of age, Susan Sontag 1. offered Thomas Mann a reinterpretation of his "Magic Mountain" 2. had her first affair with a woman, 3. met the professor she would marry. "I know …
This rock-concert adaptation in Polish of an abstract two-character French play is cool in a not very fresh way, despite the fine performances of Wojciech Niemczyk and Tomasz Nosinski.
In theater, we don't go out with the old " here, 12-time Broadway veteran Carol Channing, soon to turn 91 " to ring in the new " here, Darren Criss, 24, about to make his Broadway debut. We …
Here are the shows that you can see on Broadway as of this writing — or that are scheduled to open in Spring 2012. Many are closing by the end of December, 2011 or January, 2012. Listi…
Whatever else they have in common " and it's much " the current productions in Brooklyn of "Krapp's Last Tape" with John Hurt and "Misterman" with Cillian Murphy share one above all: Live th…
William Shakespeare is said to have coined several English words and phrases in his first tragedy, "Titus Andronicus," including "Devil incarnate" and "unappeased" " though not, surprisingly…
The Broadway version of "Lysistrata Jones" begins with a loud boom, a full moon, a stage full of smoke, and an intoning diva in Grecian attire. Hooded monks move down the aisles of the Walte…
I asked the Naked Cowboy in Times Square what was the best theater of 2011. "Les Miz," he replied, while he posed in the cold with tourists. Since the revival of "Les Miserables" closed in 2…
It is a swooning moment to hear Harry Connick Jr. sing the title song of a musical now remembered mostly because of that melody, as sung by Barbra Streisand. But Connick sings it only at the…
