5,771 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
"Left on Tenth," which Delia Ephron has adapted for the stage from her best-selling memoir about death, second love, and survival, stars beloved TV star Julianna Margulies; it's put together…
There are several things Benjamin Franklin says or does in Lloyd Suh's play "Franklinland" that I knew to be true; or at least that I had read about previously: He invented the lightning rod…
"Smash," a backstage musical about the making of a Marilyn Monroe musical called "Bombshell," will open at Broadway's Imperial Theater on April 10, its producers announced today, a long-teas…
Arthur Miller was in the spotlight this week, because of the announcement of a Broadway run this season for "John Proctor Was the Villain," a riff on "The Crucible," one of Miller's most pop…
"Warriors," a newly released concept album by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis  adapted from the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick and the 1979 film directed by Walter Hill, features twenty-six s…
Arthur Miller's first Broadway hit, "All My Sons," was inspired by a newspaper account of  a young woman in Ohio who had informed on her father for having defrauded the military during…
"Show Boat" gets a radical remake. Theater in Quarantine's Joshua William Gelb comes out of his (8' by 4') closet. Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Schenkkan takes a brea…
What most surprised me about director Kenny Leon's production of "Out Town" were not his distinctive touches.  What most surprised me is how emotionally I reacted to this "Our Town" "…
Adam Driver as superstar Strings McCrane seems to loom over the cramped set in a black ten-gallon hat, as he screams at a personal assistant who is about half his size, smashes his guitar, s…
"Vladimir" is the second play in New York this year set in Russia decades ago at the beginning of the reign of Vladimir Putin. Opening tonight Off-Broadway, Erika Sheffer's new play is simil…
Suffs will play its final Broadway performance on January 5, 2025 following 24 previews and 301 regular performances, according to an announcement late Friday night. A national tour…
Composer Stephen Sondheim's greatness lies "beyond the clever lyrics, beyond the complex music." Sondheim can make you a better person:Â Â "The ambitions, dreams, disasters, and fixatio…
The twentieth anniversary of the La MaMa Puppet Festival starts its three-week run on all four stages of La MaMa ETC later this month, but the festival is just the largest offering in two mo…
Most of us think about climate change in the wrong way, David Finnigan tells us. It is not "this apocalyptic event that's on its way, and we need to prevent it from hitting," Rather, "it's h…
Early every morning, Paul buys a cup of coffee and jokes around with Katie, the waitress in the otherwise empty local diner in the kind of small town in Upstate New York where the townsfolk …
Adam Szymkowicz, the author of this book offering advice about how to be a playwright, has been a student of such well-known playwrights (and teachers) as Christopher Durang, Marsha Norman, …
In the swirl of the new theater season, with three shows opening on Broadway last week and another this week, and daily announcements of the season ahead (of Broadway debuts, for example, fo…
Election Day is in one month from today, November 5, 2024. Here's what you need to know in order to vote in the General Election in New York City. Registration In order to vote in New York, …
Just about a month before the election, one can hardly expect every theater blogger " or podcaster or substacker " to ignore politics: So this roundup begins with three examples, then goes i…
A look back at Black vaudeville, an anthology of dramatic criticism by women writers, and the 600-year history of Latinx performing arts in America have been named the best theater books of …
"What do the following have in common: Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, the list goes on and on? …
David Henry Hwang wrote "Yellow Face" almost two decades ago, comically rendering three deflating or enraging real-life events in which he was involved up to three decades ago. And yet as I …
"Good Bones," by James Ljames, the Pulitzer-winning author of "Fat Ham," is essentially a debate about gentrification, with sharply different views expressed by the characters, and also, per…
Gavin Creel died yesterday at the age of 48, from a rare form of cancer, after an acclaimed career on Broadway of more than two decades, mostly in starring roles. Herewith some samples from …
"McNeal" is a great showcase for Robert Downey Jr., making his Broadway debut as the  novelist Jacob McNeal, who is unraveling just at the moment of his greatest acclaim. But Downey…
