5,771 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
"Stereophonic"Â Â chronicles a year of recording studio sessions by the members of a popular 1970s rock band (never named, fictional) as they put together their latest album and have the…
The title character of "King of the Jews" " a Holocaust-set play at HERE that is inventively staged and well-acted, but both intentionally and unintentionally disturbing " is inspired by the…
In "Hummus NYC," the first of four stories in "The Holylanders," a play by Moria Zrachia about Israelis living in America, Amir is outraged by what happened to his son Nuri. But the story…
Fifteen jukebox musicals were featured in last night's odd concert at Merkin Hall, "Jukebox: The Musical," part of the Kaufman Music Center's Broadway Close Up series. The concert feat…
So many of the reviews of "Here We Are" end like eulogies for Stephen Sondheim, or feature at least a line of farewell, that these are the passages I find worth quoting, more than the critic…
"O, isn't this wonderful?!" Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) exclaims upon seeing her old friends at her door. It is the first line in Stephen Sondheim's first new musical in two decades, p…
 Laurie Anderson launched the Brooklyn Academy of Music's fortieth annual Next Wave Festival Tuesday night with "Let X = X," an unconventional concert that featured, yes, songs from throu…
There's a photograph of 23-year-old Stephen Sondheim with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollabrigida on the set of director John Huston's movie "Beat the Devil," where  Sondhei…
Heidi Schreck's "What The Constitution Means To Me" is the most produced play in America this season, according to American Theatre Magazine's latest survey, and Lynn Nottage is the most pro…
Helen of Troy, the beauty whose face launched a thousand ships, the woman whose exploits inspired poets and playwrights from Homer to Euripides to Virgil to Shakespeare and his contemporary …
It's easier to feel that theater is bouncing back during such a busy week on Broadway and beyond  (especially for critics trying to catch up on shows that opened earlier whose runs hav…
"Job" begins with a woman in her twenties pointing a gun at a male therapist in his sixties. Why? That's not fully revealed until the end of the therapy session, a climax that's so odious an…
Books about the Method school of acting and about theater's long history of "racial impersonation" have been named the best theater books of the year by The Theatre Library Association, w…
Peg is unhappy, not just because her husband died a year ago, but also because it's been ages since she's seen a bat on the prairie that surrounds her house in rural Wisconsin."You want…
"Gutenberg! The Musical!" is deliberately bad " that's the central joke of it " but much of what's bad about it isn't deliberate. The score is largely unmemorable. The premise makes little s…
People will be watching "Merrily We Roll Along" in 2040, if all goes as planned. That's the year that director Richard Linklater plans to release a movie adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim a…
"(pray)" might feel at first like a theatrically heightened version of a traditional gospel church service, with church ladies in their Sunday finest preaching and praying, clapping and sway…
Today is Indigenous People's Day, which since 2021 has been officially recognized as a national holiday " not coincidentally on the same day (the second Monday in October) as Columbus …
"We're here to celebrate the body " squirts, blasts, noises and inappropriate acts," proclaimed our host, the performer known as Fantasy Grandma,  introducing "Exposure," a group show …
Many long-time leaders of New York theaters have been retiring or dying, as Jan Simpson catalogues in a post in her blog Broadway and Me. The questions she ponders: Who will replace them and…
Jocelyn Bioh's inviting workplace comedy, presenting a day in the life of a hair braiding salon in Harlem, would be a shoo-in for two separate Tony Awards, if either existed " one for hair a…
To get the full flavor of what the great exiled Russian director Dmitry Krymov does with (to?) Ernest Hemingway's two short stories, which are hard to see as love stories at all, and to Euge…
Almost two years after Stephen Sondheim death at the age of 91, October will see the opening at The Shed of what's billed as the composer's "final musical" " "Here We Are" " and the starry r…
Below is a calendar of theater opening* in New York in October, with two greatly-anticipated musicals by Stephen Sondheim, one never produced before. The other, "Merrily We Roll Along," was …
How well were you paying attention to the theater news, views and reviews in this month that launched the Fall 2023 season? Find out in the quiz below. Loading…
