5,771 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
Melissa Etheridge was so young when she started playing the guitar that her fingers bled, but she kept at it, which seems a fitting start for her rocky road to rock star. On her 17th birthda…
It's hard to picture a better cast for this first Broadway revival of Ossie Davis's 1961 broad, biting comedy about racism in the Old South. As the title character, Leslie Odom Jr., assuming…
"The Wiz" announced its opening date in April, starring Nichelle Lewis as Dorothy, Deborah Cox as Glinda and Melody A. Betts (featured in this first photograph above) as Au…
The photographs below offer a small sample of the many Jewish characters that have been portrayed in plays and musicals on Broadway, focusing on the most familiar and the most recent. Â Th…
 In celebration of the International Day of Sign Languages, proclaimed every September 23 by the United Nations since 2018, below is the schedule of ASL-interpreted performances on Bro…
The story told in Emma Horwitz's "Mary Gets Hers," about an orphan girl who falls into prostitution, and then is rescued from it,  follows nearly scene by scene a tenth century play wr…
During the second of the five concerts that are launching the new performing arts center at the World Trade Center, the violinist Trina Basu went up to the microphone after her set and said …
The soldier is silent. This frustrates the woman who is not exactly his captor but not his keeper either; she works for the motherland, which disapproves of his silence.  If he doesn't…
Half of what happens in "Prometheus Firebringer" is extraordinary, unprecedented. But you wouldn't know that just by watching what's on stage, which is mostly a series of monologues recited …
 Broadway favorites  Kelli O'Hara, Brian d'Arcy James, and Heidi Schreck are returning, and Rachel McAdams making her Broadway debut, in two plays and two musicals that were newly a…
"Psychic Self Defense" " gorgeous, impish and enveloping " had long ended before I understood the title, although the show itself remained ineffable. To be clear, I never doubted it was a wo…
Susan and Bella, two students at UC Berkeley who are twin sisters, keep on getting pregnant " their pregnancy represented by red balloons "Â Â and they keep on popping "M&Ms" " not t…
The Perelman Performing Arts Center, or PAC NYC, held a ribbon connection (rather than ribbon cutting) ceremony today on a stage in the lobby that will offer free entertainment every day fro…
Shortly before I attended Annie Baker's new play about a group of mostly older women spending their vacations at a pain clinic in Northern California, I saw a new musical about a group of yo…
The new performing arts center at the World Trade Center smartly decided to hold its official opening day ceremony on Wednesday,  not today. But if all goes well, the marble cube of th…
Each of the following movies slated for release in cinemas and/or streaming services before the end of the year may be of interest to legitimate theater fans because it directly adapts a sta…
Choose the show that you are most looking forward to, of the ten that have an official opening on Broadway from September to December 2023. They are listed chronologically below by opening d…
Caitlin Cook has reportedly spent ten years researching graffiti in public bathrooms, and five years turning the graffiti into songs, which she now has put together for an hour-long show bil…
Charles Busch has always worshipped Leading Ladies, even before he became one. That happened almost four decades ago, thanks to the surprise success of his play "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom."I…
Bryan is bulimic.  Melinda is schizophrenic. Kendra has borderline personality disorder. Newcomer Adam is an addict. They are young patients in group therapy at a rehab ward, presided …
Summer officially ended with Lea Michele singing "My Man" at the curtain call for the final performance of "Funny Girl" (see video below), a song introduced by Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Fo…
On a Labor Day when Hollywood writers and actors have been on strike for months now,  there is a fitting if startling answer this year to the question I ask every Labor Day, which i…
A new Sondheim musical, posthumously produced; a new Annie Baker play; the return to Broadway of Leslie Odom Jr. and Sarah Paulson. Below are ten shows opening in the Fall " three of which I…
For his ninetieth birthday, Sir Stanley Wells, considered one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare, was asked to deliver four lectures to answer the following questions…
Below is a calendar of theater opening* in New York in September: Leslie Odom Jr is returning to Broadway in a revival of a play by Ossie Davis, and rock star Melissa Etheridge is bringin…
