5,771 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
The quiz below offers a theatergoer's perspective on this crazy, busy, unnerving summer, Loading…
Renée Elise Goldsberry's star turn as Prospero helps make this entertaining new musical adaptation of "The Tempest" thrilling in some of the same ways as the musical for which she won a Ton…
"How To Steal An Election," a 1968 musical that offers a cynical history lesson about American presidential politics, is getting a perky revival as part of York Theater Company'sÂ�…
On 28 August, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the following speech at the March on Washington: I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demons…
The end of August, traditionally the dog days of summer, this year brings news of a British movie theater chain allowing dogs to accompany humans at select showings. Would this work fo…
To author Ethan Mordden, Edward Albee is the "Great American Gay Playwright" "Â Â emphasis on gay " even though few of his plays have any gay characters in them at all nor any obvious "g…
"Rock & Roll Man," a musical at New World Stages about Alan Freed, a radio disc jockey and concert promoter who championed early rock and roll, had already announced a September 1st clos…
What turned high school drop-out Frederick August Kittel Jr. into the revered and consequential playwright August Wilson? That's the question at the heart of "August Wilson: A Life" (Simon a…
Best to think of a Fall full of theater during these final summer days wracked by climate change disasters, indictments and dubious debates. It's not too early to get two-for-one tickets to�…
This latest magic show to land fleetingly on Broadway  stars Antonio Diaz, a boyishly charming 37-year-old Spaniard who we're told was "born into a humble family in a small town on the…
Patrick Page is hugging Eva Noblezada on the stage of "Hadestown." There are two ways to look at this photograph, just as there are two ways to look at the news of the challenges facing the …
The life of Julia Pastrana was short and ugly; her death long and grotesque. But there was also beauty in her true story, and it's captured briefly but memorably by a remarkable performer na…
The creatures created by Ralph Lee (July 9, 1935 " May 12, 2023) come alive even when in an art exhibition rather than on stage, as evident in "Myths, Legends, & Spectacle: Masks and Pup…
The  76th Edinburgh Festival Fringe is underway, a month-long festival that this year is presenting more than 3,500 shows " which might be intimidating for those theatergoers who…
On their last day of shooting "Jaws," its three stars sit around the table of a cramped fishing boat, shooting the breeze, as they had done for most of the 95 minutes of "The Shark Is Broken…
The puppets at the third International Puppet Fringe Festival measure way smaller than your hand and way taller than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; they reflect traditions thousands of years old, and …
"What does Barbie and Oppenheimer mean for Broadway?"Â Ken Davenport asks in his blog post, treating the two movie blockbusters as a singular phenomenon (hence the "does") " yet for some r…
"Back to the Future" opening on Broadway last week seemed well-timed, since theatergoers seem to be time traveling: We're looking ahead as the Broadway 2023-2024 season unfolds, and at the s…
"I can laugh at my own extinction," says the dinosaur with the face of Theodora Skipitares, in the last and most ironic of the six eerie scenes in her show at La MaMa entitled "Views from th…
When the Federal Theatre Project was shut down in 1939 after just four years, the government-funded program had presented an astonishing 830 theatrical productions on Broadway and in newly c…
Hollywood may be on strike, but movies are ever-present on New York stages. True, it wasn't until 1970 that a Broadway show based on a movie won the Tony for best musical " fittingly, the mu…
 "Back to the Future," opening tonight on Broadway, is a nearly scene-by-scene re-creation of the 1985 movie on which it's based. This is in some ways a lost opportunity to reimagine a st…
Deaf Broadway, a theater company founded on Stephen Sondheim's 90th birthday in 2020, tonight performed the musical "Company" at Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park. How? They projected the filme…
Below is a selection of theater opening in New York in August, including three on Broadway: a big musical based on a blockbuster movie, a behind-the-scenes play about a blockbuster movie,…
"Let's Call Her Patty" can most charitably be considered a character study, since there is little discernible plot, with the one tangible development occurring close to the end of the 70-min…
