This week could not be busier. Today,  300,000 employees go back to work for New York City's government, and a million students go back to the city's public schools. Tomorrow, "Chicago…
"It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while," Frankie the narrator says at the beginning of  "Angela's Ashes the Musical," just as he did …
By the time that Bill Rauch became the artistic director of the performing arts center on the site of the World Trade Center, it had been nearly two decades in the making. On this, the twent…
In "What Happened? The Michaels Abroad,"Â Â the dancer Rose Michael, already riddled with cancer, has died of COVID, and her family and friends have gathered around the kitchen table in …
If Third Rail Projects' "Return The Moon" " an eerie, airy 75 minutes that is as much secular ritual as work of theater " had been produced by almost any other theater company, I might have …
The Fall season means the reopening of some 20 big Broadway musicals, two of which began again last week to much hoopla, but it's the large slate of new work, much of it unusual for Broadway…
Where are the American plays about unions, or workers, or even just workplaces? I started asking that question several years ago on Labor Day, a legal holiday created by Congress in…
Here are shows you can still see either on stage, or online, or both, during Labor Day weekend, with links to my reviews. Of course, there are now four shows running on Broadway " Springstee…
"Hadestown" is back from the dead, reopening with most of its original principal Broadway cast intact*. "Has Hell ever sounded so thrilling," I exclaimed in my review of the 2016 Off Broadwa…
"Waitress," a musical I savored when it opened in 2016, is back on Broadway. Its reopening tonight is unlike many of the other shows returning this season. Its run had ended in January 2020,…
Below is a selection of the abundant New York theater openings in September, organized chronologically by opening date*, which for the first time in eighteen months includes a full schedule …
How well were you paying attention to the theater news and reviews in August? Take this quiz to find out. Loading…
Today, the Broadway League launches its "This is Broadway" campaign, featuring a new flashy website, a dazzling montage video narrated by Oprah Winfrey (see below), the lighting of the Empir…
Bete comes off as such an outrageous Latina diva that she could be a drag queen's campy creation, especially since she's portrayed by a man, Arturo Luis Soria. She compares herself to Madonn…
"Pass Over" is more than just a foul-mouthed, funny, beautifully acted and blisteringly pointed play about two Black men stuck on a street corner, menaced by white men. It arrives on Broadwa…
Lightning cut short the We Love NYC Homecoming concert in Central Park over the weekend,  which one hopes is not a harbinger of the desperately anticipated Fall season. Some culture ha…
"The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano"Â Â revolves around a true incident that occurred around Christmas time 1969: The Young Lords, a group of young activist Puerto Ricans in New York, took…
By Jonathan Mandell. Jonathan Mandell shares his experience at New York City's first-ever official Puppet Week.
"I'm so sick of playing the part of Elizabeth Taylor,"Â Â Kayla Boye says in "Call Me Elizabeth." Of course, Elizabeth Taylor is supposed to be saying this, not Boye, who is portraying t…
"Actor. Humanitarian. Snack." " Those are the first words we see on the screen, and they're obviously meant to describe Jake Gyllenhaal. But filmmaker, writer and actress Melissa Center's ho…
What would be the most effective play about climate change?  That's the question that Australian playwright Melissa-Kelly Franklin seems to have asked herself while writing this short …
Alma and Baya are living in the only home they've ever known, a two-person pod far from Earth, with malfunctioning machines and a dwindling food supply, when an unexpected stranger comes kno…
Amy Winehouse meets Karen Carpenter on a bench outside a cosmic nightclub, both reluctant to "face the music," in "Close to Black,"  the second play in  "Triple Bypass," which is…
During last week's heat wave, theater continued to heat up, with the official opening night of Pass Over pushed up to this Sunday, August 22nd (which may confuse people who thought that t…
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which last year went entirely digital, is back in person in Scotland this year through August 30th, though smaller than usual " only about a thousand shows at …