71 stories by "Jan@broadwayandme"
Forget about War Horse or even The Book of Mormon. The hottest ticket in town is Sleep No More. That's the Macbethtakeoff in which theatergoers put on white-face masks and roam around a…
It probably makes me sound like a philistine to say this but I've never been a big Ingmar Bergman fan. Which may make you wonder why I was so eager to see Through a Glass Darkly, the s…
The preliminary ratings for Sunday night's Tony broadcast are 6.9 million, just a smidgen down from the 7 million who watched last year. But it seems there was a 9% increase in viewers…
It's finally Tony time and people who see only a few shows a year often use the Tony broadcast (on CBS this Sunday night at 9 p.m. eastern time) to decide which ones they should see. T…
Is there a harder working or more admirable head of a theater company than Jonathan Bank, the artistic director of the Mint Theater Company? Bank has not only delivered a welcoming mes…
The Tony Awards are just a week away but so many shows opened at the end of the season that I'm way behind in posting about all the ones that are eligible for awards. I'll still try to…
The Donmar Warehouse's production of King Lear with Derek Jacobi as the addled monarch closes at BAM this weekend but I still want to get in my two cents about the show. Besides, it re…
Over the years, Playwrights Horizons has developed a reputation for being an incubator of ambitious musicals that dare to be different. William Finn's In Trousers and March of the Falsettos …
It's looking more and more like a good thing that Hollywood actors are coming to Broadway because someone has to fill the stages here. And as the American Theatre Wing's Howard Sherman recen…
The Independent Theater Bloggers Association, the group of theater watchers who regularly express ourselves online, announced the winners of our third annual theater awards yesterday. …
My hats off to the Hollywood carpetbaggers who've come to Broadway this season. People like to complain about how movie stars are taking roles from established Broadway actors. But wit…
We are now deep into the theater awards season. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park in April and, at the beginning of this month, The Lortel Awards…
My husband K and I recently saw a movie called "Baby Face." The New York Times had said it was a great example of how progressive some movies had been before the Hayes Code clamped down in 1…
Even before he made his American debut in Boeing-Boeing two seasons ago, Mark Rylance was celebrated in a long New Yorker profile (click here to read it). He went on to win a Tony for …
The legendary Arthur Laurents, who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story and directed the original productions of La Cage Aux Folles, Hallelujah, Baby! and the infamous Nick & No…
The poor Tony nominators are damned if they do and damned if they don't. As even the most casual theater fan knows, the Tony nominations were announced yesterday morning (click here to…
It's been a hectic few weeks as the spring theater season drew to its official close on April 28. And that's a large part of the reason that I missed my usual posting day on Saturday. …
It was, by chance, a rainy afternoon when I saw Séance on A Wet Afternoon, the haunting new opera that is playing just through this weekend at the New York City Opera. Because seeing theate…
Bad-mouthing Frank Wildhorn's musicals has been a blood sport for years. Critics complain that his shows"Jekyll & Hyde, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Civil War"pander to plebian tastes a…
If Broadway were a high school, Sutton Foster would be a shoo-in for class sweetheart. She's not a beauty but there's an endearing quality about her gawkiness. She's multi-talent…
Yep, it's true. I've just come off an incredible multimedia weekend. Not only did I make my debut on The American Theatre Wing's long-running TV series "Working in the Theatre" y…
..well, kind of. The folks at The American Theatre Wing invited me to moderate some episodes of their long-running TV series "Working in the Theatre." The hour-long shows bring together pane…
If you like musicals, then Broadway would seem to be the place for you this season. Eight musicals have been scheduled to open in March and April"six of them new shows. And we're…
My husband K and I were having dinner at Orso after seeing the new Stephen Adly Guirgis play when a silver-haired couple walked by, spotted our Playbill lying face down on the table and aske…
Arcadia is an amazing play. The language is, in places, sublime; the ideas totally scintillating. Many consider it to be Tom Stoppard's masterpiece. And yet, the production now playing at th…
