71 stories by "Jan@broadwayandme"
Unlike the movies or TV, the theater prides itself on being an art form that is supportive of women, including what people like to call "women of a certain age." Even younger male play…
If you love meta musicals"and judging by the ecstatic reviews the show has gotten, a whole lot of people do"you're going to love The Book of Mormon, which opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatr…
My husband K is crazy about Frank Loesser. The movie version of the composer's Pulitzer Prize"winning final work, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, sat in our Tivo queu…
I saw Mambo Mouth, John Leguizamo's first one-man show when it played at the old American Place Theatre back in 1991. And I had a really good time"a better time, alas, than I had at Gh…
People I know keep asking me what I think about Good People, the new David Lindsay-Abaire play. They don't need my opinion to determine whether it's, well, good because the show, now p…
Beautiful Burnout, which is playing through March 27 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn Heights, is the textbook definition of style over substance. But the style is sensational. …
The rap on the current revival of That Championship Season, which opened at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre last week, is that the play is outdated. Which seems a silly thing to say.&nbs…
While reading the Times this morning, my husband K discovered that our friend Judd Jones had died. That means the world is a less fun place.
Judd, who passed on March 9 at the age o…
Monday is traditionally a dark night in the theater so performances are rare, which probably explains why the New York Theatre Workshop was filled with theater folks"press and otherwise"when…
Bill Eppridge/TIME & LIFE Pictures,
Life's other demands have gotten in the way of my writing here and so I am again missing my regular Saturday morning posting deadline. But I'm hoping …
There's a lively debate currently going on within the theater blogosphere. The subject is whether M.F.A. programs, writers' workshops and the need to satisfy su…
One of the best experiences I ever had in the theater was seeing A.R. Gurney's Love Letters. Many times. And that's a large part of why I so loved it. The story is told thr…
Sign me up for the Geoffrey Rush fan club. And make that a lifetime membership, please. Like most people, I discovered the off-beat Australian actor when I saw his breakout"and O…
We're closing in on the end of Black History Month. And I suspect that the August Wilson estate has seen another big uptick in royalty receipts as theaters around the country marked th…
Here are a few hard facts of modern theatergoing life. Times are tough. Money is tight. And so casts are small. Sometimes too small. As is the case with Compulsion, the new…
Tennessee Williams would have been 100 if he'd lived until March 26. Although the chances of the hard-drinking, drug-abusing Williams surviving that long were never great. But he was, …
My hat is off to Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal. He could be hauling in big bucks playing brooding superheroes in 3-D action movies and she sassy c…
This coming Monday is not only Valentine's Day, it also marks the fourth anniversary of Broadway & Me. So I get to celebrate two things I love deeply: my husband K and writing here…
Before I went to see Rain, the concert tribute to the Beatles that reopened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre last night after a three-week hiatus, I wondered who would pay up to $120 to see a …
Despite the frigid weather, people milled around excitedly outside City Center on Wednesday evening. It's always like that on the night before the latest Encores! production opens and family…
What a year Rajiv Joseph is having. His play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo has been hailed as a brilliant meditation on the Iraq War, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last spring and wi…
The first thing I do when I go to see a play at the Mint Theater Company is check out the bookshelf in its lobby. The Mint specializes in works by playwrights who have been forgotten and tho…
Thanks to books (fictional homages by Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and George Bernard Shaw), movies (like the 1997 Stephen Fry biopic "Wilde," in which Jude Law played his lover) and, of…
Lincoln Center Theater must be a great place to work. The best actors in the theater today seem to be queuing up at its door. Just reading its cast lineups this season has been like lo…
Everyone sitting around me in BAM's Harvey Theater this past Saturday seemed to be a diehard theatergoer. The woman next to me was boasting about how she already had tickets to see Com…
