Clarence McCrane, better known as Strings, is "the third biggest crossover star in the history of country music." In Hold On to Me Darling, Kenneth Lonergan's lumpy and scattershot new play …
The first mistake writers of musicals usually make happens before they write: They choose too good or too bad a source. Too good is the more difficult case; the material, having given them d…
Danai Gurira's devastating Eclipsed, about four women enslaved as "wives" to a rebel commander during the Liberian civil war, opens this Sunday on Broadway after a sold-out run at the Public…
It takes a special kind of pluck, or vanity, to name your musical Disaster! and not expect critics to agree. But then everything about the campy little show of that name that's opening tonig…
The theater is dying. The theater is dead. Oh, look, it's reviving; no, it's dead again. It's always been that way " yet suddenly, now it isn't. For the first time since losing its connectio…
Through heavy walls and a warren of hallways, before I'm even buzzed into the studio, I recognize Audra McDonald's voice. She's just doing vocalise: singing scales on the syllables eh and oo…
The first word spoken in David Harrower's Blackbird is "shock," and the superb production that opens on Broadway tonight wastes no time in justifying it. Not so much in speech; the next nine…
On the stage of the Booth Theater, the scenic designer Christopher Oram has built a magnificent ruin of a once-respectable hotel, complete with double-height lobby, an antique elevator, and …
Serious naturalism is the New York house style this season, with works like The Humans, Eclipsed, and Blackbird highlighting the spring Broadway lineup. What a surprise, then, that for the l…
When Mark Rylance accepted the 2008 Tony award for his performance in the French farce Boeing-Boeing, and when he accepted again in 2011 for his performance in the English drama Jerusalem, h…
The entire action of Stephen Karam's play The Humans takes place in the Chinatown apartment that 26-year-old Brigid Blake has just moved into with her boyfriend, Richard Saad. It's a duplex,…
Sam Shepard had already been writing for the theater for 14 years when Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979. The play"his 23rd or so, depending on how you count"was both a distillatio…
Four Harvard graduates walk into a scene: Valerie, a young African-American actor; Jackson, an African-American surgical intern; Ginny, a Chinese-Japanese-American psychology professor; and …
One of the many useful and fascinating things the Encores! series has done over the years " last night's opening of Cabin in the Sky marks the start of its 23rd season " is to highlight, and…
A playwright enters dangerous territory when he attempts to dramatize his struggle to become an artist: a struggle that is supposedly resolved, or at least justified, by the artistry he now …
My Kindle tells me that it takes an average reader some ten hours to get through Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The delightful Bedlam stage version, which had a successful run in 2014 …
If theater is a hot medium, musical theater burns, making it a particularly bad match for the coolness of television. The three recent live musicals on NBC (The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, Th…
Stephen Karam's Chinatown apartment, which he moved into after the success of his 2011 play Sons of the Prophet, is a huge step up from his last place. Yes, the elevator is tetchy, and the d…
Every year, American Theatre magazine publishes a list of the country's most-produced playwrights. It makes sense that Ayad Akhtar topped the latest edition: His award-winning plays, many pe…
Anna Cantor, the title character of Our Mother's Brief Affair, is a suburban matron, a passive-aggressive parent, and, even in the throes of semi-dementia, a genius with a barb. (As long as …
Will we ever stop arguing about Mother Courage and Her Children? From the time Brecht wrote it, in 1939, as Fascism was approaching its orgasm in Europe, until three weeks ago, when Tonya Pi…
The key thing about farce isn't the slamming of doors but the solidity of walls; without rigid order there can be no liberating chaos. The carpentry is crucial, and I doubt there's ever been…
When Hamilton opened Off Broadway at the Public Theater last February, and then transferred to Broadway in August, many of the reviews, including mine, used words like historic, groundbreaki…
It's hard enough to revive a musical that didn't work the first time; that's why John Doyle's new version of The Color Purple is rightfully such a sensation. But it may be an even harder job…
There are several ways to define a Broadway theater, all tautological. It's a theater that uses a Broadway contract. It's a theater in the Broadway district " Sixth Avenue to Eighth Avenue, …