5,860 stories by "Jonathan Mandell"
"Like most people of color, black people in the New World, I came by my passion for literature in a circuitous way, a night journey marked by music, movement, improvisation, and smells of pe…
"Make Believe" begins with a child on stage silently playing with a Cabbage Patch Doll in an attic playroom; after a while her sister calls out "Mom?" a dozen times off-stage. Â Then her b…
What is a gay play? These three very different plays in the first week of the new Rave Theater Festival could all arguably fit the label, but it would mean stretching the definition beyond t…
They installed metal detectors in the Al Hirschfeld Theater, the new home of "Moulin Rouge," during the same week that panicking pedestrians a block away mistook a motorcycle backfiring for …
It was uncanny how much "Noirtown" made me feel as if I was living inside a film noir classic like "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep" " stylish, seductive, tough-talking and unfathomabl…
For the 43rd summer in a row, Theater for the New City is touring a free original outdoor musical in streets, playgrounds and parks throughout all five boroughs (See schedule below.)Â As …
"Moulin Rouge" was thrilling from the moment I entered the theater… until about ten minutes after it began. That's because the brightest star in this stage adaptation of Baz Luhrmann's 200…
Bat Out of Hell is a frequently enjoyable jukebox musical running at New York City Center through September 8, using the muscular rock opera anthems from singer Meat Loaf's trilogy of bes…
It's not at all baffling why these two modest monologues by different playwrights were yoked together into a single show at the Public Theater earlier this year. There's an even simpler expl…
Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal are certainly the reason why "Sea Wall/A Life" has now moved uptown to the Hudson… In the lobby of the Hudson, for $20 you can buy a quartet of magnets wi…
"Bat Out of Hell"Â is a frequently enjoyable jukebox musical running at New York City Center through September 8, using the muscular rock opera anthems from singer Meat Loaf's trilogy of b…
Actors Equity went on strike for the first time on August 7, 1919 " one hundred years ago today. Stars like Ethel Barrymore, W.C. Fields and Marie Dressler joined hundreds of their fellow un…
It makes sense that George Abbott is the first theater artist profiled in "The 100 Most Important People in Musical Theatre" (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 288 pages, publication date…
I spent much of the week in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, attending the week-long 16th biennial National Black Theatre Festival, which presented 30 plays and musicals from black theaters in…
Three mass shootings in a single week " in Gilroy, California last Sunday leaving three dead; in El Paso,Texas leaving at least 20 dead Sunday: in Dayton, Ohio, leaving at least nine dead " …
Harold Prince, the consummate Broadway producer and director who died on Wednesday at the age of 91, had his first Broadway credit in April 1950, as an assistant stage manager for "Tickets, …
In "Hannah Senesh," a play running through August 18th at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the title character is a Jewish teenager in Europe in the 1930s who starts keeping a diary at age 13.…
Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge deliver back-to-back monologues in the only show opening on Broadway in August. After a promised Broadway run was scrapped, "Bat Out of Hell" is finally ope…
Harold Prince died this morning at 91 years of age after a brief illness, in Reykjavik, Iceland. There will be no funeral, but a celebration of his life is planned.  The lights of allÂ�…
Harold Prince died this morning at 91 years of age after a brief illness, in Reykjavik, Iceland. There will be no funeral, but a celebration of his life is planned.  The lights of allÂ�…
How well were you paying attention to the theater news and views in July, from the Broadway Blackout to the Dunaway Dismissal? Answer these dozen questions and find out. Â
Below is the list of nominations announced tonight for the 15th annual New York Innovative Theater Awards, which celebrates the best of the city's independent theater " aka Off-Off Broadway.…
Other New Yorkers may view midsummer, with its heat waves and general malaise, as time to get out of the city. Theatergoers know it as festival fever. These include some of the familiar annu…
 The three shows reviewed below from this year's New York Musical Festival are all, each in its own way, naïve…or one of the near synonyms for the word naïve, each of which offer…
It would be easy to make some wrong assumptions about this dinner theater production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Café Fae, given its title, its marketing, and the fact that it is co-p…
