5,808 stories by "Jonathan Mandell"
Here is a song from Fun Home, in which the three Bechdel children, whose father is (among other things) a funeral director, make up a commercial for the establishment, which they have nickna…
Christian Borle plays William Shakespeare as a kind of Elizabethan Era Elvis in “Something Rotten.” Here he is performing “IT’s Hard to Be The Bard” at the Star…
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is coming back to Lincoln Center, more relevant than ever. From June 10 to 21, Â the company will perform such works as: After the Rain Pas de Deux b…
“When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense," Robert De Niro said in a commencement address this past week to graduates of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Tw…
Artists discuss their responsibility to historyBy JONATHAN MANDELLWelcome to Part 2 of our two-part look at how Broadway is currently staging history. Today, we talk to Broadway artists abou…
To the extent that “Elling” works, it is not due to the wisps of plot, which are even more incidental than they are implausible. The entertainment comes from the well-pitched per…
A mysterious but familiar stranger visits a multigenerational household of struggling black men in Jackie Alexander's sometimes insightful play, which is undermined by a vague, predictable p…
The only problem with “La Bete,” which has now opened on Broadway, is what certainly shot it down in 1991 — the play itself, an imitation Moliere comedy set in 17th century…
Not the end of the line? Though the Scottsboro Boys found only a short welcome on Broadway, there's already talk that their musicalized adventures might become a feature film.
Caridad Svich's stage adaptation of Julie Alvarez's poetic and sorrowful novel chronicling the real-life story of the murder of the revolutionary Mirabal sisters of the Dominican Republic do…
But it is hard to judge the script alone when the production has so much going for it — the fine performances, a six-member cast that includes Estelle Parsons as Margie’s babysit…
How Spider-Man’s mishaps reflect the long history of stage safety Even before Christopher Tierney plummeted some 30 feet off a platform to become the fourth cast member with serious in…
“Elf” the musical, a harmless and occasionally charming stage adaptation that has now opened at the Al Hirschfeld Theater and runs just until January 2, more or less replicates t…
With wine and song, three performers push the genre envelopeIt would be wrong to call Three Pianos a jukebox musical, even though it is a stage show created around a series of old songs. Aft…
It is Patrick Stewart’s skills as a performer - his life in the theater — that offer some of the major pleasures in the Broadway version of this slight, sweet, slow, sentimental …
If it frustrates our expectations, “A Free Man of Color” - ambitious, inventive, daring — is an honorable failure with much to recommend it, even while it is difficult to s…
Why the recent boom in theatre about theatre? Patrick Stewart has portrayed a spaceship captain, a mutant, Scrooge, and Macbeth, but the character he’s performing this season on Broad…
Thanks primarily to the impressive performances of Lauria as the explosive coach and Light as his wife, “Lombardi” is nowhere near as bad as might be assumed by those who cannot …
This modest, somewhat clichéd play with a few Latin songs takes place in a barbershop in Washington Heights and is told almost entirely in Spanish and from a Dominican perspective.
Soldiers during World War II line up to visit a prostitute, and one eventually does, in this intermittently intriguing but underdeveloped exercise.
Excerpts from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s commencement speech at Wesleyan College, where he graduated in 2002, in which he mentions the genesis of In The Heights, and quotes from Hamilton. Th…
