5,854 stories by "Jonathan Mandell"
Below are videos from the Broadway casts who performed at the 2023 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade: "& Juliet, "Spamalot," "Shucked" "How To Dance in Ohio," and rehearsal video from "Back…
Long before Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray sang "The Money Song" in the musical "Cabaret," set in a cabaret in Nazi Germany, a performer sang a similarly satirical song about money in a real ca…
Graciela Daniele, a Broadway luminary for six decades, directs this lovely and peculiar musical written by her good friend Michael John LaChiusa, who uses Daniele's life as the inspiration f…
Of the eight shows I reviewed this past week, I probably reacted to two of them differently than I would have without the rise in antisemitism over the last six weeks.About the Broadway revi…
Below is the Broadway schedule for Thanksgiving Week 2023, which differs from the usual week's schedule: Only two shows of the 26 currently playing have performances on Thanksgiving Day (Thu…
"Hell's Kitchen," opening tonight at the Public Theater, is not a musical biography of Alicia Keys, nor, despite the title, is it about the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood where she grew up. It'…
About halfway through Lameece Issaq's solo show, a younger man named Gabe dressed as an angel, in a wig and women's makeup, arrives at the home of the unnamed woman at the center of the stor…
For only the third time in Broadway history, you can see a play this weekend live as it's being performed on stage even if you live thousands of miles away. "Jaja's African Hair Braiding,…
In its first Broadway revival, "Spamalot" is high-stepping, low-brow and often hilarious. The cast, featuring such comic royalty of the Rialto as Christopher Fitzgerald, Michael Urie and Les…
In "Scene Partners," we first see Dianne Wiest in close-up on a screen, as pink and bejeweled as a movie star, though more nervous than one, as she says: "Hello! I'm Meryl Kowalski, comin…
On this, the seventieth anniversary year of the signature work of Nobel Prize winning author Samuel Beckett, a play in which (as one Beckett scholar famously put it) "nothing happens, …
When Barry Manilow's musical finally debuted in New York last year, I was thrilled. I had just one small reservation. On my second viewing of "Harmony," which opens tonight on Broadway, that…
Alexandra Tatarsky's solo show should probably come with a warning. This is not because she keeps on taking things out of her crotch, including a Styrofoam head to which she's apparently giv…
It's been a week of what Broadway-goers might consider alternative theater  " above all, the announcement that "Sleep No More" and "Here Lies Love" are closing, which prompted my look …
It came as a shock to lovers of immersive theater, and reportedly even to the people who work on  "Sleep No More," the show by the British theater company Punchdrunk that launched New …
The most enduring theater of Western Civilization was created by combat veterans. "Ancient Greek drama was a form of storytelling, communal therapy, and ritual reintegration for combat veter…
Five albums have been nominated for the best musical theater album, all of them of current or recent Broadway shows (like last year, but unlike the year before.). The 66th annual Grammy Awar…
In the video below, dozens of Broadway performers have recorded the song from "Les Miserables" with a slightly altered title on behalf of the more than two hundred people who were kidnapped …
Electric Root's version of "The Sound of Music" and BlackBox Ensemble's newly translated version of "Borrowed Landscape"  each separately gave one-night-only performances this week.…
"Watch Night" is Bill T. Jones and company's response to the mass shootings by white supremacists of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S…
When we were little, I remember my brother being frightened by the Saber-toothed tiger in our book about prehistoric animals. I wasn't. I had nightmares about Pinocchio " not the Disney cart…
Over the course of her solo show about an Argentinian who moves as a child to New York City, Florencia Iriondo hands out little round chipas, an Argentine cheese bread (savory), and little s…
Raunch, regrets and puppets dominated the New York theater that opened this week, sometimes all three in the same show. Two different plays told the story of an older man's reaction to l…
Ephraim Sykes, one of Broadway's top song-and-dance men, starred as Joey Evans in  "Pal Joey," which ended its half-week run today as part of the New York City Center Encores! Concert …
When last we saw playwright Qui Nguyen's parents,  in "Vietgone," Nguyen's acclaimed 2016 play with an unconventional pop culture approach,  Quang and Tong had separately escaped…
