5,854 stories by "Jonathan Mandell"
In "Merry Me," billed as a lesbian sex comedy,  a seven-member cast is charming enough to wring laughs out of playwright Hansol Jung's raunchy effort to queer the canon, in what often …
At BAM, the waiter offered me the menu, but it only had one sentence written on it: "Say 'I would like to order the Arctic char.'" "I would like to order the Arctic char," I complied."How wo…
Theresa Rebeck's play about a hoarder is the slightest of comedies. Its plot is paltry. Its insights are pat. It promises more laughs than it delivers.  It even promises more junk than…
Mickey Sabbath, the 64-year-old self-absorbed, lecherous narrator and protagonist of Philip Roth's 1995 novel, had a career as a puppeteer until he got arthritis, and there is a moment early…
Below is a calendar of theater opening* in New York in November, featuring the return to the stage of Danny DeVito, Diane Wiest, Priscilla Lopez, James Monroe Iglehart and Christopher Abbott…
How well were you paying attention to theater news and reviews in October? Take this quiz and see. Loading…
Timed for Halloween, this latest digital theater, livestreamed from the closet in Joshua William Gelb's East Village apartment, feels as much of a landmark production as the original "Nosfer…
Twenty new shows will be opening on Broadway (so far) in the remainder of the 2023-2024 season, including two newly announced " as well as a revival next Fall of one of the country's most pe…
"Stereophonic"Â Â chronicles a year of recording studio sessions by the members of a popular 1970s rock band (never named, fictional) as they put together their latest album and have the…
The title character of "King of the Jews" " a Holocaust-set play at HERE that is inventively staged and well-acted, but both intentionally and unintentionally disturbing " is inspired by the…
In "Hummus NYC," the first of four stories in "The Holylanders," a play by Moria Zrachia about Israelis living in America, Amir is outraged by what happened to his son Nuri. But the story…
Fifteen jukebox musicals were featured in last night's odd concert at Merkin Hall, "Jukebox: The Musical," part of the Kaufman Music Center's Broadway Close Up series. The concert feat…
So many of the reviews of "Here We Are" end like eulogies for Stephen Sondheim, or feature at least a line of farewell, that these are the passages I find worth quoting, more than the critic…
"O, isn't this wonderful?!" Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) exclaims upon seeing her old friends at her door. It is the first line in Stephen Sondheim's first new musical in two decades, p…
 Laurie Anderson launched the Brooklyn Academy of Music's fortieth annual Next Wave Festival Tuesday night with "Let X = X," an unconventional concert that featured, yes, songs from throu…
There's a photograph of 23-year-old Stephen Sondheim with Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollabrigida on the set of director John Huston's movie "Beat the Devil," where  Sondhei…
Heidi Schreck's "What The Constitution Means To Me" is the most produced play in America this season, according to American Theatre Magazine's latest survey, and Lynn Nottage is the most pro…
Helen of Troy, the beauty whose face launched a thousand ships, the woman whose exploits inspired poets and playwrights from Homer to Euripides to Virgil to Shakespeare and his contemporary …
It's easier to feel that theater is bouncing back during such a busy week on Broadway and beyond  (especially for critics trying to catch up on shows that opened earlier whose runs hav…
"Job" begins with a woman in her twenties pointing a gun at a male therapist in his sixties. Why? That's not fully revealed until the end of the therapy session, a climax that's so odious an…
Books about the Method school of acting and about theater's long history of "racial impersonation" have been named the best theater books of the year by The Theatre Library Association, w…
Peg is unhappy, not just because her husband died a year ago, but also because it's been ages since she's seen a bat on the prairie that surrounds her house in rural Wisconsin."You want…
"Gutenberg! The Musical!" is deliberately bad " that's the central joke of it " but much of what's bad about it isn't deliberate. The score is largely unmemorable. The premise makes little s…
People will be watching "Merrily We Roll Along" in 2040, if all goes as planned. That's the year that director Richard Linklater plans to release a movie adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim a…
"(pray)" might feel at first like a theatrically heightened version of a traditional gospel church service, with church ladies in their Sunday finest preaching and praying, clapping and sway…
