5,855 stories by "Jonathan Mandell"
A sign of the vitality of American theater in the 1960s is how many shows that Al Hirschfeld caricatured at the time are currently on New York stages in revivals: 1776, A Delicate Balance, F…
Below is a day-by-day calendar of theater opening* in November, a month that features six new Broadway shows, four of them musicals, as well as some exciting theater-adjacent events, such as…
Broadway 2023 is shaping up, even as Fall 2022 heats up, with eight Broadway shows having opened in October, six more scheduled to do so in November, and Off Broadway featuring new plays wit…
How well were you paying attention to New York theater in October " the shows (eight on Broadway alone!), the controversies (many)? Answer these ten questions to find out Loading…
"Hound Dog," a play with music, evokes Elvis, Joni Mitchell and "Ramy" the Hulu series about an Egyptian-American immigrant family in New Jersey (the last unintentionally) " which provide th…
In 2016, Stephen Sondheim, who was working on a new musical based on two movies by Luis Buñuel,  was listed on an internal memo at the New Yorker Magazine as a possible subject for …
Gabriel Byrne gives four different kinds of curtain calls in the middle of "Walking With Ghosts," his lovely solo show opening tonight at Broadway's Music Box Theater. These are hilarious im…
Ralph Fiennes nails Robert Moses " the gruff, no-nonsense New York voice, the pugnacious face, the planted stance ready for combat; pelvis thrust forward. Commanding, confident to the point …
Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Joe Morton and Sean Combs have all portrayed Walter Lee Younger on Broadway. Given how admired these performers are,  it may come as a shock that the…
Will a Caesars Palace casino be put above the Minskoff Theater,  home to "The Lion King"? Caesars and the landlord of 1515 Broadway, SL Green, have put in a bid with the New York St…
Theater heals in grim times, even in grim shows, according to several theater bloggers, who are sounding a surprising note of optimism in recent posts amid the current reports of tension bot…
"What Kind of Woman," playwright Abbe Tanenbaum tells us in a program note, was inspired by a cache of letters from women seeking abortion before Roe vs. Wade, which she discovered …
Broadway performers Idina Menzel, Gideon Glick, Andy Mientus, Nancy Olson, directors Jack O'Brien and Sheldon Epps are all new authors " of memoirs, novels, a cookbook, a children's book; no…
Is "Topdog/Underdog" as outdated as the three-card monte that the play revolves around? In Suzan-Lori Parks' twenty-year-old play, two brothers with the loaded names of Lincoln and Booth spe…
Emma Rice's jokey, sprawling musical adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" that opens tonight at St. Ann's Warehouse might befuddle anyone who associates the title with the 1939 movie. Laurence …
Two Broadway cast members provoked voluble reactions among theater lovers this past week,  both of which feel like case studies with surprisingly complex implications. Sara Porkalob, w…
Sara Porkalob, who is making her Broadway debut portraying Edward Rutledge, the pro-slavery representative from South Carolina, in the gender-reversed Broadway revival of "1776," gave an …
For Edward Hopper, theater was a passionate pastime, an inspiration, and also, from first to last, a subject of his paintings " enough of them to fill a gallery and then some in "Edward Hopp…
The first Broadway revival of August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson"Â is full of stars and ghosts. The ghosts are what make it brilliant. Don't misunderstand. It's thrilling that: -Samuel L. J…
Angela Lansbury received her first Oscar nomination before World War II was won, and today, there are children who know who she is. It's hard to imagine anyone matching the historical sweep …
Angela Lansbury, the English born actress, child star in Hollywood and beloved sleuth of "Murder She Wrote" who conquered Broadway relatively late in life, died today at her home in Los Ange…
Three more shows opened last week, the latest in the revved-up Broadway season, all three with non-traditional casts, two of them familiar Broadway fare thus made unfamiliar (and, the produc…
In honor of Indigenous Peoples' Day, which President Joe Biden first formally recognized as a national holiday in 2021, to be celebrated the second Monday of October (today!) " not coinci…
The "Death of a Salesman" that opens tonight on Broadway begins and ends with the people around Willy Loman literally singing the blues " the music that turned the bitterness and exhaustion …
A day before opening night of the sixth Broadway production of Arthur Miller's 1949 plays seems a good time to resurrect my review of the fifth production which opened on March 15th, 2012 st…
