1,084 stories by "Matthew Murray"
You don't need to have served in the military to know that the old axiom is true.
Spring has finally sprung in New York, but it's summer 365 days a year in the Illyria of The Public Theater's Mobile Unit production of Twelfth Night.
Even a door that's slammed rarely stays shut forever.
Swing music tends to be both exciting and comforting: reliant on the bright, brash edges of brass, but conjuring the more innocently explosive energy of a simpler and carefree era.
Few plays of recent vintage have entered the public consciousness, to say nothing of the public vernacular, the way Six Degrees of Separation has.
It's no wonder that the story of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova continues to fascinate a century after her death: Hers is one of the few modern fairy tales everyone wants to bel…
With her gripping new play The Antipodes, which just opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Annie Baker considers one of the artist's eternal dilemmas: What happens when you give ev…
Chocolate has traditionally fallen into the category of things that are pretty good even when they're bad.
The real news about the slam-bang revival of Hello, Dolly! that just opened at the Shubert isn't what you think.
Certain distances may seem large, but can in fact be very small: between wealth and poverty, for example, or between importance and meaninglessness, or between being somebody and being nobod…
It's almost impossible today to imagine a time when a Broadway play would have been shut down for obscenity, especially about the long-since-accepted topic of homosexuality.
Andy Karl looked to be in visible pain at the end of the Friday night press performance of Groundhog Day, the new musical at the August Wilson.
It's a sad fact of the even sadder world we live in that J.T. Rogers's play Oslo, which just opened at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center following a run downstairs at the Mitzi E. Newhou…
Magic acts can get away with being quiet and contemplative, as the magic is usually flashy and showy enough.
The one intriguing twist Zayd Dohrn puts on the traditional culture-clash-marriage plot he uses in The Profane, which just opened at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, is t…
You don't need to be obsessed with beauty products to grasp the timeless axiom about makeup: Less is more.
When you need gold-plated ham, who better to turn to than Kevin Kline?
You already know the tune that gives Martin Sherman's new play at The Public Theater, Gently Down the Stream, its title.
Charm used to be the glue that held musicals together, but today it's largely unappreciated, if not outright scorned, as antithetical to big products and big budgets that can't (or shouldn't…
The Play That Goes Wrong, which just opened at the Lyceum, is funny.
It's rarely fun to have your intelligence demeaned, but you may not mind the way John Leguizamo does it.
When Lynn Nottage's new play Sweat opened at The Public Theater last year right before election day (November 3, to be exact) it made one kind of political statement.
At least the helicopter is better. . . .
Sarah Ruhl is a playwright who usually needs an editor, and for the first act of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, her new play at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, she seems…
Subtlety is no great hallmark of Arthur Miller's plays.
