1,084 stories by "Matthew Murray"
Anger or intimacy?
When your ticket to the theatre includes a five-course meal and you walk away forgetting the food, something is very right with the show.
Because I consider myself pretty well versed in the United States Constitution, I did not expect Colin Quinn's new solo show at the Barrow Street Theatre, Unconstitutional, to teach me much.…
It's not a twinkle in the night sky " it's a supernova.
If the leads' singing and acting ability, raw stage presence, and intense chemistry with each other were all any musical needed, then The Memory Show would be the runaway success of the year.
An amazing thing happens deep in the first act of the American Repertory Theater revival of Pippin that just opened at the Music Box: A spark of humanity ignites.
You may think she's sitting on a couch, but it's really a throne.
Lighting rarely receives its full due in the theater when you're referring strictly to the electrical fixtures hanging high above the stage.
Any regular showgoer knows that, due to the emotions or intensity involved, theatre can be exhausting, but rarely is that more true than with the new musical at The Public Theater, Here Lies…
More than anything else, you feel the pain.
Roles in William Shakespeare's plays " particularly his Big Tragedies " are often realms in which grandstanding and brilliance can occur in roughly equal measure.
The opening images of the revival of Orphans, which just opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld, are all about animals.
Those who have long found the Frank Wildhorn"Leslie Bricusse musical Jekyll & Hyde incomprehensible will not have their minds changed by the bewildering new revival of it that just opened at…
A reminder for all those lost of soul and bereft of spirit: Finding yourself is not an instantaneous process.
Success did not come easily to either Clifford Odets or many of the characters he created for his plays, and rarely is that made more clear than in The Big Knife.
Romance isn't dead after all " at least not on Broadway this season.
Those expecting only to laugh at (rather than with) Motown: The Musical, which just opened at the Lunt-Fontanne, will find their guffaws " temporarily " silenced the instant the curtain goes…
A collision of race, class, sexuality, abuse, and adoption, all occurring between the ticks and tocks of a biological clock about to strike midnight?
Is there much point in complaining when bad is so deliciously good?
It's late in the first act of Kinky Boots, the new musical that just opened at the Al Hirschfeld, and all is hopeless....
"You are the story I should write," sings Jamie Wellerstein, wunderkind author extraordinaire, near the beginning of Jason Robert Brown's song-cycle musical The Last Five Years.
Who says the good guy can't have an edge? Making his Broadway debut in Lucky Guy " the late Nora Ephron's final play, which just opened at the Broadhurst " Tom Hanks proves that he can and s…
Intrepid theatregoers, fret not: Even if you think you've seen it all, musicals remain capable of surprising you....
In recent years it's become easier to forget that superhero musicals didn't begin (and end) with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark...
Where's Merrick when you need him? . . .
