1,084 stories by "Matthew Murray"
As Stephen Sondheim, Michael John LaChiusa, and many others have proven over the last four decades, a concept musical absolutely must have a concept.
Chances are that all your assumptions " about its level of humor, about its effectiveness, about its shock value (or lack thereof) " are precisely correct.
Certainly, this isn't your grandmother's Oz adaptation, though given
its spiritual resemblance to The Wiz, maybe it's your aunt's.
Allen's plotting and foundational concepts are so strong that you can't help but feel that time and additional testing will help bend Sex Curve's benefit curve even more sharply upward.
Hanky Panky and Surviving Love, part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival
Beauty and purpose can be found anywhere. There's certainly plenty of both to be found in All New People.
Gated and The Dickening, part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival
It's possible " if exceedingly unlikely " that when a woman enters within the first moments of Susan Charlotte's play The Shoemaker, which just opened at the Acorn Theatre, and says, "My sol…
What theatre has always possessed " and what continues to distinguish it from film, television, and so many other art forms " is a rigorous devotion to imagination.
But when Death Takes a Holiday speaks, and especially sings, from its heart, as it does with increasing regularity and urgency as the evening unfolds, it gives you almost everything you coul…
It puts a taut and fascinating, if sometimes off-handed, spin on a tale so familiar it often seems to have no additional facets to explore.
A Strange and Separate People, which just opened at the Theatre Row Studio Theatre, concerns how gay men participate in perhaps an even more exclusionary community: that of Orthodox Jews on …
". . . at least you can definitively say upon leaving it that you've never seen or heard anything like it before."
Civil Rights, Vietnam, Woodstock " whatever you may think of the Baby Boomer era, there's no denying its inhabitants made some major history and represented an individuality and ambition rar…
If anything could be the subject of wall-shattering comedy, it's American energy policy.
Some theatrical phenomena are merely difficult to understand; others are downright impossible.
The societal indignities suffered by women and the exploitation of blacks at white hands are such powerful subjects to the American psyche that's it not surprising they keep turning up as th…
"Fine drama and comedy never go out of style, but parody has a much shorter shelf life."
It's difficult to learn much from a teacher you can't trust.
"... unquestionably among the very worst professional productions of Shakespeare I have ever seen. (We're talking bottom five here " at best.)"
This is head-to-toe environmental theatre of the kind that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark aimed for but never quite achieved.
All's Well That Ends Well has been deemed one of the "problem plays" for the same reason that Sullivan and his excellent company, led by Annie Parisse and André Holland, make it seem so rig…
If you think weddings are nerve-wracking enough as they are, imagine trying to plan one while you're constantly being tormented with mental pictures of your parents having sex!
... this is a play that's confused by the dead-end opportunities it keeps presenting itself, ...
