166 stories by "Matthew Westphal"
“[Manfred] Karge, now 77, has been called ‘East Germany’s Orson Welles’ or ‘the Brandenburg Beckett’ – though those aren’t comparisons he is c…
Alexis Soloski: “Mostly I’m in favour of dressing down. It seems democratising to me. Less elitist. It makes theatre seem like the kind of thing anyone and everyone can go do, wh…
Five actors and four dancers will be leaving the 19-person cast of Dusty, a new show about the singer Dusty Springfield, by the end of August. The producers of the show, which began performa…
Threesome, by Yussef El Guindi, “begins as a bawdy bedroom comedy whose main characters, a heterosexual Egyptian-American couple, invite a white American man into their bed. Over two a…
“The biting satirical musical that mocks Mormons has finally come to the heart of Mormonlandia, starting a sold-out, two-week run Tuesday at a Salt Lake City theater two blocks from th…
The director and his colleagues who wrote and staged the nine-hour production that toured the world in the 1980s have returned to the ancient Indian epic for a work titled Battlefield. The f…
Yes, all you millennials – back before you were born, the few people who remembered that the Nazis had used pink triangles to mark out homosexuals in the prison camps tended to view th…
“As the term has gained greater currency – even the White House is using it – a belated spotlight has fallen on one of the key contributors to mass incarceration in this co…
That’s the title of a song – written from the point of view of that unwise woman in the audience – recently posted to YouTube by composer Robert Maggio and lyricist Matthew…
“It’s been horrible to watch our otherwise splendid union’s desperate attempt to boost membership by pretending there was enough money to be made in 50-seat fringe venues t…
That’s Taye Diggs – yes, the guy who gave Stella her groove back. “Hold up, though – is this not madness? Black America’s most eligible bachelor is about to pla…
“Details will be announced on Monday for the Lughnasa International Friel Festival which will have, at its heart, a production of one of Friel’s plays presented on both sides of …
“In a scenario out of Footloose, a Tullahoma clergyman tried to unite local church leaders in opposition to a production of the musical Rent, performed by a mostly teen-aged cast. R…
Douglas Gordon taking an axe to the wall of a theatre after bad reviews of his new production is but one tiny example. Critic Michael Billington offers some more – including Steven Ber…
“Through theatre, the women in the group tell their stories to the people who need to hear them most: police officers, brothel owners, clients, men. The audience gathers in a circle an…
The actress/folk hero explains what exactly the audience member whose phone she took away was doing, where in the theater the offender was sitting, and why her nonstop texting was distractin…
“Roughly one-fifth” – 22%, actually – “of the productions staged at hundreds of theaters nationwide over the past three seasons were written by women, according…
Michelle Terry (currently playing Rosalind at Shakespeare’s Globe): “Going into the forest of Arden, disguised as a man, means she gets to explore every possible version of herse…
Producer Cameron Mackintosh: “We wanted to get into the grit of the opera house and the lair and make it far more atmospheric, in a stylized realistic way. … It’s a much mo…
Nick Silvestri, age 19, in a prepared statement: “I don’t go to plays very much, and I didn’t realize that the stage is considered off limits. I’ve learned a lot abou…
See? It’s not just music critics doing it. “It’s a lesson that audiences have yet to learn. … Patti LuPone will not tolerate your foolery in a Broadway theatre. Or of…
“We could see her text. She was so uninterested. She showed her husband what she was texting. … When we went out for the second act I was very close to her, and she was still tex…
“He said the incident was not a dare. It was not intended as a joke. His iPhone 6 was just low on juice. Why did he do it? What was the emergency? ‘Girls were calling all day. Wh…
Five-time Tony nominee Jan Maxwell: “The kinds of roles I was being offered were just – I’d been there and done that, and I just didn’t want to do that anymore. ̷…
“Customers were asked to book tickets in advance – so we still captured their data – but they did not pay until after the show. There was no obligation to pay anything, ent…
