Somewhere in the bowels of the Belasco Theatre, long considered to be haunted by its namesake, the actor Mark Rylance has installed a Ping-Pong table. “I like to encourage a playful pl…
I sat directly behind Stephen Sondheim at a performance of “Fun Home,” a new musical at the Public.
Since Janis Joplin died, in the fall of 1970, her younger siblings, Laura and Michael Joplin, have jointly watched over her estate.
By the time Vickie Lynn Hogan was twenty-six, she had made a name for herself, having modelled for Guess jeans and appeared on the cover of Playboy. The name was Anna Nicole Smith. A native …
“Chicago” captures something canny about the metabolism of fame and about the symbiosis between criminals and the hankering public.
The sixty-seventh annual Antoinette Perry Awards were handed out last night, and they began with Neil Patrick Harris dissing Shia LaBeouf. (“I wouldn’t be here if someone else ha…
Sunlight gleams over the savannah. The cicadas are descending on “Mamma Mia.” June is busting out all over, and, as Leslie Uggams once sang, the lidda bidda drigdes and the hucka…
If most of its promises ended up, well, smashed, the show’s two seasons still offered a Minnelli of delights (it’s like a flock of seagulls) for theatre lovers, who regarded it w…
Should everyone follow Williamson’s lead and throw the offending cell phone? Of course not: theatregoing would turn into a Hobbesian state of nature, or, worse, the L train after midni…
The legend of Mike McAlary—tabloid chronicler of the crime-ridden, crack-laden New York City of the Koch-Dinkins era—has been burnished twice over: first by the man himself, who,…
But what does Meryl Streep have to say? That’s the question I ask myself about most things—the “Mad Men” season première, North Korea, the bumblebee die-off̵…
Three years before Roald Dahl died, he was stumped by a five-year-old. Like many of his protagonists, Matilda Wormwood was a precocious youngster surrounded by monstrous adults and grotesque…
Frank had one last shot at the upper chamber: for one night only, he was making a cameo appearance as a Republican senator in the 1959 musical “Fiorello!”
Who fared the best in Tom Hooper’s, “Les Misérables,” and who was just plain misérable? A ranking, from best to worst, below.
There is a farm in Haddam, Connecticut, that you dreamed of as a child. Some twenty-six dogs run free on its ninety acres—working or retired show dogs, many of them former Totos, from …
For sixteen years, the actor Roger Rees and the playwright Rick Elice have lived in a book-crammed apartment in the Beresford, on Central Park West. Elice (New Yorker, garrulous) is the auth…
Until Mayor Bloomberg leaves office or marries his longtime partner, Diana Taylor, New York City will have to do without a proper First Lady, as it has, effectively, since 2000, when Rudolph…
In 2006, the singer-songwriters Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová put out a tiny movie called “Once,” which went on to earn twenty million dollars and an Academy Award, …
Broadway, like New York City, is a place where petty comforts are fought for but rarely won. So when Jujamcyn Theatres, which owns five Broadway houses, recently announced a “revolutio…
This week, an Off Broadway revival of "Carrie," the musical based on the Stephen King novel, starts performances at the Lucille Lortel, marking the semi-ironic return of what may be Broadway…
"I won't grow up!" is the mantra of many a grad student and Botox injectee, but the line belongs to Peter Pan, and specifically to Cathy Rigby, the former Olympic gymnast who has played the …
The three activities that made people the happiest are sex, exercise, and going to the theatre.
The Research Behind the "Anything Goes" Revival