610 stories by "Richard Seff"
Richard Seff interrupted his Fla vacation to catch the WSS touring company.
Richard Seff reviews this "splendid import from Britain."
Richard Seff reviews the new musical In Transit at 59E59.
What a joy to see a rich plumcake of a play, crafted well without apology for its craftsmanship, using language as it was meant to be used, to illuminate, to entertain, to engage.
"I have two winners for you this time, as opposed to my last column which featured two on the down side."
A.R. Gurney has written over 40 plays and I'll wager he's had more use of perhaps 6 characters than any playwright in history. This prolific playwright is in the Alan Ayckbourn/Neil Simon cl…
Doug Hughes, who seems to be directing every other show to hit New York, manages to make us believe he's been thoroughly steeped in this world of inbred Southern ways and means. He is helped…
It doesn’t sound like much of an epitaph for a Broadway season, but Something Rotten is indeed the title of the last show to open before the deadline for a 2015 Tony nomination. Happil…
Hillary Mantel is a novelist, dramatist and critic whose best known works are her two novels about the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. The play Wolf Hall is the collective title of two long…
This will be a short review because I have respect for the creative team behind Doctor Zhivago, but disappointment in their relentlessly moving musical now at the Broadway Theatre. Boris Pas…
I suggest that producers, composers, writers, stars and others with lots of money earned from their work other than in theatre, those who have done no apprenticeship in theatre, who have nev…
When all the elements fuse, when a director is clearly in charge and on the right track, it is such a pleasure to be out front watching everything come together, to make magic from first lig…
Full disclosure: I have known and loved Chita Rivera and her talent since we were virtually toddlers. I was then (we’re talking the early 1950s) a baby agent and she had just emerged f…
In the 1940s and ’50s summer theatres popped up all over the place, particularly in New England, where every other town boasted of one. Westport, Ct. had two; Hyannis, Falmouth, Dennis…
“Fresh as paint” kept buzzing through my head as I sat, enthralled, as this latest “new musical based on a famous film” sang and danced its way across the boards of t…
If you leave your sense of disbelief checked in the cloak room at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway, you might just have a fun time as you watch this marriage romp unwind, filled with …
For those of you who love live theatre enough to cherish the teamwork of two major acting talents, Skylight by David Hare should motivate you to book yourself a seat this spring, for the run…
The current stage revival on Broadway of Lerner and Loewe’s film Gigi is lovely to look at. It’s filled with principal performers in supporting roles, who have played leads on Br…
I’m sending you this note on the City Center’s staged reading of Lerner and Loewe’s Paint Your Wagon even though its brief 6 performances scheduled ended earlier today. I w…
The word is out. It didn’t arrive in town with much hoopla, most thought “another revival of a relic from the past” so it fooled even the vast ticket buying public, but the…
In 1989 Wendy Wasserstein’s play hit Broadway hard, dealing with her fervent feelings about women’s liberation which began with her graduation from high school just as the 19…
It’s always a pleasure to welcome Helen Mirren back to the Broadway stage. Her new vehicle by Peter Morgan, who served her well once before as author of “The Queen,” a film…
Larry David's 'Fish' gives new meaning to the word "promising." There's no question his play is full of laughs, but it is peopled by over a dozen completely one dimensional characters who re…
At the conclusion of the Saturday matinee during the seven performance run of each Encores! presentation at New York’s City Center, there is always a talkback with members of the compa…
I hadn’t been to the Nederlander, the theatre that is the furthest south in the neighborhood called “Broadway”, since Rent opened there in 1996. That musical stayed put for…
