610 stories by "Richard Seff"
Playwright Ayad Akhtar has Disgraced running on Broadway. It’s found its audience, which responds to the play’s sparkling and insightful dialogue dealing with the complicated rel…
Bernard Pomerance’s play from 1977 has been revived on Broadway for a fourteen week run, starring Bradley Cooper in the title role, which is the only big news connected with the produc…
It’s a few months after Hurricane Sandy hit New York on October 29, 2012. Staten Island took a beating from the storm and when the lights come up on Sharyn Rothstein’s new play, …
One of the unexpected pleasures of covering New York theatre for our site is that I have the opportunity to view the wide spectrum of subjects, themes, current issues that playwrights use as…
Another revival has plunked itself down on Broadway . As the original new musicals are mostly half baked, I wonder what the season will be like 20 years from now, when there is nothing to re…
I have to credit Jack O’Brien, the director, and lead producer Tom Kirdahy for delivering what is unquestionably the hottest ticket in town as we hit the mid-season mark. I say that be…
A full house at the 776 seat Circle in the Square in Manhattan’s theatre district managed to settle in just before 8PM, for there were signs all over the place announcing “No one…
When Mike Nichols passed away last Wednesday night at the age of 83, I found myself needing to hit the YouTube buttons to have another look at some of the sketches he and Elaine May performe…
I bring you my first double header, as play after play opens off Broadway, courtesy of the dozen not-for-profit theatres that have firmly established themselves. LOST LAKE by David Auburn Lo…
This is a little bonus notice, because it was a rare showing of Stephen Sondheim’s very first musical, written when he was in his early twenties. Twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstei…
The winter winds have just begun to blow, yet spring has arrived at the City Center on West 55th Street, where The Band Wagon is making a lot of people happy. Unfortunately, this version wil…
Tom Stoppard is back on Broadway . His Indian Ink is playing at the Cort Theatre and now the Roundabout has produced his 1982 success The Real Thing as part of its season at the American Air…
Sarah Ruhl is a writer of imagination and considerable experience. The Lincoln Center Theatre has presented two of her early plays, The Clean House and In The Next Room (The Vibrator Play), …
We always have high hopes when a gifted writer from one field chooses to drop in on another. Scott Fitzgerald tried it (The Vegetable), so did Henry James (Guy Domville). Ernest Hemingway wr…
From the moment Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced begins, we are intrigued. Set in designer John Lee Beatty’s upper east side Manhattan apartment, even the scenery speaks to us. The set ca…
The 100th Musical in Mufti is about to open at the York Theatre, which is a gem of a small space buried under St. Peter’s Church on 54th Street and Lexington Avenue. This very useful s…
I was apprehensive when I entered the central lobby of the vast Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street to see the latest revival of Bernstein-Comden and Green’s On the Town. I have to be one of …
In 1976 Julie Harris, at the peak of her onstage career, brought this one woman play to Broadway. She managed to keep it afloat for over 100 performances at the Longacre Theatre where the re…
James Dickey’s novel Deliverance was a critical and popular success when it was published in 1970. It won the National Book Award, and was the basis of the equally popular film that wa…
This title of a new play by Simon Stephens may seem long-winded and awkward, but it is an accurate account of what a child with Asperger’s Syndrome might answer when asked to describe …
Playwright Kenneth Lonergan has much to be grateful for, to Scott Rudin and his consortium of partners who brought us Steppenwolf’s revival of This Is Our Youth, which established Lone…
If the Mitford sisters, who attracted attention in social circles in the 1930s, didn’t fascinate or even interest you, then you might have trouble cozying up to Tom Stoppard’s ve…
Inspired by Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, Donald Margulies’ new play The Country House makes good use of some of the same raw materials. Chekhov liked country houses and actresses and …
In ample time for Thanksgiving, Jeffrey Richards and a slew of associates (“by special arrangement with the Roundabout Theatre Company”) has delivered to the Longacre Theatre on …
Chekhov’s play, now at The Pearl Theater for a few more weeks, offers so many unhappy characters, all rusticating in the country (rural Russia, circa 1890) it’s difficult to foll…
