610 stories by "Richard Seff"
Pastiche is back in town, settled in for a run on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre. Some brave and disparate talents got together with a 1907 novel by Roy Horniman, already used as the so…
Amanda Peet is an actress with impressive credits on stage (Awake and Sing), on screen (“Something’s Gotta Give”, “Igby Goes Down”), the TV series “Studio…
I’ve never been a late-night type so I’m not too familiar with the cabaret scene in New York. And I’m not the one you’ll see walking down the street with wires plugge…
The Lincoln Center Theatre has assembled a vast company of more than 20 actors, and allotted an equally vast budget to its spectacular production of the perennial favorite Macbeth. Our m…
Terrence McNally is one fortunate fellow. He was quoted in an interview on Playbill.com as having said  that he’s been blessed with a happy home life, and the privilege of worki…
I was fortunate enough to catch Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the final years of their long running tandem Broadway careers. They were able to elevate lesser plays like O Mistress Mine, I…
The name Dennis Kelly didn't register with me when I noted it in the playbill to his play Taking Care of Baby, which the Manhattan Theatre Club is currently presenting off Broadway. I should…
International stage star Mark Rylance has offered us a holiday season treat by bringing us his remarkable Shakespearean double header of Richard III and Twelfth Night. He’s packed his …
It all looks so simple, the making of a hit musical, when the creators and cast have done it right. After Midnight is a suitable example of the kind of success about which one might ask: …
Tracee Chimo’s performance as “Diana” in Bad Jews is not going to make any new friends. Her work  in this acerbic new play by Joshua Harmon is masterful and brave as she…
Some seasons ago, the Roundabout Theatre Company brought us a British import of a stage adaptation called The 39 Steps, which used the Alfred Hitchcock film of 1935 as its source. The play m…
54 Below is the smart cabaret just underneath Theatre 54 in New York. It features the best of the Broadway performers who show up regularly between engagements on the legit stage, and it…
In 1947 when The Winslow Boy first hit Broadway, its author Terence Rattigan was in great favor, churning out hit after hit beginning with 1937′s French Without Tears and continuing we…
Bruce Norris won the Pulitzer in 2011 and the Tony Award in 2012 for best play when his Clybourne Park played on Broadway after a successful run off Broadway in 2010. Critics and public …
Harold Pinter arrived on the London theatre scene in the mid 1950s along with John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Edward Bond, David Storey and Arnold Wesker, among other playwrights who were det…
A strange thing happens when good actors find themselves cast in a play in which their characters are ill defined or not defined at all. These actors, trapped on their own, make choices in o…
Jack Canfora, whose plays have been winning  him a promising reputation, has now offered us Jericho at 59 East 59th Street under the direction of Evan Bergman with whom he’s worked …
What a nice surprise to be able to welcome back the lesser known Bernard Shaw play You Never Can Tell. Even its light hearted title suggests that immediately after Mrs. Warren’s Pr…
It would have been a fitting tribute to Horton Foote had he been able to see two of his progeny packin’ ‘em in during the same season on and off Broadway. For The Trip to Bountif…
I suggest that Norbert Leo Butz run for President in 2016. I’d make it “Mayor of New York City” this coming November, for we shall need him then, but he’ll be oth…
George Kelly is one of those excellent playwrights who flourished in the Golden Age of Broadway. Born in 1887 in Schuylkill Falls, Pennsylvania, he was the seventh of ten children born to th…
I saw Pippin three times during its original four and a half year New York run in the 1970s. I enjoyed it thoroughly but I always thought of it as a minor musical which a major director …
Last summer, Mark Lamos directed a production of Harbor, a new play by Chad Beguelin, at the Westport Country Playhouse, where Mr. Lamos presides as artistic director. It did well there, had…
I must admit the very title of this new musical caused me concern. I didn’t think there would be much in it with which I could identify. I knew it had a rock score and that didn’…
The 17th annual New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC)is upon us  and though I’ve never covered it before, one new play came to my attention and intrigued me enough to v…
