610 stories by "Richard Seff"
The tenth anniversary season of this valuable festival, New York Musical Theatre Festival, is just concluding. By final curtain on July 28th, it will have presented some 350 new musicals…
If you’ve been contemplating a summer visit to lower New England for some swell weather, beautiful rain nourished greenery and even good theatre, you might consider an afternoon or eve…
June 11, 2013 — As is the custom, two days after the Tony Awards, Actors’ Equity Association gathers together its Council for a meeting in which policy is discussed. The R…
The Mint Theatre, under the artistic directorship of Jonathan Bank, produces worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten. It’s an invaluable part of the New Yor…
From a warmly remembered film of the same name, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, together with director Michel Greif, have fashioned a warm and loving musical play. Richard Greenberg tackled…
A phoenix has risen on Broadway. Out of the ashes of a very pleasant TV Special by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, once thought of as enchanting, but now considered something o…
In 1949 Clifford Odets, after years of cashing in on his early successes with the Group Theatre, returned to Broadway with The Big Knife, which was to be his bitter comment on the price h…
Cicely Tyson now joins Laurette Taylor in the small pantheon of actresses who have given us  monumental performances onstage; Ms. Taylor of course, for her Amanda in The Glass Menager…
I feel I’ve had to do almost as much research as the actors who perform in the Lincoln Center Theatre’s production of Richard Nelson’s Nikolai and the Others. That’s …
Playwright Jonathan Tolins has managed to take material that could have inspired a campy gay play limited in its appeal to those whose idea of first class entertainment is a Saturday night s…
The Divine Miss M has finally, after forty years, found her way to a Broadway stage in a legit play which could  be called The Divine Miss M, but isn’t, because that title was alrea…
Lyle Kessler’s career has been pretty well defined by an early play of his, Orphans. There have been other plays, but nothing that created the stir that this one did.  It’s…
Douglas Carter Beane, prolific playwright with a comic twist, brought Broadway a revised book to Cinderella just weeks ago, and here he is again with an original play about another kind …
Richard Greenberg is a prolific playwright whose Take Me Out established him some years ago as a welcome new voice. That play about the locker room aspects of a baseball team and the coming …
The Golden Age of musicals on Broadway has been over for several years now. I think on that we are all agreed (by “all” I mean those of us who were around to revel in it, to appr…
Anita Loos, the charming and talented screenplay writer and novelist, was having a sort of mid life crisis in her career and in her personal life in 1946. Ms. Loos was 58 years old at th…
I knew Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster were featured in this musical, but the rest of the cast were not familiar to me. I knew Neil Pepe,  the artistic head of the off Broadway Atla…
For reasons of his own, Jonathan Bank, the artistic director of the very useful Mint Theatre, seems determined to single-handedly deliver the playwright Teresa Deevy from oblivion to rene…
Picture yourself stuck in a run down 100 seat movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts in the summer of 2012. You are hidden from view, and you cannot speak, so for 3 hours you must …
Twenty years ago, the writer David Ives arrived on the New York theatre scene with a bang when his evening of short comic plays opened off Broadway, where they remained for some 600 plus per…
This musical pastiche, put together with bits and pieces of a dozen old musical comedies, opened 9 months ago at the Imperial on Broadway, and it’s very much still there, doing busines…
It was interesting to see William Inge’s Picnic and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on successive nights. Both first arrived on Broadway in the mid-fifties, both re…
William Inge is one of those mid-20th century American playwrights who started late (he was 30 when his first play, Come Back, Little Sheba arrived on Broadway). It was a success, and ul…
As we approach the fiscal cliff (by the time you read this, we might be over the edge), as we battle the sleet and the hail and the snow and the rain, there is one oasis that puts all that u…
Every now and then Terrence McNally, one of America’s prized and prolific playwrights, having been off the boards for a season or two, sits down to write a play that isn’t about …
