610 stories by "Richard Seff"
Nina Raines’ Tribes began life at the Royal Court in London, where it had rave reviews and numerous honors, including an Olivier Award nomination for Best Play. No wonder then that an …
Theresa Rebeck is a playwright who combines the politically active mind of the late Lillian Hellman and the brittle wit of the late Jean Kerr, two formidable playwrights who greatly enriched…
I caught a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying this week, and as I watched young Nick Jonas prancing about as J. Pierrepont Finch in the current Broadway revival ofÂ…
Margaret Edson is that rare bird, a playwright whose first play, Wit, earned a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That alone makes her unique, but she becomes more so when we realize that she has…
The battle has begun. I’ve been reading followup columns from the critics of the New York Times and other prominent commentators admitting that some of their nitpicking reviews of the …
Athol Fugard, South African playwright, had been writing plays for 20 years when The Road to Mecca was first mounted in 1988. Clearly a personal diatribe against the platitudes inherent in s…
I don’t usually take you along with me when I go trouping off/off Broadway, but I’m making an exception because last evening I stumbled on a special treat and as it will run thro…
David Hyde Pierce clearly likes to keep working, for which we are grateful. Ever since his long run as Frasier’s brother Niles on the sitcom “Frasier,” Â he has returned …
Back in what now seems like the “not so good old days,” each Broadway season seemed to offer at least one fun filled show about athletes (all male then)Â and the ladies in the…
Here we have a comedy, a first, dealing with meeting the needs of the USA and China when doing business together. In Chinglish, Â David Henry Hwang’s play, a smalltime American busin…
There are several Hugh Jackmans. The most familiar perhaps is the X Man “Wolverine,” but that hairy ape has little to do with at least four other Jackmans on display in this …
With 75 plays under his belt, it would appear that Alan Ayckbourn can find two hours worth of entertainment and enlightenment in  any of his own actual or imagined experiences as he lives…
It took 25 producers and/or production companies to offer Frank Wildhorn a seventh crack at Broadway after his six previous attempts didn’t quite work out. His first, Jekyll and Hyde, …
The Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut is to be commended for unearthing City of Angels, a 1989 hit Broadway musical that is rarely done. It’s a very different sort of m…
The closet is, at last, wide open. No more need for gay characters to parade around pretending to be women, which was the game played in the mid-nineteenth century. When even a hint of t…
David Ives’ contribution to our Broadway season, courtesy of the Manhattan Theatre Club is, as the King of Siam used to say, “a puzzlement.” Â Starting as a hilarious bac…
Relatively Speaking is the collective title for three one act plays by three who usually turn their talents toward the screen. Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen are three stagestruc…
The various Manhattan not-for-profit theatres have done us all a great service by offering a home to a dozen talented playwrights. Theatres like Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center Theatr…
It’s nowhere near June yet love and marriage seems to be in the theatrical air as Hallowe’en approaches. On October 14th. the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey…
The Disney Company has clearly put a good deal of Lion King money into this attempt to reinvent a movie of theirs from 1992: Newsies. The film lost almost $12,000,000 so one might wonder why…
Say thanks to whomever you say thanks to, for we have a new playwright among us. His name? Jeff Talbott, and he is the recipient of the first ever Arthur Laurents-Tom Hatcher Award, which ho…
Jonathan Bank runs a pretty tight ship over there at the Mint Theater Company, one of our off-Broadway treasures. In the most unpretentious of black box theatres on the third floor of a 43rd…
I don’t usually cover the Cabaret world, but as Michael Feinstein and Linda Eder have both graced Broadway stages on their career trajectories, I thought you might like to know how the…
Sondheim’s Follies is back on Broadway, and in this time of earthquakes, hurricanes and political chaos, that’s a good thing. Set in 1971, for two and a half hours it permits us …
This import from the National Theatre in London, at the Beaumont Theatre in LincolnCenter, is more an experience than a play, and as such it’s a hum-dinger. As a play it is less th…
