610 stories by "Richard Seff"
Lillian Hellman first conceived the idea for this play in 1930 but did not complete it and only went back to it five years later following her first production, the successful "The Children'…
Composers and lyricists have long been attracted to successful films as source material for adaptation into Broadway musicals. "Saturday Night Fever," "Groundhog Day," “Rocky,” e…
I admit that forty years ago, when the Go-Go's female rock stardom was in full bloom, when their punk scene was all the rage amongst the hip, I was very happy with musical theatre as it was …
I was confused when I entered the small Helen Hayes Theater for I thought I'd entered the wrong building. I was ushered into the small foyer, and from the auditorium I could hear ear splitti…
Once again, we have a new production of an old success from the school of "And Then I Wrote…" musicals. This time out the writers are Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who, over the course of …
The Mint Theatre’s Artistic Director, Jonathan Bank, has an uncanny eye for the best of the old obscure plays that deserve a crack at a contemporary audience for re-examination. A perf…
I was introduced to professional theater when I was twelve. A friend of my parents worked for the owners of a Broadway playhouse and she invited my mother and me to a matinee of a long runni…
The Manhattan Theatre Club has opened this new play by Anthony Giardina, and director Doug Hughes has cast it impeccably, staged it fluidly with help from John Lee Beatty’s rapidly tur…
The Vineyard Theatre off Broadway has once again delivered a worthy new musical play created by uptown talents John Kander, Susan Stroman, and David Thompson and inspired by a Henry James no…
The Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, rises majestically over the Connecticut River. Its mission is to take popular musicals from the past, dust them off, and shape them up …
If I were asked to come up with a snappy slogan for Noel Gay’s musical “Me And My Girl"" something that might fit on the sides of buses or on the wall of a subway car"I’d p…
“I have often walked down this street before.” Freddie Eynsford-Hill sings those lyrics as he begins his romantic ode to Eliza Doolittle to whom he is wildly attracted after just…
Once again, Dolly is back where she belongs, lighting up the sky with her dazzling radiance distilled through the many gifts of Bernadette Peters who is her current inhabitant. Ms. Peters re…
At 79, still active as a playwright and director, Alan Ayckbourn here gives us his 81st work for the theatre. He’s been supplying us with material since 1959; and his new play is as fr…
If you are among those who are not familiar with the names Draco and Scorpius Malfoy, Cedric Diggory, Dudley Dursley, Uncle Vernon, Severus Snape, Amos Diggory, Albus Dumbledore, Aunt Petuni…
It gives me so much pleasure to be able to begin a review of a Broadway musical from the inside out. By that I mean that in recent weeks, in covering this season’s arrivals, I’ve…
The new musical “Mean Girls”, currently playing at the August Wilson theatre on Broadway, is a tough one to write about. There are two ways to approach it as I see it. It’s…
I’ve often found it difficult to feel much empathy for characters who have little or no redeeming features. The exception that might well prove that rule is the current revival of Kenn…
By now you may well have heard that Glenda Jackson has made a sensational return to the stage as a character simply called “A” in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women&…
Tony Kushner’s masterpiece has arrived on Broadway. As it did after its great success twenty-five years ago, it comes to us from London where it was received very well once again. In 1…
The long wait is over. The Disney company has finally delivered the much anticipated stage version of its animated blockbuster film Frozen. A great deal of money has been spent, some of it f…
I wasn’t going to review this Encores! production because it was only presented for 7 performances and it will have closed (on March 27th)Â before you have a chance to see it. But I …
On this pleasant Sunday afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing the first half of Bruce Norris’ play The Low Road at the Public. I say “half” because one of the actors becam…
The New York theater season has evolved from the so-called Golden Age, when virtually all new plays meant Broadway, to the current series of not-for-profit productions by the huge list of Of…
First there was Grand Opera. Then along came Light Opera and finally Operetta. In 1866, because a ballet troupe was left stranded, a new form called “Musical Theater” was born. T…
