610 stories by "Richard Seff"
A small, amiable musical, very loosely based on Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, has opened at the York Theatre Company on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue. It’s called Despe…
The New York Theatre Workshop on East 4th Street in the East Village is a small but potent force in the theater community. Its mandate is to offer production of new works which deal with iss…
Sarah Ruhl is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. Playwrights Horizons has played host to two of her many play — Stage Kiss and Dead Man’s Cell Phone. He…
The Cherry Lane Theatre, in Greenwich Village, is offering a new play by a New York playwright, Thomas Klingenstein, whose earlier works have been seen at the Lark Theatre Lab, the Atlantic …
Hal Prince, producer/director extraordinaire is far too modest. His new offering at the Manhattan Theatre Club is so vastly entertaining that I hereby elevate him from PRINCE to KING OF BROA…
An awful lot goes on in William Shakespeare’s dream play, but here’s all you really have to know. It’s set in Athens at first, later moves into the woods, for that’s …
Barbara Goldman was married to the Academy Award winning playwright/screenwriter/novelist James Goldman; she’s been called Bobby through their 23-year marriage, which ended when he die…
One of the most fascinating items on the Broadway scene is the current production of a British import, 1984. Co-adapted from the 1949 novel of George Orwell by Duncan Macmillan and Robert Ic…
Scott McPherson wrote Marvin’s Room, a play about illness, family ties, and death when he was just a lad of 30. As a gay man, he was of course aware of the AIDS epidemic that had been …
In Napoli, Brooklyn, playing at Roundabout Theatre Company through September 3, Playwright Meghan Kennedy gets us started with a mimed prologue in which a family sits at the dining table, en…
We are in the streets of Rome. The lights onstage bump up and immediately we are in the midst of controversy. Flavius and Marullus are admonishing the crowd to break up and get on with their…
The Manhattan Theatre Club is presently offering a 4-character play set in “the urban east of America” in the “near present day.” That description in the Playbill is …
The New York theatre scene continues to offer variety and great fun with this post-Tony production of Nikolai Gogol’s masterpiece, The Government Inspector, as adapted by American play…
Out of his imaginative mind comes another powerful theatre piece by Robert Shenkkan, author of 15 plays including two dealing with LBJ (All the Way and The Great Society.) This time, he prop…
Every now and then it’s refreshing to turn on the time travel clock and return to what we then called “civilization” circa 1920. You know, after the war to end all wars, be…
With apologies to James Morgan and the York Theatre Company ("York Theatre") for this very late review of their current offering Marry Harry. I saw this new musical on April 30, but in the l…
In 1982 a distinguished group of Broadway pros, including Hal Prince, Betty Comden and Aldolph Green, came up with what was then thought to be a misbegotten idea: what happened to Nora Helme…
Eleven new musicals have opened since War Paint and here comes the last before the April 30th deadline for Tony Nomination. It’s called Bandstand and it didn’t offer us Bette Mid…
As the theatre season races to the end of its nomination deadline for the Tony Awards, musical shows are exploding all over the place. We’ve had half a dozen in the last two weeks, and…
The night I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the new musical based on Roald Dahl’s novel, the theatre was packed with moms and dads with little kids in tow. All of them seemed to…
Andy Karl is a delightful musical theatre leading man, but he’s been having a bit of bad luck lately. During a late preview of Groundhog Day, his latest outing on stage, he suffered se…
John Guare’s masterpiece from 1990 solidly launched his career, earning a run of 155 performances off-Broadway which extended to a run at the Beaumont Theatre on Broadway of 485 additi…
I’ve seen this play so many times. As a youngster of 19 I played “Horace” at NYU in a production that helped me along in my burgeoning acting career. Someone saw me in it, …
I’m going to tell you a short story before I get to my review of Hello, Dolly! which is now playing at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. I do so to give what’s now called “t…
Playwright Paula Vogel has been writing plays for almost forty years, in which she has dealt with issues that fueled her life. She’s been particularly interested in exploring the need …
