Let's begin this week's column with one of the strangest theatre stories I've encountered in 25 years of covering the scene. Here's how the lead to the Playbill.com news stor…
Gore Vidal's friends and colleagues — including Dennis Kucinich, Elizabeth Ashley, Michael Moore, Elaine May and others — toasted the late essayist-novelist-playwright-screen…
When the Public Theater stages shows at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, are there discussions between the creative team and the keepers of Central Park?
Phyllis Diller, the outrageous stand-up comic who was one of the first women to find wide success in her field, died Aug. 20 at her home in Brentwood, CA. She was 95.
Tony Award winner Elizabeth Ashley, currently in Broadway's The Best Man, reflects on tequila, Gore Vidal, growing up in Louisiana, Tennessee Williams, director Michael Wilson and how sh…
Lee Silver, a longtime executive at the theatre-owning Shubert Organization, died Aug. 15 at Cedar Manor in Ossining, NY, where he had been recovering from a brief health setback, according …
William Windom, a stage and television actor who found brief critical fame as the star of the television series "My World and Welcome to It," died Aug. 16 at his home in Woodacre, …
Playbill magazine's tribute to the 100th anniversary of Actors' Equity continues with a look at how The Cradle Will Rock represented empowerment for struggling actors during the Grea…
The Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park production of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods got mixed reviews, included a pretty negative one from the New York Times. But the show m…
Ron Palillo, who fashioned an indelible impression as an awkward Brooklyn teen in the 1970s sitcom "Welcome Back, Kotter," died Aug. 14. He was 63.
A shadowy chapter in American history — and in the young life of "Star Trek" and stage actor George Takei — has inspired Allegiance - A New American Musical, in which T…
Al Freeman, Jr., and actor of dignity and range who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, when opportunities for African-American stage actors expanded greatly, died Aug. 9. He was 78.
Pyotr Fomenko, a rebellious Russian stage director who often ran afoul with Soviet authorites, died Aug 9 in Moscow. He was 80.
Sondheim in the Park opened this week.
Dale C. Olson, an entertainment industry publicist, died Aug. 9 at the Burbank Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.
Michael Cristofer won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his 1977 play The Shadow Box, a credit lost on viewers of the TV soap "Smash," on which the actor-playwright plays t…
Marvin Hamlisch, who achieved theatre immortality as the composer of the iconic musical A Chorus Line, died Aug. 7. He was 68.
Joan Stein, who produced plays on Broadway and Off-Broadway, died Aug. 3. The cause was appendiceal cancer. She was 59.
Broadway openings in August? As recently as 20 years ago, they would have been unheard of. But no longer. We've got air-conditioning, don't we? And there's not a lot of competiti…
What happens when stage managers are sick or on vacation? Who are their understudies? We asked.
Broadway practitioners Robyn Goodman, Michael Mayer, Douglas Carter Beane, Marc Shaiman & Scott Wittman, plus entertainment critics David Cote and Robert Cashill, comment on Playbill'…
Actor R.G. Armstrong, who appeared in the original Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Orpheus Descending, died July 27. He was 95.
Actress Lupe Ontiveros, who acted on Broadway in the musical Zoot Suit, died on July 26. The cause was liver cancer. She was 69.
Given that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman Rocco Landesman has a theatre background, it should come as no surprise that he named one of his signature initiatives after a T…
The phrase "hit Chekhov production" is such an oddity in the theatre that one must make a point of using it when one gets the rare chance.