112 stories by "The Playgoer"
You thought attending the theatre was entertainment? It's hard work! But if you abide by the following proscriptions, you will make playgoing pleasanter for you and all around you.
First, d…
If I told you that Ethan Hawke was enlisting playwright friend Jonathan Marc Sherman to adapt Brecht's Baal for him to star in (and direct) so he could sport a Billy Idol 'do, wheeze aw…
If only the current Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof featured something as jarring and surprising as a "Ghost Skipper" floating in and out of the background. Despite the understanda…
Well that was some "hiatus," wasn't it? Where were we...
For the few of you that might still be tuning in, welcome back! Sorry for the prolonged, um, "intermission." My excuse is simp…
As has been apparent since the Tony Awards, The Playgoer has been taking the summer off. But I do indeed intend to resume blogging during the fall in some form. What does that mean? Shifting…
For Twitter followers: the blogcast doesn't update there, but there have been some extra bonus tweets (@theplaygoer)
11:10 Once Best Musical. What can I say. I didn't see it coming. And I'm…
...is on!
Yes, sorry we've been absent here a long time. But help nurse Playgoer back to life by visiting and taking part in the traditional Tony Live Blogcast here tomorrow night starting …
They're out there.
Random thoughts:
First I recklessly tweet that Once would not even make it to opening night on Broadway, now it leads the pack with 11 Tony nominations. Go figure. (And…
My latest for Time Out: Willy Holtzman's The Morini Strad at Primary Stages.
The takeaway: "Tuesdays with Morrie for the WQXR crowd."
By the way, forgot to mention in the review that this …
Kudos to producer Jordan Roth for simplifying the rush ticket policy for at least one Broadway show:
A limited number of lower-price general rush tickets will be available for every perform…
Time we had a little humor in the Mike Daisey affair...
A writer named Jason Mick, at the Daily Tech site, criticizes, as I have, the things that Daisey got wrong or made up. Then he adds:
…
Orson Welles in 1939, when he was still a stage and radio star, pre-Citizen Kane. From a new exhibit of Golden Age Hollywood color photos at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.
Kinda looks…
"We do not and cannot fact check our artists; we're a theater, not a news organization. The vast majority of what occurs on our stages is fiction. If we didn't believe fiction could reveal…
From NYPL, an online Noel Coward archive with bio and lots of photos. Take a tour and add a little style to your weekend!
The Lincoln Center Performing Arts branch will also have an on-site…
For Time Out this week I review Eugene O'Neill's 1920 Broadway debut play, Beyond the Horizon. A title long familiar to me from theatre history books, nice to finally see it in this Irish Re…
Are you sitting down? The crowd-funding site, Kickstarter, will soon be able to boast a bigger arts-funding treasure-chest than the National Endowment for the Arts.
Or, at least, so boasts …
So I'm up early today and I decide to tune into "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and what do I see a commercial for? Manhattan Theatre Club! No, not one of those 15-second blips at the end of t…
"Stage-acting, she feels, is a true test of discipline for someone who is used to flying by the seat of their pants 'in that you've got to say this here and you must put that prop there. Yo…
Looks like 9-5 employed adults are finding it just as hard there as here to get a decent theatre ticket discount:
While young people have access to youth ticket discounts (and so they shoul…
Yesterday, the fundraising website Kickstarter reached a milestone when not one, but two of its clients passed the million-dollar threshold.
I mused last year upon the opportunities here fo…
Patrick Healy's lede for today's front-page NYT story on the 10,000th(!) performance of Phantom says a lot:
"The Phantom of the Opera" will make show business history on Saturday with the 10…
Nick Cohen in the Literary Review (UK) offers some useful ways to think about censorship in the 21st century:
We cannot puncture our own myth that we are fearless seekers after truth, even …
Normally I find any pop culture take on theatre to be oddly distorted. But, catching up with a recent SNL rerun this weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to find not one, but two very f…
Steve Waters in the Guardian sings the praises of the short play:
So what is a short play, exactly? Is it simply defined by its length? I ask because as a form it's under-discussed and und…
Something interesting happening on the Rialto right now: a number of recent Off Broadway successes will be descending upon available theatres this spring just in time for Tony Time. (That ti…
