687 stories by "Wendy Caster"
In the late 1970s, The Public Theater presented the Yale Rep production of Sganarelle: An Evening of Molière Farces. It was a wonderful evening. One performer was particularly good: Mark…
Jan and Nick, a young married couple, have just moved into an apartment in the East Village. It's 1977, they're in their mid-20s, and they've been together 7 years. Their marriage is happy b…
Adam Szymkowicz's entertaining The Fat Cat Killers combines an incompetent-criminals comedy with a take-down of capitalism. Rather than building on or complementing each other, the two co…
Although we have not previously shown great acuity in Tony prediction, here we are again. Hope springs eternal!
This year's list of Tony nominees reveals a healthy, exciting season. Looking …
From the press release for We Do The Same Thing Every Week:
Dick and Jane are bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon. A six-foot tall cat shows up, and hijinks ensue. Later, elsewhere, Dick and J…
Caryl Churchill is not in love with the sound of her own voice. (Many playwrights are, along with many people in every walk of life.) While Churchill has a tremendous amount to say, her writ…
That the American justice system is worse than broken--dangerous, dishonest, racist--is not news. Some innocent people have been coerced into confessing, others have accepted plea bargains r…
I am not a fan of Arthur Miller's. But I like to revisit works to see if I've missed something. Having recently reread Death of a Salesman and seen the The Village Theater Group pro…
In Garside's Career, written by Harold Brighouse before the first World War, Peter Garside is a skilled mechanic and avid Union member in 1914 Midlanton, England. He has just completed a uni…
The delightful NAATCO-Play on Shakespeare all-femme, all-Asian-American production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline only runs through Feb. 15. If you are a fan of first-class theatre that is…
Mrs. Loman, Barbara Cassady's sequel to Death of a Salesman, starts right after Willy's funeral. Linda Loman, her sons Biff and Happy, and next door neighbor Charley and his son Bernard gath…
When the curtain came down on Act 1 of Gypsy, my friend Susan said, "She's so wrong and she's so good." Excellent summation!
I was one of those who greeted Audra's casting with, she's miscas…
Based on both the reviews and word of mouth, I went into Target Margin's "re-envisioning" of Show Boat (here called Show/Boat: A River) with low expectations. Sadly, it lived down to them.Â…
A built-in weakness in some comedies of ideas is that one side of an argument may simply be right. As someone who believes strongly in vaccines, I thought Eureka Day might have to wrestle…
 I reviewed Women Writing Musicals on Talkin' Broadway.
One of the stranger parts of aging is watching time go from "now" to "then" to "retro" to "no one on Jeopardy knows the answer."…
In the new book Women Writing Musicals, Jennifer Ashley Tepper and Applause Theatre & Cinema Books rescue one important part of theatre history: women writing musicals. And it is full of jui…
Last month I had the pleasure of attending the TRU (Theater Resources Unlimited) benefit. The TRU mission:
TRU was formed to promote a spirit of cooperation and support within the general t…
Last week, the wonderful MasterVoices presented the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band. In 1927, its book, about a war over cheese tariffs, was written by George F. Kaufman with a pretty sa…
Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) wrote 30 plays, a few of which were produced on Broadway, along with screenplays and poetry. Nowadays he is known--when he is known at all--for having written Green Gr…
What is honor? That's a particularly relevant question as we head into the election. Is honor reputation? Or is it something between a person and herself? What value does honor have? Do most…
The American Classical Orchestra (ACO), described by its founder/conductor as "our labor of love," utilizes period instruments to better produce classical pieces as the composers composed th…
Annette is winning at life. She has just negotiated a major promotion; her boyfriend Charles is attractive, considerate, and wealthy; their major life challenge is whether to stay in the Upp…
One is not supposed to focus so much on trees that you miss the forest, right? I get that. But what if they're really big, ugly, focus-grabbing trees?
I suspect that Client-Attorney…
There's a little gem playing at the Wild Project through September 28th. One set, 80 minutes, with terrific and compassionate writing (Matthew Freeman), directing (Jessi D. Hill), and acting…
On one hand, there could never be too many books about Stephen Sondheim. On the other hand, each book should be able to justify its existence through untold stories (are there any?), a new p…
