Getting a show in front of a mainstream audience ain't easy and it can be even tougher when you're a playwright of color. Which is why I'm happy to have seen MartÃn Zimmerman's Seven Spot…
The theater awards season is like a presidential campaign. Everyone has their eyes on the ultimate prize but there are lots of other contests along the way that offer trophies and with them,…
I promise to get back to talking about shows I've seen soon but as a card-carrying member of the Outer Critics Circle, I feel honor-bound to tout the awards we announced on Monday. The OCC r…
All Tony awards are coveted but the awards for Best Musical tend to be the most coveted of all. And because 13 new musicals debuted during the 2016-2017 season, the odds of getting one this …
If you're reading this blog, then you already know that the Tony nominations were announced yesterday. And depending on how you look at it, this year's nominators had one of the toughe…
Like most talented playwrights these days, Annie Baker has no doubt been asked to spend some time in a writers' room for one of the prestige TV shows. But on the basis of her new play The An…
There's no question that the Tonys are the Oscars, or most desired awards, of the theater world but there are other coveted prizes too. Yesterday, the Outer Critics Circle, of which I'm a pr…
The Tonys may be the top dog in awards season but it's not the only one in the game. Lots of other groups also celebrate the best of the theater season. The nominations for the Lucille …
Playwrights Horizons hasn't made a big deal of it but over the past year, the company seems to have gone out of its way to tell stories about people whose lives rarely get shown onstage and …
If you love musicals, this is the season for you. Fourteen new ones will have opened by the time the season officially ends on April 27. And they range from small edgy chamber pieces to…
Sometimes you want a little sizzle with your theatrical steak. Or at least I do. Which is why I'm such a fan of shows that take an imaginative approach to their storytelling, using all…
And we're off: the awards season has officially begun. Nominations for the Lucille Lortel Awards, which honor off-Broadway productions, were announced this week. And since lots of shows run …
Happy marriages don't get much love in plays; they don't provide enough dysfunction for drama and there's not enough cutting up in them for comedy. So gratefully ensconced in one myself and …
Spring is always kind of a crazy time for me. I'm happy to see the end of winter weather and excited by all the new shows coming in but am inevitably so busy seeing them (and juggling all th…
Mass shootings are now so commonplace that they've spawned a whole subgenre of theater. Over the past decade I've seen The Columbine Project and The Library, both based on the 1999 massacre …
If you read Broadway & Me, then you know how much I love theater. What you may not know is that I also love podcasts and so I've decided to combine the two because this is shaping up to …
People have been telling me I should see a Marcus Gardley play for years now. But I somehow missed his breakout play The House that Will Not Stand and all the subsequent ones. Until this pas…
Being a woman today can be tough (just ask Hillary Clinton). But it isn't as Job-like tough as Penelope Skinner makes it out to be in the play Linda, which is running through April 2 at Manh…
You may have to be a young woman in your late teens or early 20s to truly appreciate All The Fine Boys, the new play that The New Group is running in the tiny Ford Foundation Studio Theatre …
Grief is strange. We deal with the loss of someone we love as best we can but sometimes, even months later, the lingering sorrow continues to inform the choices we make. I don't know if…
Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth premiered in 1942, just 10 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor launched the U.S. into World War II. Clearly tapping into the zeitgeist of the mome…
Bull in a China Shop is a flawed play and yet I want to commend LCT3 for putting it on. For this is just the kind of show that a theater devoted to nurturing new artists should be doing. The…
In some ways, the family in Steven Levenson's new play If I Forget will be familiar to just about anyone who has a family. There's the bossy big sister and her henpecked husband, the ad…
Stephen Sondheim will turn 87 next month but he's working on a new musical tentatively called Buñuel that is scheduled to have a full workshop production at the Public Theater later this …
The day may come when attending a performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard will be like going to one for The Rocky Horror Show where audience members dress up like their favorit…