There are no Pilgrim clothes or 17th century posturings in Broadway's latest return to "The Crucible." Ivo van Hove, the unstoppably provocative and dazzling Belgian director, clearly believ…
If Phylicia Rashad had not already taken us on formidable journeys through the world of August Wilson and so many other formidable dramas, it would be tempting to call Shelah, the matriarch …
George C. Wolfe owns a book, a handsome pictorial history of Broadway. In the section about 1921, there are 10 pages of photos and explanations of major shows of the year. "Shuffle Along," s…
It doesn't shy away from the cornball or the unapologetically sentimental. And, yes, the plot is implausibly romantic and hinged on coincidence.
You know when Carrie Mathison is trying to convince the men -- they're almost always men -- in the CIA and she furrows her brow with such frustrated intensity that the pressure scrunches dow…
This is not another Women's History Month lament over the scarcity of work for women in the theater.I'm not going to report the latest statistics -- improving ever-so-slightly but still dism…
"She Loves Me" never was your conventional boffo-Broadway musical. Written, astonishingly, just a year before Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick flipped their sensibilities to create the earthy …
The Public Theater has been in the forefront of high-profile theater about so many previously raw subjects -- Vietnam and AIDS, for starters -- that we could be blasé about yet anothe…
This should be a cartoon, this sprawling and marvelous comedy about a millionaire Country Western star and his life crises back in the small Texas town that born him. We really ought to be l…
In 1975, the late John Houseman, who had impeccable taste, got the rights to a little country-western fairy tale for The Acting Company, the touring troupe he hand-picked from his precocious…
The city has two very different kinds of theater right now that create new relationships between the audience, the actors and the playwright.
He hulks, but looks more freaked out than scary. She may once have had the delicacy of a forest creature, but the ravages of survival have hardened her into a dried bundle of twigs. They are…
It's possible to imagine a mood that may only be satisfied by a couple of hours of watching really good performers having a lark with really bad material. It is harder, however, to guess why…
The excitement was electric last October, when Lupita Nyong'o made her New York stage debut Off-Broadway in the Public Theater's smallest upstairs space.
The first time a character in "The Humans" made a reference to the fall of the World Trade Center, I reflexively flinched. Even after more than 14 years, plays that fictionalize 9/11 have in…
Jason Robards, the late Eugene O'Neill virtuoso, used to say that many people see themselves in Erie Smith, the two-bit gambler trying to hold onto his big-shot pipe dreams in the playwright…
When "The Crucible" opens at the Walter Kerr Theatre in April, no one should expect anything like a conventional revival of Arthur Miller's searing 1953 tragedy about hypocrisy, mass hysteri…
There is so much love, dread, tenderness and brutality in "The Humans" that it is hard to believe just 90 minutes pass through Stephen Karam's deeply-felt family tragicomedy thriller.
This may say something scary about us. But Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" doesn't feel as upsetting or as comically monstrous as it once did. Long before the words "dysfunctional family" had b…
Brits on Broadway are hardly news. Brits at BAM have been a staple for what seems like forever, returning in March with the Royal Shakespeare Company in a cycle of Shakespeare's kingly maste…
New York City Center's Encores! series of semi-staged revivals is fulfilling the part of its mission that meticulously restores forgotten shows we don't need to see beyond its scheduled week…
It is hard not to wish that John Patrick Shanley had resisted the impulse to include an author's note in the program of "Prodigal Son." Without identifying the 90-minute memory play as autob…
There are racial and emotional land mines all around "Smart People," the provocative, sharply observed and shrewdly breezy new play by Lydia R. Diamond. The playwright, whose "Stick Fly" mar…
"Frozen," the highest-grossing animated film of all time, will try to melt Broadway's heart as a musical in the spring of 2018, reports Newsday's Linda Winer.
No star names or celebrity faces are hawking their allure from the marquee at the Helen Hayes Theatre these days. And unless you are a devoted Off-Broadway theatergoer, the name of the playw…