4,063 stories from theaterlife
By: David Sheward
February 28, 2025. Sam Shepard's darkly funny and tragic family drama Curse of the Starving Class premiered in London in 1977 and then Off-Broadway at the Public Theater i…
By: Samuel L. Leiter
February 25, 2025. It's been only six years since the 2019 revival of Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class (London, 1977; New York 1978) at the Pershing Square Sig…
By: Paulanne Simmons
February 24, 2025. Having grown up in the industrial north of England, the son of a manager for a cotton-spinning business and a school headmistress, Harold Brighouse c…
By: Paulanne Simmons
February 24, 2025. According to Finn (Michael Park), the environmental scientist in Redwood, the roots of the redwood tree don't go down very far. They form relatio…
By: David Sheward
January 21, 2025. The trouble with most "issue" plays is the characters seem more like animated talking points, rather than complex, flesh-and-blood human beings. Fortunat…
By: Patrick Christiano
February 21, 2025: Redwood, a visually stunning new musical about healing, directed by Tina Landau, and starring Idina Menzel in her highly anticipated return to Broa…
By: Samuel L. Leiter
February 20, 2025. The Mint Theatre, whose mission is to find forgotten modern plays deserving revivals, sometimes swings and misses; with British playwright Harold Bri…
By Paulanne Simmons
February 19, 2025. Amy Beth Williams' Valentine's Day show at Don't Tell Mama, Amy Beth Williams: In Reverse, was about time and how it cycles through the seasons of o…
By: Alix Cohen
February 19, 2025. When playwright Philip W. Chung noticed an Asian man in the cast of Charlie Chaplin's 1917 short, The Adventurer, he was sufficiently intrigued to do some…
By: David Sheward
February 17, 2025: The potential is there for a gripping and informative play in Gregg Ostrin's Kowalski, but sadly all we get is forced conflict and sitcom-level humor. T…
By: David Sheward
February 13, 2025. There's an awful lot of talk about trees in Redwood, the uneven new musical at the Nederlander after a run at the La Jolla Playhouse. During one of the…
By: Paulanne Simmons
Broadway Con Celebrating their 10th Consecutive Year
February 12, 2025. Whether you want to make your friends jealous with a selfie taken with your favorite celebri…
By: Alix Cohen
February 12, 2025: There will probably never be a last word on masterful composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021). As I write, I'm sure students are researching theses…
By: David Sheward
February 8, 2025. The most striking image in Khawla Ibraheem's disturbing and moving solo play A Knock on the Roof at New York Theater Workshop is not the one you'd expec…
By: David Sheward
February 7, 2025. Sequels of classic plays have a mixed history. Some are total bombs such as the famous flop musical A Doll's Life which follows Ibsen's Nora after she …
By: Samuel L. Leiter
February 4, 2025: In Jordan Harrison's play, The Antiquities, receiving its premiere at Playwrights Horizons, one of the characters is a writer who thinks artificial …
By: David Sheward
January 29, 2025: When Jonathan Spector's Eureka Day opened Off-Broadway in 2019, the dark comedy about the vaccination debate at a high-toned private school in Berkeley…
By: Samuel L. Leiter
January 31, 2025: Anyone who's ever struggled to master a foreign language in private classes will find something to appreciate in English, Sanaz Toossi's fitfully …
By: David Sheward
January 24, 2025: If you're looking for the perfect date night show"or just want a massive injection of laughs"then head over to the Hudson Theater for All In: Comedy Abo…
By: David Sheward
January, 31, 2025: Ken Urban's A Guide for the Homesick, now at the intimate Daryl Roth 2 stage following a run at Huntington Theater Company in 2017, has its heart in t…
By: David Sheward
January 31, 2025: Here we go again. It's time for yet another dysfunctional family reunion. Cult of Love, presented by Second Stage at the Hayes Theater after a product…
By: David Sheward
January, 28 2025: The sixth Broadway production of Gypsy, the classic musical based on the memoirs of legendary stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, is a theatrical miracle. Not onl…
By: Samuel L. Leiter
January 28, 2025: There have been many iconic performances of important dramatic roles in the modern American theatre, but only a very few that arouse the kind of elec…
By: Paulanne Simmons
January 28, 2025: There's nothing particularly new about a play based on correspondence between two friends (one can't help thinking of A. R. Gurney's Love Letters…
By: David Sheward
January 24, 2025: In recent decades, the theatergoing public has had a love/hate relationship with Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat. When Florenz Ziegfeld…
