The headliner -- and riveting center -- of "Antigone" is Juliette Binoche, the Oscar-winning risk-taker with the delicate features belying her tensile power. The storyteller is Sophocles, in…
When a Los Angeles company called Deaf West Theatre brought its breakthrough musical revival of "Big River" to Broadway in 2003, the combination of American Sign Language and spoken word fus…
With all the ongoing, ever-deepening dismay over the paucity of productions of plays by women, I've been thinking a lot about Caryl Churchill. The great (not a word I use easily) English mas…
When a big, modern, evangelical church with a charismatic preacher has a crisis -- at least in a play -- it is hard not to expect another sex or embezzlement scandal. This is far from the ca…
Playwright Michael Laurence portrays an actor named Michael in "Hamlet in Bed," his visceral and unpredictable if not actually believable, two-character hallucinatory drama. He is a gaunt, t…
This is one of those stories that slips away with the everyday crush of headlines and the dwindling of people who remember what happened yesterday -- or, more specifically, 50 years of yeste…
Commissioned anthologies in the theater tend to be uneven grab-bags of inspiration and folly. But "Desire," The Acting Company's evening of six plays by six playwrights, based on short stori…
The synopsis and title, "The Legend of Georgia McBride," are not promising: A straight Elvis impersonator becomes a drag queen to support his pregnant wife.
Not all that long ago, I would get uneasy when heading home into the lonely streets beyond the lit doorway of the opera house at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Years before anyone officially…
SPRING AWAKENING (Atkinson Theatre, 256 W. 47th St., Sept. 27) The Tony-winning musical version was revolutionary on Broadway in its 2006 premiere -- genuine rock art based on a scandalous 1…
Seems like old times on Broadway this fall.
Ivy Smith, the winner of the subway's monthly Miss Turnstyle contest in "On the Town," is a smart and modest -- if not exactly conclusive -- role for a star ballerina in her two-week, high-p…
Eighty-three years ago, Dennis Scanlon's grandfather got a job ushering at the Music Box Theatre. Not long after, Scanlon's father put on the uniform -- yes, they used to wear outfits with b…
When ballet star Misty Copeland makes her Broadway debut Aug. 25 as a star replacement in "On the Town" for the last two weeks of the revival's run, she will be the first black woman to play…
Slow down your metabolism. We're in current Annie Baker territory. "The Flick," which won last year's Pulitzer, asked us to hang out for three hours with people working at a dying movie thea…
Until recently, "Cymbeline" has been one of Shakespeare's least-performed plays and -- no surprise -- there have been reasons. For starters, it is both tragicomedy and fairy-tale romance. Th…
With the delirious praise swirling around "Hamilton" since its Public Theater run in February, there was danger that Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop masterwork would seem anticlimactic -- or at…
News of Jan Maxwell's retirement from the stage has hit harder than people outside the theater might understand.
The death of Roger Rees, 71, earlier this month has left sadness on so many levels. The worst of it comes from the loss of one of our great theater actors -- a treasure who won a 1982 Tony f…
Colin Quinn is not trying to bring back the ethnic joke, is he? Please, he's much too deep and smart for that, right? And yet, there is a nostalgia -- better, an exasperated, irritated wistf…
The word "etiquette" has such a quaint sound to it. To complain about bad behavior, especially involving electronics, makes the complainer seem destined for little-old-ladyland, or an elitis…
Can a sudden religious conversion be convincingly dramatized? Can a man who has done cruel, hateful, casually sadistic acts as a young 18th century British slave trader for almost three quar…
The Long Island teen who tried to plug his cellphone into a fake outlet at Broadway's "Hand to God" read an apology at a hastily called news conference outside the theater Friday.
The Long Island teen who tried to plug his cellphone into a fake outlet at Broadway's "Hand to God" read an apology at a hastily called news conference outside the theater Friday.
There is much to be said for longevity, for staying power, for consistency in the face of a changing entertainment cosmos.