8,501 stories from Backstage
Because Kristen Palmer's two-hander reveals almost nothing of its characters lives outside the hothouse of their relationship, it's difficult to put their troubles in a meaningful context.
For high schoolers in 'Spring Awakening,' art and life often merge.
David Mamet's charming children's theatre piece is making a reappearance as part of the Atlantic Theater Company's Atlantic for Kids program. The esprit de corps among the actors is palpable…
The latest in New York ethnic interactive entertainments is for the Irish, both actual and honorary. It's in the form of an old-fashioned Irish wake, where a hard-working cast of seven leads…
Writer and director Adelheid Roosen offers a compassionate look into the lives and psyches of Muslims living in Western society. The two pieces, running in repertory, make for a heady and so…
Loosier needs to know that upbeat numbers have as much lyric meaning as the ballads she usually understands demand some display of particularized emotions rather than generic glee.
Myra Bairstow has written a mildly intriguing if exposition-heavy drama.
Theresa Rebeck's pen has rarely been as sharp as she affixes her themes -- avarice, power, revenge -- to this tale of half-sisters between whom little love is lost and a stamp album potentia…
Gangster flicks of the 1930s have been parodied so frequently that the spoofs are now more familiar than the originals. Todd Michael's latest comedy wrings considerable juice out of what should be a desiccated wheeze; the result is a brisk, mirthful hour pitched somewhere between a Mad movie parody and the even madder genre travesties of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater.
Thanks to Leigh Silverman's inventively crisp noir staging and solid performances, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles pries open the closet door and reveals the characters trapped behind it.
Poor Chekhov: out of copyright and up for grabs. Resonance Ensemble has set his final play, The Cherry Orchard, in the American South of 1948 and is running the production in repertory with the world premiere of The Coffee Trees, a new play by Arthur Giron clearly inspired by The Cherry Orchard and set on a South American coffee plantation in 1997. But as Chekhov says in the second act of The Cherry Orchard, "When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured."
Late in Greetings From Yorkville, Robert (Robert Grusecki) tosses one last idea at Anya (Anya Turner), his songwriting partner. After years of trying to make it big in theatre, he suggests that they write a two-character musical about a songwriting team. It will be about "living, loving, and coping," he says. Given that Yorkville has been written by Grusecki and Turner, it stands to reason these elements would be found in abundance. Alas, it does not, instead serving up the songwriters' tunes with only the sketchiest and most generic of story lines and characterizations.
In his super-charged two-act drama, Suh eschews stereotypes of the disabled to create real human beings, and he's highly adept at crafting explosive two-person scenes that crackle with tensi…
Joel Adlen wrote the book, music, and lyrics for this movie-length version of Jane Austen's book, but missing are some of Austen's brightest lines, and the songs are mostly just serviceable.
A cult hit in Los Angeles, this putative attempt at post-Sept. 11 humor may fall on New York ears more harshly than on those of our West Coast counterparts. The show ultimately feels like a …
Labor groups representing a broad swath of Broadway employees -- including actors, musicians, press agents, costumers, and box office personnel -- appear to be standing shoulder to shoulder …
Director Alex Roe and his committed cast have gone far beyond mounting a museum piece. Their production this 1890 play by James A. Herne, the American Ibsen, does justice both to its watersh…
Book writers Kate Ferguson and Robert Hudson employ wild Pythonesque humor to send up literature's greatest detective but fail to give the necessary human dimension that would have made this…
Skip Kennon and Fred Landau have their hearts in the right place in adapting the 1984 comic fantasy "The Last Starfighter" to the musical stage. But without the special effects the big scree…
Only upon watching "Forbidden Broadway: Rude Awakening" -- the more than fitfully funny 25th-anniversary edition of the satirical musical revue -- did it register just how iconic "Spring Awa…
If "Jungle Queen Debutante" wants to conquer Shubert Alley, it might begin by hacking away at the thick underbrush of plot and uncovering a point. The sheer amount of energy expended on tell…
With book, music, and lyrics by the brainy Noel Katz, the new musical "Such Good Friends" is a deceptively old-fashioned musical comedy, yet it carries a hard-hitting political message that …
This is a renewed Eartha -- a surprising and true enhancement of the one who's been a nitery staple for over 50 years. And, fans, c'est si bon.
Only the contributions of its highly skilled dancers save "TraumNovela" from being an utterly pointless production. A ghastly dance-driven musical-theatre work with virtually no dialogue, th…
