8,501 stories from Backstage
John B. Keane's 1959 drama is an odd and contradictory beast in which sentimentality vies with cynicism, and mellifluous language cloaks some rather hoary melodramatics.
Queen of salsa Celia Cruz - with her flamboyant costumes, wigs, joyful energy, and legendary voice - deserves a jukebox musical, but it turns out to be difficult to dramatize a life that was…
Director Estelle Parsons focuses on performances, not pacing, in this faithful if plodding production of Maxwell Anderson's drama. Final results are mixed, but the show may blossom with time.
Don't be fooled by the title. Little Egypt isn't a musical about the belly dancer of that name who was all the rage at the Chicago World's Fair back in 1893. That wouldn't be a bad idea, though. Rather, it's a musical about the romantic travails of six folks living in an area of southern Illinois that's dubbed Little Egypt. That's not necessarily a bad idea either, but in this case it misfires.
The Family Fiorelli is an uneven entry into the genre of musicals dealing with a wife who strays from her vintner husband by sleeping with the hot-looking local priest, who teaches karate to her older son who has cerebral palsy. Oh, and her younger son is a prodigy at wine tasting and dreams of becoming a sommelier, while her lesbian sister is pregnant and wants to marry her lawyer girlfriend. You know, that genre.
Wilson's mocking of the period's conventions is so light and deft that it plays very nearly like the real thing. The stock characters, tortured song cues, and pastry of a plot need firm but …
Rock 'n' roll and musical theatre have never been a happy combination, for reasons that defy analysis, and "Love Sucks," a punk takeoff on Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost," is no excepti…
An invigoratingly entertaining event, "Three Mo' Tenors" caters heavily to the tastes of popular audiences and offers far more pop music than classical. This is unfortunate, because these cl…
Punch line after punch line registers in Horton Foote's comedy because he resists easy rhythms, preferring to embed humor in character. And here those characters are entrusted to a capital c…
This is Little Red Riding Hood on the bayou. And what an exuberant retelling of the childhood fable it is! Thanks to the zydeco-inspired music and lyrics by Joan Cushing and a sprightly cast…
"Maccabeat!," billed as a rock musical -- the story of Hanukah with a "Hebrew hottie" in the lead -- is clearly forgettable, never living up to its promise as a Biblical spoof. Based on the …
This new musical revue knows its target audience, but is considerably more workmanlike than inspired or revelatory.
If Ron Sproat's book were up to the level of songwriters Christopher Berg and Frank Evans, this would be a real sleeper; warts and all, it's a touching, charming little musical without an ir…
Book writer Brooke Pierce and songwriter Masi Asare have chosen one of the toughest assignments in musical comedy - sustaining a parody for an entire evening. They almost succeed.
A little more subtext wouldn't have killed it, but "The Lady Swims Today" is an engrossing little caper that still makes for an amusing, professionally mounted exercise in high-end pulp.
Joe Major's songwriting proves he can be clever, but the flimsy joke holding "Bernice Bobs Her Mullet" together just isn't quite clever enough.
The premiere of Kyle Jarrow's "Love Kills" leaves little room for doubt that he can write catchy hooks and poignant lyrics firmly in line with the current uprising of pop-based musicals that…
Filled with kooky, outsized characters and a generous if often salty live-and-let-live spirit, "Gemini the Musical," like its lead character, has a lot of heart but is still struggling to fi…
This scatterbrained musical about ADD should be forced to repeat basic drama - poetry interp, too.
This charming and winningly presented highlight of the New York Musical Theatre Festival makes the satire of community theatre winningly fresh again.
Bad camp is like a hot dog stuffed with gorgonzola - an ill-thought offering whose every calorie is empty.
It feels wrong to call this difficult, multifaceted play entertainment; it's more a force unique unto itself.
Through much of his new problematic comedy-drama, Adam Rapp, one of the more prominent figures in the current crop of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway writers, seems to be doing Sam Shepard-lite.
Director Ivo van Hove's deconstruction is the kind that will drive purists mad and experimenters into believing they've witnessed the parting of the Red Sea.
