Playwright David Auburn's narrative two-hander Summer, 1976, opening tonight at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, boasts a pair of supremely gifted actresses who are quite adroit at getting us…
As modernist playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw demonstrated, theatre has the power to rattle the cultural consciousness and shine the spotlight on pressing contemporary social and political…
The 2023 Brits Off Broadway Festival kicks off at 59E59 Theaters with the Theatre Royal Plymouth production of Breathless, playwright Laura Horton's tale of compulsion and anxiety that shine…
Who owns history? Or more precisely, who gets to decide which aspects of history are moved to the front of the line and plastered with the title of "TRUTH"? A serious question that is taken …
What tickles your funny bone? Is it an evening of witty repartee and bon mots being tossed about with debonair aplomb? A bit of Noël Coward, perhaps, or the carefully structured comedy st…
The blurb on the back cover describes it as a "cheerfully opinionated guidebook" and that's an apt characterization of Steven Suskin's thoughtful survey of songs with impact and importance. …
Camelot, the 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical that is near and dear to the hearts of aficionados of Broadway's "Golden Age," has always been loved for its songs. This remains true to this day, …
Fat Ham, James Ijames' fanciful Pulitzer Prize-winning riff on Hamlet that opened tonight at the American Airlines Theatre, takes a sad tale about bloody vengeance and reconfigures it into a…
The last time Playwrights Horizons aimed to just make us laugh and not think too hard was The Thanksgiving Play. That turned out well. Playwrights is back in comedic mode with Regretfully, S…
Elaine is committed to taking care of her mother, but it's far from easy. Ruth had a stroke, and she frequently has difficulty speaking, occasionally has difficulty moving around, and receiv…
In his Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop, Michael R. Jackson skewered the predominantly white theatre industry through the main character's effort to create a "big…
Transforming a best-selling novel from page to stage is a risky affair. It takes a great deal of talent, imagination, and theatrical acumen to pull it off without getting bogged down in weig…
As an Off-Broadway nonmusical, Vanities ran forever, opening in 1976 and closing after almost 1,800 performances. A look at three besties (one of whom was played by Kathy Bates) at the end o…
I've got to confess that it is hard to erase the memory of a tuba-playing Patti LuPone from the stripped-down 2006 Broadway production of Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But …
How best to describe Bad Cinderella, the new musical with a score by über-successful theatre composer and impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber that officially opened tonight at the Imperial Theat…
In September 1986, Lily Tomlin took Broadway by storm in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Jane Wagner's play that explored, among other topics, women's issues and se…
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What a difference four months makes! Back in November, the Alfred Uhry/Jason Robert Brown powerhouse 1998 musical Parade, about the kangaroo court trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank,…
In adapting Arden of Faversham, the anonymously written domestic tragedy from 1592, Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat explain in a program note that they intended to merge the tragic and far…
Hello, Encores! Well, hello, Encores! It's so nice to have you back where you belong. Back to your original mission, that is, somewhat lost in recent years, of producing brief runs of quickl…
The Harder They Come, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' adaptation of the reggae-infused 1972 Jamaican film of the same title, is rocking the Public Theater these days with its top-notch cast, an…
While watching playwright Keith Bunin's The Coast Starlight, opening tonight at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, I kept coming up with alternate titles: Strangers on a Train, Ship…
Whew, this one really needed an intimacy coordinator. Liliana Padilla's How to Defend Yourself, at New York Theatre Workshop, is mostly about its titular topic, as reflected through the unea…
I Love My Family, But..., the amiable new revue at the Huron Club at SoHo Playhouse, is composed of sixteen musical snapshots focused on a presumably typical family in, as the script states,…
Doubtless, there never were a lot of chuckles to be found in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. But this latest Broadway production, opening tonight at the Hudson Theatre in an adaptation by pla…