884 stories from Broadway & Me
Summer was once a slow time in the New York theater world but the number of summer theater festivals has been rising so fast that even the most avid theatergoer would have a hard time keepin…
Right before my husband K and I went to see the Encores! Off-Center production of Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, I re-read the 1928 narrative poem on which the musical is based. I found it t…
You can't say that Of Good Stock doesn't aim to please. It's set in a spacious Cape Cod vacation home that's been appealingly designed and lit by Santo Loquasto and Peter Kaczorowski. Its ch…
Shows for Days is Douglas Carter Beane's paean to the power of theater to change lives. But theater is most powerful when a playwright transforms his personal experience into a story that te…
Having never seen Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, I approached the production that's now playing at The Flea Theater through July 18 in the same way that many people approach a bowl of Brussels…
Some people claim Memorial Day as the beginning of summer. Other say the season starts when the school year ends and people begin to skip out from work early on Fridays. Sticklers insist tha…
June is the Indian summer of the New York theater season. Falling between the heat of the shows rushing out to qualify for the Tonys and other awards and the relative freeze that settles ove…
The gay best friend has become a stock character in contemporary plays. From The Heidi Chronicles to If/Then, he's the sidekick there with a shoulder to cry on, a snappy wisecrack to ad…
In some ways, Gloria, which has been extended at the Vineyard Theatre through July 18, isn't remarkable at all. Like a growing number of books, movies, magazine articles and even other plays…
Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was "The Exorcist" of its day. Sixteenth century theatergoers were so horrified by Marlowe's retelling of the tragic story of the ambitious scholar who s…
Office Politics is the kind of show that I rarely see. Its playwright, director and actors are all new to me. Its entire run, including previews, is just two weeks (it closes this weekend). …
Anne Washburn clearly loves the theater. Her 2013 play Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play was an ode to theater's power to crate order out of chaos. I'll confess that I was lukewarm about it (c…
A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that the number of non-believers"atheists, agnostics, people who check the "none of the above" box when asked about their religious affiliatio…
Once again, Tony time has rolled around before I've had a chance to sound off on all the shows that are in contention for the big prizes. And as anyone who pays even the slightest attention …
As the story goes, a drama school teacher once told Robert Creighton that he reminded him of the old movie actor James Cagney. And indeed, Creighton does resemble Cagney and radiates the sam…
Everything, including playwrights, gets branded these days. And Robert Askins has glommed onto what's turning out to be a surprisingly marketable one: he's the "religion guy." Hand to G…
When Le Mardi à Monoprix premiered in France five years ago, playwright Emmanuel Darley's sympathetic look at the life of a transgender woman must have seemed a bold statement. The play m…
There's a comfort in the familiar that makes it's hard to try something new, particularly when the rewards roll in for doing the same old thing. So although I have mixed feelings about …
My much adored niece Jennifer got married to a really great guy yesterday and we're all still celebrating so there will be no post today but I'll be back next week. In the meantime, I hope y…
Holding a stage all by one's self takes guts. But two very talented actors step up to the challenge and, with varying degrees of success, show how it can be done in the new one-woman s…
Like so many Americans in the '60s, Broadway show makers were swept up in the free-spirit mania of the times and created shows with eccentric characters who thumbed their noses at the establ…
The contests for this year's theater awards are so tight"and so many of the nominees truly worthy"that I hardly know where to cast my allegiance. And that's especially true in the category o…
The average Broadway theatergoer sees four shows a year, according to the Broadway League. The average theater reviewer routinely sees more shows than that in a week. Which may be one reason…
It's hard to argue with the Tony nominations announced yesterday morning. The much-admired An American in Paris and the even more critically beloved Fun Home lead the pac…
There is a direct line connecting the down and outers waiting for Hickey in The Iceman Cometh and the outcasts who gather in the parking lot of the Hummingbird Motel for the premature funera…
