New York, NY, November 3, 2016 " Music students at The Juilliard School gave a well-received sunrise performance " "God Loves Jazz" " this morning on West 65th Street, on the eastern side of…
After its US debut at Yale Repertory Theatre in March 1982, and before it opened on Broadway in early May of that year, Athol Fugard's MASTER HAROLD…and the boys played a one-week engageme…
Long after I stopped acting in school productions (which was November 1981 at the University of Pennsylvania, to be precise), my mother would periodically say how much she wished that my sho…
When I speak about it with people who saw it, the phrase that comes up most often is, "It was life-changing." When I speak about it with people who have read about it, but didn't see it, the…
If you look at photos or video from Marathon of Hope, a new musical that just premiered in Waterloo, Canada, about an hour outside Toronto, something seems off. The musical is based on the l…
"Unfortunately, no deaf actors showed up to the auditions." The statement above was made yesterday in a public statement to the Deaf and hard of hearing community by Leslie Charipar, artisti…
O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is-a comin' down the street, and apparently it's not interested in doing business with kids who aspire to the arts, their parents, their teachers, or arts organiza…
The casting of the upcoming production of In The Heights at Porchlight Music Theatre in Chicago, in particular a non-Latinx actor in the leading role of Usnavi, has provoked a great deal of …
Thanks to smartphone technology, we all walk around with cameras in our pockets or bags, but tend to pull them out to take pictures of events, of friends, of ourselves. As someone trained on…
To a particular subset of junior comedy nerds, of which I was an unapologetic member, 1976 was a watershed year, for a reason only tangentially connected to the official Bicentennial celebra…
It is quite possible that, when the English stage was officially opened up to allow women to perform alongside men, most likely in 1660 when Margaret Hughes played Desdemona, some arg…
"I knew y'all would come. It's the rest of the world I couldn't have anticipated." That was what Lin-Manuel Miranda admitted about his extraordinary recent success with the musical Hamilton …
If you're looking for critical consensus, you won't find much of it in the new book The Critics Say…: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (McFarl…
While much will be written about the passing of Muhammad Ali, he does leave us with a theatrical footnote. I'm speaking of his single Broadway role, as the lead in the musical Buck White. Os…
Before you start shouting about spoiler alerts, let me point out that the headline of this piece does not indicate in what context this suicide occurs. Could be real life. Could be a play, a…
Since 2005, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, the British playwright and director, has been bringing plays " often two or even three at a time " to 59E59 Theaters in New York from his home base at the Ste…
The statements, on their face, are utterly startling. "Blacks and Latinos lack the keyboard skills needed for this field." "I don't have to take this. Yes, my board is all white, and they ar…
Years from now, newer converts to Hamilton fandom will marvel at how Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail assembled such a notable cast. It will be viewed like Rent, like American Graffiti, a …
This morning, I was both annoyed and bemused to learn that Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi, two esteemed British actors, had just been given airtime by National Public Radio, to advance the Ox…
In what will most assuredly give comfort to aspiring performers everywhere, you'll be highly amused to know that Cate Blanchett began her career singing silly songs in the Melbourne Unive…
Online or in print, headlines are meant to be grabbers. Just this week, I was taken aback by, and simply had to read, Â The Independent's "Radioactive wild boars rampaging around Fukushima…
My memory of the moment is quite vivid, if inevitably inexact. It happened 41 years ago, in the early afternoon, in Mrs. Winkler's seventh grade science class at Amity Junior High School, as…
Exiting the subway at Christopher Street, turning south on Seventh Avenue, my eyes always turn to the brick building on my left, with the word "Garage" inlaid near the peak of its low-rise r…
Let's get the story straight. When Tappan Zee High School's production of Mel Brooks's The Producers was performed this weekend, there were swastikas on stage. This shouldn't be any su…
The recent flurry of conversations surrounding theatre chat rooms, prompted in large part by a blog post from Patti Murin in the wake of the premature shutdown of the musical Nerds,…