884 stories from Broadway & Me
The Tony nominations announced yesterday morning were as perplexing as ever. Maybe even more so. As happens every year, some "sure things" got left out (almost none of the big name movie sta…
Appearing in a Broadway play has become almost as popular with Hollywood stars as having a charity of their own. Of course, some Hollywood actors"Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington"h…
The spring season is firing along on all cylinders. Six shows are opening this week. The Outer Critics Circle announced its nominations yesterday (click here to see them), the Drama League l…
Standing ovations have become so much a part of the Broadway theater-going experience that the producer Ken Davenport recently conducted a survey to find out why people keep jumping up at th…
Moviemaking"the old-fashioned kind with people and plots but no aliens or armageddons"has become so rare in Hollywood that there's been a mass migration of some of its best talent into TV……
Ira Aldridge, the first black man to play Othello before a white audience, is a fascinating character. And Adrian Lester, who recently played the Moor in an acclaimed production by London's …
The new musical The Bridges of Madison County isn't doing well. And I'm not sure why. It's based on the 1992 novel about the star-crossed love affair between a war bride turned Iowa housewif…
Back in the days when both writers and audiences prized loving families as much as dysfunctional ones, people couldn't get enough of the Hansons, a poor but close-knit clan of Norwegian-Amer…
Beau Willimon's first play, Farragut North, was produced by the Atlantic Theater Company with John Gallagher and Chris Noth in the lead roles and then turned into the movie "The Ides of Marc…
I can't say exactly how it happened but I've obviously missed the deadline for Wednesday's post and so I'm belatedly turning on the ghost light, the traditional sign that theaters are tempor…
After years of seeing dramas about dysfunctional families, I'd begun to wonder if it was even possible for there to be a good play about a happy family. So I suppose I should have been happy…
The two previous plays by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins that I've seen" Neighbors and The Octoroon: An Adaptation of the Octoroon Based on the Octoroon"featured black actors wearing black face and …
If you asked a random sampling of playgoers to list the best living playwrights in the country today, names like Edward Albee, Tony Kushner and Sam Shepard would come up long before anyone g…
Two shows have recently opened that I'd like to talk about but don't feel as though I should since I've a rooting interest in each. The first is Satchmo at the Waldorf, a one-man (but multi-…
Almost everything"the acting, the directing, the costumes, the set, and most especially the play itself"works in Stage Kiss, the romantic comedy now running at Playwrights Horizon through Ma…
Drag queens have long played a central role in gay life. In the old almost-everybody-in-the-closet days, they provided a way for gay men (those who dressed up as women and those who simply a…
When a revival doesn't work, people often say it's because the show has outlived its time. Well, we no longer live in a time when the marriage of a Jew and a gentile would be a scandal…
When Time magazine put together its list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, Bruce Lee won a spot, right alongside Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Pablo Picasso and Mother…
It turns out to be surprisingly easy to love Love and Information the new Caryl Churchill play that New York Theatre Workshop opened this week at the Minetta Lane Theatre. I don't always fee…
Death pops up fairly regularly in plays. But its companion grief"the agonizing bewilderment that follows the loss of a loved one"appears less frequently. And that's why I thought it might be…
As you surely know, yesterday was Valentine's Day (hope you enjoyed yours as much as my husband K and I did ours). But, as you may not know, it was also the anniversary of Broadway & Me.…
If you crossed the linked stories in the 2003 movie "Love Actually" with the quirky small-town characters of the '90s-era sitcom "Northern Exposure" you might end up with Almost, Maine, the …
From Jan: So much theater. So little time. I put the Encores! production of Little Me on my calendar as soon as I heard about it but somehow I didn't get around to getting ticket…
Bertolt Brecht famously championed the theater of alienation but the revival of his A Man's a Man that opened last week at Classic Stage Company is oddly endearing.Like so many works by Brec…
Plays about the Irish so often portray their characters in such a twee way that you'd think they were just one step removed from leprechauns. And I feared I was in for more of that kind of b…
