8,501 stories from Backstage
Playwright Richard Greenberg has adapted Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” for the theater with remarkable fidelity—and that’s the problem.…
The lights dim in the tiny theater. They come up slightly to reveal a drunken couple graphically doing the nasty. Before they reach a climax, the man can be heard snoring loudly. The woman c…
From scripts available on e-readers to an online dictionary of standard theater phrases, it seems almost every facet of the theater industry is being digitized. Music Theatre International (…
The notion of taking one’s breath away dominates Strange Sun Theater’s brisk production of “The Drowning Girls,” both in the figurative romantic sense and the literal…
“Is it better to do what you’re told or to do what you want?” asks a coy young woman (Rachel I. Berman) from behind a closed bathroom door. I answer. She laughs. Pause. &ld…
The American Theatre Wing has announced the 67th Annual Tony Awards for June 9, to be held once again at Radio City Music Hall. The ceremony will air live on CBS.
CBS has aired the Tony Awar…
Lanford Wilson’s 1975 play “The Mound Builders” is, according to Wilson’s published preface, constructed to resemble the process at an archaeological dig, where scien…
Playwright Mark Rigney has ambition and audacity galore, but in this New York premiere, currently on view at 59E59 Theaters, he’s chosen a metaphor for presenting his ideas that doesn&…
The music of Billy Joel, ABBA, and Green Day have all inspired Broadway adaptations of their work—and now the catalog of Carole King will join their ranks. “Beautiful: The Carole…
Thirty high schools around the country, including three New York-based schools, are currently final contenders for the “Smash” Make a Musical campaign. The NBC musical show has p…
It has taken 30 producers to bring Christopher Durang’s six-character, one-set comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” to the Great White Way, and all I can say is God…
Fasten your seat belts: Craig Lucas has written a divertissement. “The Lying Lesson” takes place in an empty house in a remote seaside town in Maine and begins in a booming, crac…
54 Below, a venue dubbed “Broadway’s nightclub” and located near Times Square, is putting its own spin on an “American Idol” and other competition shows. Starti…
How can a family redeem itself in the aftermath of a scandal? What does it take to forgive and be forgiven? What is it like to suffer for another’s sins? Those are the timeless themes …
In case you missed the Encores! concert version in 1998 or the 1995 Goodspeed Opera House mounting in Connecticut, Musicals Tonight!’s bare-bones concert presentation delivers a respec…
Some relics of the past are best left moldering in the attic. Such a dusty curio is “Loud Speaker,” John Howard Lawson’s frantic 1927 burlesque of American politics, presen…
Playwright Annie Baker pushes her deliberately anti-theatrical approach to drama past the breaking point in “The Flick,” which spends three hours and 15 minutes detailing the ban…
The Detroit race riots seem like fertile territory for heated conflict, but Dominique Morisseau’s witty “Detroit ’67” stays on simmer. The riots take a back seat, ent…
“Shaheed” means “martyr,” and that’s exactly what the late Benazir Bhutto was to the Pakistani people. Aware that she might be killed by her country’s Isl…
Anton Chekhov is a popular subject to parody and re-imagine these days. With Christopher Durang’s “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” on Broadway and Annie Baker’s …
The coy asterisk in the title of Target Margin Theater’s latest production is meant to promote mysterious fascination. The play in question, a classic of New York City’s Yiddish …
There’s no doubt that Ike Holter’s “Hit the Wall,” an attempt to dramatize the Stonewall Riots, which are generally considered the birth of the modern gay rights move…
A new musical, “First Date,” will be making its way to the Longacre Theatre this summer, producer Junkyard Dog Productions announced earlier this week.
“First Date” i…
It didn’t sound too promising: a cabaret-style revue satirizing Bravo’s prolific “Real Housewives” franchise set in a quaint village in Upstate New York. How much mat…
The estimable Holland Taylor has not simply found the role of her career in former Texas governor Ann Richards; she’s written it as well, after doing impressively extensive research. I…
