8,501 stories from Backstage
For some time before writing “The Yeomen of the Guard or, The Merry Man and His Maid,” composer Arthur Sullivan was chaffing at the bit to quit his collaboration with William S. …
Having seen "Les Misérables" on stage six times, including everything form the original Broadway show to a local high school production, and the movie a total of eight, Backstage's Fi…
There’s a lot of yelling going on at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, but very little drama is generated in director Rob Ashford’s maladroit production of Tennessee Williams’ 1…
Creative practice in the visual and performing arts has lately shifted from the production of an art object—a painting, a dance, a play—to the orchestration of an “experien…
When Jordan Dean lost his job, columnist Michael Riedel responded with characteristic reserve. From his perch at the New York Post, Riedel had campaigned to have Dean’s character Skipp…
Los Angeles is playing host to a high-stakes singing competition, but its contestants aren’t belting out the latest pop hits. Instead, L.A.’s Next Great Stage Star’s 20 con…
Watching an acting exercise can be mildly entertaining, but it’s rarely dramatically satisfying. That’s the takeaway from “Working on ‘A Special Day’,” th…
An unnamed Belarusian man walks onstage and shows us the many scars covering his body. Some are the result of accidents, but others derive, he says, from beatings by the Belarusian KGB. Then…
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” opens on Broadway, National Theatre Live presents “The Magistrate” with John Lithgow, 92Y talks to “Relevant Octogenarians” Barbar…
Tina Satter, artistic director of Half Straddle, a five-year-old experimental theater company that’s been gaining enthusiastic attention of late, takes on Anton Chekhov with both impud…
Theatricality as fluid as “Midsummer [a play with songs]” displays can help or hurt the material. David Greig’s two-hander (he also directed), with music by Gordon McIntyre…
In an Oscar season that has lacked a firm frontrunner and been full of surprises, there have been only two sure things: Anne Hathaway will win best supporting actress and Daniel Day-Lewis wi…
It’s hard to fathom what adapter-director Ben West is up to in this drastically cut, heavily revised pint-size production of Allan Sherman and Albert Hague’s “The Fig Leave…
After their respective directors failed to land Academy Award nominations, "Argo" and "Les Misérables" got a nice boost from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association on Sunday night by…
William Inge’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize–winning “Picnic” is indisputably an American classic, but that doesn’t mean the play is foolproof. An ensemble piece, its mer…
“Airswimming”, written in 1997, is the inaugural work of British playwright Charlotte Jones, best known for her 2002 “Humble Boy,” which was successfully produced in …
Having seen the DVD of Ian McKellen’s superb 1982 one-man show “Acting Shakespeare,” in which the brilliant British actor intersperses autobiographical anecdotes and inform…
The ambiguously titled “Opus No. 7,” conceived and directed by Dmitry Krymov, is a memory play, with the emphasis, refreshingly, on play. The animating spirit—unique to the…
Pierre Corneille caused a commotion with “Le Cid” in 1637. An audience-pleasing commercial success, the play was nonetheless rejected by members of the French literary establishm…
“I, Malvolio” is the latest in a series of solo Shakespearean pieces that Tim Crouch has created and performed. Previous works include “I, Caliban” (“The Tempes…
It’s not easy for Peggy Shaw to ask for help. As the nation’s reigning queer feminist performance artist since 1980, when she founded the company Split Britches with Lois Weaver …
Raucous laughter and awkward silences fill the Public Theater’s Newman Theater during “Ganesh Versus the Third Reich,” a bizarrely compelling show from Australia’s Ba…
January is the unofficial month of experimental downtown theater, what with the Under the Radar and Coil festivals in full swing. But they are not the only game in town. The Wild Project is …
Sharr White’s penetrating drama “The Other Place” was a highlight of the 2011 winter theatrical season when it played Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Now the MC…
If you’re in the mood to hear some of the top standards of the Great American Songbook, from “Stormy Weather” to “Over the Rainbow,” you might want to bundle up…
