6,591 stories from Stage and Cinema
FOLLIES IN HOLLYWOOD Follies has always been a fabulous musical. It may not be Stephen Sondheim‘s greatest musical, but it is the Stephen Sondheim musical that his admirers most desper…
THE IMPERFECT STORM Over lunch today, I tried to tell someone about Michael Elyanow’s new take on the Medea myth and found myself crying into my tikka masala. The material is horri…
WHERE IS MRS. O’LEARY’S COW WHEN YOU NEED HER? Had the inexhaustible 57-year-old Christie Brinkley performed "Roxie" on America's Got Talent, I would have demanded that she make …
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL East West Players' cross-cultural take on the Stephen Sondheim/Harold Wheeler musical A Little Night Music highlights one of the most shimmering and romantic sco…
BETTER BE ON YOUR AVANT-GARDE Have you ever eaten at a new restaurant and summed it up thusly?: "I have no idea what I just ate! It was a little tough to chew and digest, but the presentatio…
INTIMATE OPERA Bringing opera to a wider audience is the noble goal of many a musical entrepreneur, but few succeed as well as Josh Shaw and Stephen Karr, founders of the Pacific Opera Proje…
GOING NOWHERE Regarded as one of Bruce Springsteen's best works, the 1982 album Nebraska has inspired tributes from Johnny Cash, Aimee Mann, Chris Cornell and other artists moved by its blea…
A CAPTIVATING GENDER-BENDING STORY In Michael Premsrirat's thoroughly engaging The Girl Most Likely To, an unnamed teenage Boy (a winning Tobit Raphael) is, and always has been, in the wrong…
THE PAINT JOB ON THIS PROMISING MUSICAL NEEDS DARKER COLORS NPR's This American Life is where I first heard about the 1997 film Hands on a Hard Body, which documented a 1995 dealership-spons…
RIGHT UP HALF-BAKED ALLEY Keith Stevenson’s writing in Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd. unsteadily walks a line between high and low comedy, veering more often toward sit-comism. …
DEAFTRAP Writer Stephen Sachs and the Fountain Theatre have come up with what would appear to be a fresh approach to Rostand's classic play, Cyrano de Bergerac. In this modern-day version, C…
THE PROBLEM WITH BEING TOO WELL-MANNERED David Auburn‘s The Columnist gets the good part over with in the first scene and then proceeds to become exactly the sort of play we might have…
PLENTY OF NOTHING Even before The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, it was fraught with controversy.  A New York Times puff piece on the Boston American Repertory Theater p…
A SMALL LITTLE CREATES HUGE RESULTS For its scintillating revival of A Little Night Music, the Writers' Theatre has condensed the Stephen Sondheim classic into a chamber musical. The action …
A WAR OF IDEAS For the first forty-five minutes of City Lit's OPUS 1861, a miracle occurred: I wept. Consistently. The simple but mighty idea is this: six actors dressed in simple army fatig…
Stage and Cinema sent Harvey Perr back to the east coast to catch up on this very busy time of the season in New York City theater, when new shows open one right after the other and Tony fev…
PICKING THROUGH AMBIGUITIES In Harold Pinter's purposefully ambiguous The Caretaker (1960), currently playing at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater, Davies (Jonathan Pryce) is a tran…
THE ICEMAN HATH ARRIVED Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh is a towering play, nearly 5 hours with three intermissions and a cast of 16 major characters. Yet its theme can be summarize…
RENT GETS A NEW LEASE ON LIFE, EVEN AS THE INTRINSIC PROBLEMS REMAIN As soon as David Cromer was announced as the director, the revival of Rent became one of the buzz productions of the seas…
TIMON ON OUR HANDS OK, raise your hand if you have read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. No? Do you even know how to say Timon? It is pronounced TIME-uhn. Have you seen a production? Probably …
TAUGHT BY MASTERS William Faulkner might or might not have quipped that Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies he’d ever met. Faulkner definitely did call James both priggish…
THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT A demon-possessed, bleeding-eyed, pyro-maniacal Raggedy Ann doll with pre-cum on her face is the vortex around which Michael John LaChiusa's new comedy Sukie and Sue:…
MAKE A FELINE FOR THEATER WIT At the beginning of Tigers Be Still at Theater Wit, 24-year old Sherry takes a microphone and announces to the audience, karaoke style, "This is the story of ho…
TOO MANY THEATER INGREDIENTS SPOIL THE BROTH If there were a Joseph Jefferson Award simply for risk-taking in the theatre, Brandon Bruce would most assuredly win for his direction of John We…
CIRQUE'S PERKS What’s a circus without lions, tigers, and elephants? In the case of Cirque du Soleil's Totem, their eleventh major production in 26 years, it’s a marked impro…
