219 stories from The Faster Times
The most powerful moment for me in "Magic/Bird," a play about the rivalry and then friendship between basketball stars Magic Earvin Johnson and Larry Bird, occurs after Johnson announces tha…
Which Broadway show are you must looking forward to? Take the poll So many plays and musicals are opening from now through April 26th that it is hard to keep up. Here are my reviews of what …
It is not until the very end of "End of the Rainbow," after Judy Garland's pianist tells us how she died from an overdose, that we feel free to be entertained: Tracie Bennett comes back from…
With its talk of sex in the White House and God on the campaign stump, "The Best Man," which debuted in 1960, long has seemed prophetic. But the references to the 2012 campaign are downright…
Wider than the gap between the one percent and the 99 percent, or between labor and management, is the one between those who grew up adoring the film "Newsies" and those who found it unwatch…
When “Jesus Christ Superstar” opened on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theater in 1971, the concept album had already sold two and a half million copies. So, while protesters pic…
Willy Loman is something no American wants to be " average. It is something his wife recognizes about him: "A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man," Linda tells their two childr…
They meet on a Dublin street, he a street musician about to abandon his guitar, she a Czech pianist without a piano. In "Once" the Broadway musical, as in "Once" the small hit film, love beg…
"The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," Mike Daisey's well-reviewed monologue currently at the Public Theater, is the subject of an expose in This American Life, the radio program that ai…
There will be 17 Broadway openings from March 15 to April 26th, an astonishing turnover with only 40 theaters on the Great White Way, almost too overwhelming to consider. So let's focus just…
Decades after Carrie wreaked her revenge for being dumped on with pigs blood, "Carrie” the musical, which opens tonight at the Lucille Lortel, has a chance for its own sort of revenge …
The finale of "Assistance" is an abused employee's revenge fantasy: A woman curses out her boss, and then dances defiantly as the office around her self-destructs in spectacular fashion: The…
Apartheid was virulent and ignored outside South Africa in 1961 when Athol Fugard wrote "Blood Knot," launching his international career. The American anti-apartheid movement was in full for…
Each Broadway show has a different policy to enable either the general public, or students, or young people, to buy tickets at a steep discount. Anything Goes General Rush: $30 " limited num…
There is the William Shatner, long forgotten, who appeared with Spencer Tracy in "Judgment at Nuremberg" and replaced an ill Christopher Plummer as Henry V at the Stratford Festival. There i…
Once young and idealist, now rich, arrogant and corrupted, the main characters of "Merrily We Roll Along," Stephen Sondheim's most reworked flop, could be said to resemble the Encores! serie…
In "Rx," Phil tells Meena that she may be suffering from workplace depression, "which isn't a personal failure; it's a disease." He quickly adds: "We hope." If it is a disease, the giant pha…
Smash, the new NBC TV series about the making of a Broadway musical, is well-timed for theater people, both because it's on Mondays (their standard day off), and because it starts in Februar…
"Welcome to blood, sex, sorrow and a good party," a young man said cheerfully, as he handed out a drink during the Flea Theater's adaptation of all seven surviving tragedies by Sophocles, a …
The Nixon Rule is named after Cynthia Nixon, who is starring as a literature professor dying of cancer in the Broadway debut of "Wit" 13 years after it opened Off-Broadway and won the Pulitz…
"It's not all that important, of course," the minister says, helping Miss Helen fill out a form to put her in an old-age home. It is one of many shrewd little moments in Athol Fugard's "The …
Is the "Porgy and Bess" currently on Broadway worth seeing? Consider these other questions: Is "Porgy and Bess" racist? Is it an opera or a musical? How important is that goat cart to you? T…
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”- Martin Luther King, Jr. What's on Broadway? Long-running shows, shows about to close, and shows about to open.…
At around 16 years of age, Susan Sontag 1. offered Thomas Mann a reinterpretation of his "Magic Mountain" 2. had her first affair with a woman, 3. met the professor she would marry. "I know …
Here's a story I wrote about David Wheeler, who died last week, and his marvelous theater in Boston, which predeceased him. I got to know David when he was at Robert Brustein’s America…
