392 stories from The Wicked Stage
I've mentioned it a few times in this space, but it's official now: Today is the release of a CD I helped make with my old film-school and campus newspaper colleague Susan Lambert: O Baby Mi…
My first exposure to Dennis Miles' work was inauspicious: His one-act Rosa Mundy, about a strange young woman who alternately lusted for and killed visitors to her lonely home, was staged as…
I spent a fascinating afternoon a few weeks ago at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village talking to some unfailingly gracious Icelanders, and a few slightly baffled American actors, …
Ballinger and NithapalanI had the pleasure of breaking bread (larb, actually) with Erik Patterson yesterday. He's an L.A.-based playwright whose work I admired more than a decade ago at Thea…
My heart sank early and often last week at the City Center concert rendition of Randy Newman's Faust, but never so low as when Newman muffed one of his own best lines. That he was onstage at…
One challenge of my job trying to cover theater with a national perspective, both at American Theatre and, to a certain degree, at the NY Times, is how to keep tabs on work I can't actually …
I'll be at tonight's one-night-only concert reading of Randy Newman's Faust with bells on. (How 'bout you, George Hunka?) I'd noted the possibility that the show would finally get a hearing …
photo by Caitlin McNaneyA few years ago, a musical theater colleague of mine told me that someone named "Glen Kelly" was the guy who really wrote the scores of The Producers and Young Franke…
I'm just back from the TCG Conference in San Diego last week--my fourth ever, and despite (or perhaps because of) the perfectly sunny but cool weather in my beloved, much-missed Southern Cal…
Chris Myers and Danny Wolohan in An Octoroon"I rarely hope for my writing to have any effect. But I confess that I hope this piece makes people feel a certain kind of way." -Ta-Nehisi Coates…
Blogging has been light for much the same reasons as I noted here, but I feel I should catch readers up with my extra-curricular work.I interviewed Norm Lewis, Broadway's first black Phantom…
Mark Ruffalo and Laurel Green in Justin Tanner's Still Life With Vacuum Salesman at the Cast Theatre, 1994 (photo by Ed Krieger)I haven't lived in Los Angeles since the summer of 2005 but I'…
A favorite scene from Foreign Correspondent, referenced in David Rudkin's new play The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock. Some time in the early 1980s, my dad flagged a listing in our loc…
I happened to catch Michael C. Hall in two early-ish stage roles: as the young kid in the Taper's exquisite production of Skylight (with Laila Robins and Brian Cox) and as the emcee in …
The 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama has just been announced, and I'm so happy to hear it went to Annie Baker's The Flick, I played I thoroughly enjoyed and admired. I don't know how Annie got …
I came across this lede in an old review of mine while working on my recent feature on Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally, and it struck as worth highlighting. The review is of the Mike L…
One reason I was so disappointed by Classic Stage Company's muddled, soporific staging of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle last year was that two of the most formative theatergoing experience…
This is the 10th year of the Wicked Stage blog (predated by its few years as a weekly-ish column in the inky pages of Back Stage West), but so far it's been a sparsely populated, as you may …
When I spoke to Jeanine Tesori last year about her new Encores! summer series, at the top of her wish list of musicals she wanted to revive was Randy Newman's Faust, which had a mostly great…
As my modest theater blog enters its 10th year, it now feels chiefly like a venue for links to my feature writing as it comes along (though I was too busy recently to trumpet my latest piece…
For what it's worth, when I recently took issue with Charles McNulty's review of three high-profile New York Shakespeare productions, I had already filed my review of the fall's Bard glut, b…
Charles McNulty is right on the merits and right in his reasoning in this new review lamenting the Lincoln Center Macbeth and adding his praise to the hosannahs for the Globe's Twelfth Night…
In lieu of a new Sondheim show, the airing tonight of Six by Sondheim on HBO qualifies as an event for fans. I'm gratified that the great interview clips that showed throughout the othe…
Capping this season's surfeit of Shakespeare productions is the Lincoln Center production of Macbeth, which I've taken to calling MacHawke after its star, Ethan Hawke (much as I will always …
How much does it matter how you say "Godot"? With Beckett, no detail is too small. As I've noted in this space before, the excellent 2000 Matrix Theatre production starring David Dukes and G…
