884 stories from Broadway & Me
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Wishing you a year filled with all of the above, plus, of course, lots of great theater...
Theater worked hard this year to come back from the pandemic. As part of those efforts, Broadway dropped its requirement that theatergoers show proof of being vaccinated and made mask wearin…
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The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust announced this week that it is awarding its $100,000 Mimi Award to two mid-career playwrights: James Ijames and Lloyd Suh. I'm pleased for both…
The world of musical theater is divided right now between the people who saw KPOP before it came to Broadway and those who saw it afterward. I sadly fall into the latter group.Â
The origi…
Bruce Norris has a knack for making people uncomfortable. His 2006 play The Pain and the Itch featured a 4-year-old with a genital rash, a metaphor for her family's dysfunction that call…
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& Juliet, the exuberant new musical that mashes up Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with the songbook of the pop hitmaker Max Martin wasn't made for me. It was made for the tween gir…
The writer Joan Didion once said that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." But lately an increasing number of theater makers have not only been telling the stories of their lives bu…
My friend Seymour "Red" Press died yesterday. Although to call him a friend doesn't really describe what he meant to my husband K and me. Red was a longtime musical contractor and K, a trump…
As a recent story in the online magazine TDF Stages noted, James Baldwin is having a theatrical moment (click here to read more about it). The black writer and intellectual, who died in 1987…
Revivals used to be fairly simple. A producer would take a beloved title or maybe even an underappreciated one, cast it with a star or two and voilà , a show. But that's not how it goes no…
The very limited six-day run of Burn, Alan Cumming's solo performance piece at The Joyce Theater, ends this weekend but there is so much joy in it that I can't resist celebrating it.Â
Cu…
Monday is Labor Day, which means that it's time for my annual tribute to some of the people whose labor makes the theater we all love work. I've been doing this for 15 years now and I can't …
Everyone who loves serious theater loves the idea of giving talented new writers a chance to show what they can do. The question is the timing. Too many workshops (and the notes that come al…
Greek tragedies don't get done a lot. Which is why I really try to see them when I can. So my theatergoing buddy Bill and I bought tickets for the new production of the Oresteia that is play…
So many musicals nowadays are based on movies or other pop culture IP (by which I mean jukebox musicals of one kind or another) that it's nicely retro to have one based on a book. That's the…
Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. At least that's the approach two recent plays have taken with the current political morass in which we all find ourselves. Selina Filling…
Now that Covid has been around for more than two years and vaccines have made contracting the virus a little less scary, a new kind of normal is settling in. The Tony award ceremonies return…
For the second time this month, there will be no regular post here. It's not because there haven't been shows to see and talk about: although it will be weeks before anything new opens on Br…
The settings and the circumstances are the same in two new off-Broadway shows that portray the plight of the young Black and Brown people who are so often trapped in systems that view them"a…
Dreaming Zenzile, the musical that opened at New York Theatre Workshop this week, began as a tribute concert. And it probably should have stayed one. Â
The show, a co-production wi…
The girls aren't what they're expected to be in Belfast Girls, the new show that opened at the Irish Rep this week. They also aren't what we've come to expect to find in historical dramas li…
It may seem strange for a theater lover"and hip-hop know-nothing"like me to be quoting the rapper Drake but his self-congratulatory lyrics "Started from the bottom, now we're here" seem part…
Samuel D. Hunter's A Case for the Existence of God has been almost universally adored by the critics. And the play, which has just been extended at Signature Theatre through May 22, deserves…
Seventeen shows opened or reopened on Broadway this month and as I bounced from one to the other, I found myself asking what exactly is a Broadway show. The simplest answer to that question …
