158 stories from Scheck on the Arts
In the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, we learn that the central character experienced a past life and suffered an untimely end, only to be reborn in a new incarnation. Such is t…
It’s a long weekend’s journey into night at Stick Fly, Lydia R. Diamond’s overstuffed play about an African-American family’s tumultuous reunion at their summer home …
When the indie film musical Once was released five years ago, it became a critical and box-office sensation. This touching tale of the relationship between a Dublin Irish street musician and…
The stifling languorousness that so often afflicts contemporary productions of Chekhov is thankfully nowhere in sight in this Classic Stage Company’s revival of The Cherry Orchard. Dir…
One might think that true-life, murderous outlaws wouldn’t exactly be a likely choice for musical treatment, but then again composer Frank Wildhorn has already put songs in the mouths …
There’s a chill in the air. The tourists are packing the streets. And the Christmas decorations are blanketing the stores. It can only mean one thing. The Radio City Christmas Spectacu…
There’s a lot of love being expressed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Not only by the audience towards Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, the veteran musical stars who have been performi…
In the opening minutes of Theresa Rebeck’s new play, four young students nervously await the arrival of a famous novelist who they’ve hired to conduct a series of private seminar…
It’s not surprising that Noel Coward’s Private Lives is so often produced on Broadway. This delicious 1930 comedy, which has been seen here no less than four times in the last th…
Thomas Bradshaw’s new play Burning is playing at the New Group’s theater on 42nd Street, but it would have been right at home on the old 42nd Street as well. This sprawling, ambi…
There’s a mass seduction going on nightly at the Broadhurst Theatre. In his one-man show Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway, the Aussie performer has the audience eating out of the palm of…
Just in case you didn’t you didn’t get your hippy-dippy fix with the recent revival of Hair, there’s now the 40th anniversary production of Godspell to help you get your gr…
Santino Fontana continues to emerge as one of the great talents of the New York stage in Sons of the Prophet, the latest confident from Stephen Karam. As some might remember, it was another …
Jesse Eisenberg certainly hasn’t written an attractive part for himself in his debuting playwriting effort, now being presented by the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. In his dark come…
I don’t envy actress-turned-emerging-playwright Zoe Kazan; it’s hard to write a family play that steers clear of the usual tropes of long-simmering resentment and buried history.…
Miscommunication—of the linguistic, cultural and relationship kind—is the subject of David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish. Receiving its Broadway premiere after an acclaimed run e…
Relatively Speaking, the new evening of comic one-acts by Woody Allen, Elaine May and Ethan Coen, has just opened on Broadway, and all I can say is…oy! That this level of writing talen…
The recent death of Steve Jobs provides a fascinating conundrum for Mike Daisey, the writer/performer of the solo piece The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. On the one hand, it provides an a…
One of history’s greatest ironies is that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his soaring “I’ve have been to the mountaintop” speech on the very night before his death.…
Contemporary playwrights seem forever bent on proving Tolstoy’s line that “all families are unhappy in their own way.” The latest example is Nicky Silvers, who has mined su…
Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy was written in the 1960s and is set in the 1930s, but it would unfortunately resonate in any decade. This portrait of a desperate business tycoon was ins…
Playwright Jeff Talbott clearly knows the territory that he explores in The Submission. Having had his previous efforts presented at numerous theater festivals, he’s well in a position…
With some exceptions, absurdism doesn’t age particularly well. The impact of what was shocking and avant-garde decades ago is reduced by the endless mediocre imitations that have follo…
Last season, the Play Company’s production of Invasion! at Soho Rep left made quite an impact, garnering an OBIE award for playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri, in his debut as a playwright…
Try as I might, I find it impossible to appreciate the Elevator Repair Service’s aesthetic. This enterprising downtown troupe has made a significant name for themselves in recent years…
