392 stories from The Wicked Stage
I've got a piece in the new BAMBill, also online, about Filter Theatre's new environmentalist drama Water, which I saw on video in advance of writing. An excerpt:
A transatlantic mystery wi…
The Book of Mormon has now been a Broadway hit for two and a half years, and it's now making its second trip to Denver--about as close to "Sal Tlay Ka Siti" as this irreverent if less t…
There are no Playbills on offer at the Public's current production of The Good Person of Szechwan, a remount of the Foundry Theatre's beautiful, pitch-perfect queering/contemporizing of Brec…
Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
I confess I haven't followed David Cromer's busy New York directing career as closely as I could or should have; but how coul…
More than a dozen years ago, when L.A. native Jon Robin Baitz belatedly premiered his L.A.-set play Mizlansky/Zilinsky at the Geffen Playhouse, I had the chance to sit down with him and…
Early in my New York freelance career, I wrote about the opening of a new multimedia arts space not far from Ground Zero. It was almost exactly seven years ago, in early September, 2006, and…
My formative-album-replay project continues apace over at my Train My Ear blog, and I feel I'd be remiss if I didn't mention here that today's is a cast album, Oliver! (the original London r…
I'm in Arizona helping my dad prepare for a big move, so I'm kind of out of the loop. I offer in lieu of original blogging, a look back to a post from five years ago today in which I propose…
I realized recently that one could mark the years of my young life by actress crushes: Amy Irving and Ingrid Bergman in high school, Holly Hunter and Audrey Hepburn in college, and some inde…
Ten years ago today was my last as editor-in-chief of Back Stage West, the weekly actors' trade paper I joined 10 years previously (on Sept. 14, 1993). I just marked this anni…
"The old officeholders, the filthy herd of swine whom we vaguely knew and would even vaguely nod to at cocktail parties, were quietly replaced by a new herd of swine whom we didn't know--the…
I've slowly but surely restarted my formative-album replay project over at my other blog, Train My Ear, and though many of the records aren't theater-related, today's is a beloved collection…
As I write this, my four-year-old son is at a matinee of The Lion King with my wife. (Ah, seems like only yesterday he was going to toddler theatre...) They've never seen it; I saw it twice …
Most good actors, in my experience, manage a delicate balancing act between being vulnerable, emotionally available, with feelings closer to the surface than seems altogether healthy on the …
Brad Fleischer and Arian Moayed in Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo (photo by Craig Schwartz)
In the current issue of American Theatre, I've got an interview with playwright Rajiv Joseph (Gr…
It's been some time in the works: an album of songs inspired by Shakespeare and intended for kids, titled O Baby Mine: Sing a Song of Shakespeare. And though the actual CD, the brainchild of…
Jeanine Tesori has long been something of a hero to me"not because I've loved every score she's done (did anyone think Shrek was a great fit?) but because I feel a distinct affinit…
Robbie in New Orleans: a large spirit and a sense of wonder.
In the summer of 2002, I was heading into what would be, in retrospect, a really rough patch of my life. My mom had died suddenl…
It's great to see Michael Feingold writing about theater again (kudos to TheaterMania for snapping him up), and with his own self-directed topics. And I love that he starts up his new column…
It's easy to forget that there are different generations of Disney films, and hence Disney fans. As I was born at the end of the '60s, it was the films Uncle Walt made in that decade, and th…
It's been a few years in the making, and it's still not ready to roll out just yet, but with a few other songwriters I've been putting together O Baby Mine, an album of Shakespeare-insp…
Insert obligatory apology for light posting here. The slowdown has been mainly due to my being out of town to report a big story on the Goodman Theatre's new Jungle Book. You may have h…
At the end of an illuminating interview about her new adaptation of The Jungle Book for the Goodman Theater, Mary Zimmerman gives a snappish but, I think, profound answer to a commonplace in…
Cross-posted at StageGrade.
We're sensing a trend with our StageGrade Tony Poll: Critical
dissatisfaction with shows themselves, coupled with huge love for the
performers and directors of…
I was just kvetching to someone yesterday about how Kenneth Lonergan's 1996 watershed This Is Our Youth is almost never revived (a subject I covered at more length for Isaac last year), and …
