3,308 stories from Newsday
It hurts to have to say this. But "Hair" has been allowed to deteriorate into the packaged '60s theme park that this revival had so smartly avoided.
Jonathan Demme, famous as director of "The Silence of the Lambs" but beloved for so many quality indie films, has made a strange, but strangely touching, choice for his stage-directing debut…
I have to cherish an art form that, unlike the rest of American culture, cherishes its older artists.
Everyday Rapture is an easygoing end to a frantic Broadway season.
Little wonder that, for the third time since 1997, a New York theater has turned to Collected Stories. Donald Margulies's drama delivers an engrossing, if somewhat schematic, couple of hours with just a single set and two actors.
For Enron to be any more timely, the financial satire with music would have to be happening in the offices of Goldman Sachs' lawyers. If Rupert Goold's fanciful multimedia staging of Lucy Prebble's London hit were any livelier, the actors wearing voracious debt-eating raptors masks on their heads would be dashing up the theater aisles gobbling credit-card receipts from our wallets.
If you need to understand why Broadway—not to mention America—needed to change in 1968, take a look at Promises, Promises, the emotionally and musically stunted show that opened the same year as Hair.
If "Spring Awakening" was the birth of genuine rock musicals on Broadway, then "American Idiot" is its worthy son.
Stephen Sondheim, Superstar?
This is little more than a glorified club act, a concert of terrific formative rock and roll loosely held together with conversational connective tissue and telescoped rock history.
If anyone still wonders why the Encores! series needs to exist, a perfect response is "Anyone Can Whistle."
Is it entertaining? Yes. Is it disappointing? Yes.
The result is good fluff, elevated by showing-off, whistle-stop pacing and the pleasures of sharing a theater with actors working pleasurably to make us hang our brains at the door.
The relationship goes through a familiar trajectory, from master-student slave to a grudging respect, but transcends pat expectations. So does this compelling play.
Of the 24 musicals that will be on Broadway by the end of the month, 10 can safely be described as rock musicals.
