1,089 stories from Show Showdown
My latest essay is up at Art Times:The holy grail of New York theater is a rave review in the New York Times. It doesn't guarantee success (and a pan doesn't guarantee failure), but a …
Ian Spring and LEXXE as Alice. Photo: Mark Shelby Perry
This burlesque journey down the rabbit hole transforms Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into a circus-tinged, sexy ro…
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, I watched certain political plays with a sense of distance, deeply sympathetic to the characters and deeply grateful that those awful things weren't …
It took me a very long time to see Fidler afn Dakh (Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish)--more on that in a minute--but I'm glad I pushed myself to go. In slowing down the musical's often fren…
In Series A, the first part of Summer Shorts at 59E59, all three plays circle around death. This is a lot for a 90-minute evening.The first show, Interior, is the most fully realize…
Ya gotta love Annie Golden. She has a sweetness to her, with a wild voice and a slightly goofy vibe. For a creative team to decide to shape a musical around her--even going so far as to name…
Sometimes the plot in Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoots Macbeth by Tom Stoppard, first produced in 1979, runs too close to home. But some background first:In Dogg's Hamlet, practically everyone spea…
Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth plays with language and slapstick, presents fascinating mini-versions of two of Shakespeare's masterpieces, vividly depicts the importance o…
Ladyship, the new show by twins Laura Good and Linda Good, exemplifies how difficult it is to write a good musical. There is so much here to like: some beautiful songs, an original story, an…
It's hard to know what to write about Illuminati Lizards From Outer Space since I was unable to hear ~70% of the lyrics (100% if more than one person was singing). I don't know if it was …
Kristen Egenes, Laura Hall, Kathleen Culler, Kelly Berman, Gia Mongell, Timmy Hays, Emma Vielbig, Lucy Anders, Brittany Rodin, Emily Kersey, Mandy McDonell. Photo: Shoshana Medney
The Bach…
Andre De Shields
Donna Walker-Kuhn
Inspiring others was the theme at the League of Professional Theatre Women 2019 Leadership Luncheon celebrating the inaugural Rachel Crothers Leadership…
This isn't exactly a review because I wasn't able to see the whole show. But here are some thoughts based on what I saw.
The rhythms of African-American casual conversation fit beautifully …
Well, two of us did okay: Liz and Sandra each had 17 correct predictions. I had decided to be iconoclastic, which was a bad idea: 11 correct predictions.
THE WINNERS
Liz
Sandra…
Nathan Lane
The 75th Theatre World Awards celebrated the debut of promising Broadway and Off-Broadway actors on June 3 in a sweet ceremony full of touching stories, even though it ran more t…
There are plenty of pleasures to be had at the Marquis Theater, where Tootsie, starring a  is running and probably will be for a while. The show is often quite funny; the cast is solid…
Mentalist and magician Gary Ferrar
Mentalist and magician Gary Ferrar's open-ended run and residency of Nothing Here is Real at The Cocktail Lounge Below Oxbow Tavern is not glitzy wi…
I have seen enough mediocre-to-bad high-concept productions of Shakespeare's plays to shudder at the very idea of "high-concept." Then along comes Mac Beth, the amazing Red Bull Productio…
I suspect that there is a good play inside Jesse Eisenberg's Happy Talk, currently at The New Group at the Signature Center. The ideas and the situation are intriguing, and there is humo…
Best MusicalAin't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations
Beetlejuice
Hadestown
The PromTootsie
Liz Wollman: Hadestown. Seriously, can we please celebrate a creative…
Trisha Lee works as a cleaner in a hospital in Sparkton, Texas. She is a church-going Christian. She adored her late husband. The focus of her life is her 14-year-old daughter Jolene. Or is …
One of the themes of the gorgeous and heart-breaking Caroline, or Change, the story of an African-American maid working for a Jewish family in the 1960s South, is that "change come fast, …
What an odd show is Lady in the Dark. Consisting largely of three dream sequences, it lacks forward propulsion and is frequently overdone and/or pointless and/or flabby, particularly in the …
As you probably already know, in the old days theatre critics wrote their reviews right after seeing the performances. In fact, as the shows ended, the critics ran up the aisles to maximize …
My sister once said that, while the worst men are incredibly sleazy, the worst women are incredibly stupid. In the world premiere of The Pain of My Belligerence at Playwrights Horizons, w…
