3,024 stories from USA Today
The up-and-coming actress shares a tea with her mother, Valerie, and let USA TODAY sit in.
Many of us have fond memories of watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as preschoolers. But did you know that, for some viewers, Fred Rogers' neighborly lessons held messages of social and sexual empowerment—that he was, in fact, "the father of free love"? This is one of the more intriguing revelations in Everyday Rapture, the slight but charming revue that opened Thursday at Broadway's American Airlines Theatre.
For anyone who thought turning popular movies into dopey musicals was strictly a 21st-century phenomenon, a little history lesson has begun.
Anyone who had hoped that Green Day would finally bring punk-rock nihilism to Broadway is about to be sorely disappointed. Few could have predicted that American Idiot, the new adaptation of the band's massively popular, starkly disenchanted album of the same name, would be the feel-good musical of the season.
Attending a performance of this La Cage, which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, is a bit like spending an afternoon with an overactive but thoroughly charming child.
With their punk-informed hairdos and garb, the members of Green Day look slightly out of place in Sardi's, a landmark theater-district restaurant frequented by stage folks and matinee crowds. But Billie Joe Armstrong, Tré Cool and Mike Dirnt are Broadway babies themselves these days. The new musical American Idiot, an adaptation of the rock band's multiplatinum 2004 album, opens Tuesday at the St. James Theatre. And the guys are clearly, in Armstrong's words, "stoked" as they chat with director Michael Mayer.
So now we know the truth: Elvis wasn't nearly as sexy as Carl Perkins or as charismatic as Jerry Lee Lewis. That revelation, however fictional, is the most entertaining aspect of Million Dollar Quartet, the patronizing new jukebox musical that opened Sunday at the Nederlander Theatre.
"Martin Short could host a show, because he sings, he dances and, God knows, he's funny. When CBS put Bette Midler in a sitcom, I thought she should have had a variety show. She's got the sa…
Director Stanley Tucci has clearly instructed his ensemble to abandon all inhibitions in the pursuit of a goofy good time.
Coming up in a less enlightened era, Bankhead was destined to be defined by her exploits as a free-thinking, fast-living woman. Better to be in on the joke than to invite scorn or, worse, pity. That's clearly the perspective of Matthew Lombardo, the author of Looped. The play, which opened Sunday at Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, is a passionate, if not entirely convincing, rebuttal to anyone who has tried to reduce Bankhead to a punch line.
