884 stories from Broadway & Me
Just like Shakespeare, the great Greek playwrights staged their plays with all-male actors. But unlike the Bard, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides centered many of their plays around great …
One of my best friends worked for the Negro Ensemble Company back in its heyday and so I got to see the original productions of such shows as Zooman and the Sign, The River Niger and the NEC…
Wither the musical? Not the jukebox musical or the ones that strap themselves to popular movies like a shipwreck victim clinging to a lifeboat or even those with rock scores whose songs self…
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Time flies. And this year it's whizzing by so quickly that I almost forgot to take some time out to celebrate the 13th anniversary of Broadway & Me…
Christopher Chen's intriguing memory play The Headlands works on so many levels that it's hard for me to keep track of all of them.
It starts out as a crime procedural centered around an i…
Spring doesn't officially arrive this year until week after next but the spring theater season is already here, with new shows opening almost every day. And I'm already running behind as I t…
I had planned to post a review this week but it was a pan of a play that I really didn't like and that seems somehow wrong at this time when concerns about the spread of the COVID-19 virus h…
We're all longing for moments of clarity, sanity and even a little levity during these days of social distancing and self-isolating. But while there may be no live performances on Broadw…
It's been a month since I last posted here. With theaters everywhere closed, there's been too little to say. But today is Shakespeare's birthday and I'm taking comfort from the fact that …
Good news, particularly good news about theater, has been hard to find over the last two months since concerns about the coronavirus locked most of us indoors and closed theaters around the …
Happy Fourth of July! This is obviously a more unusual summer than most. COVID-19 continues its rampage across the country and most theaters remain closed. People are marching in the streets…
My pals at BroadwayRadio invited me to join them for this past Sunday's "This Week on Broadway" podcast. We talked about some of our all-time favorite plays (you can hear us by clicking h…
The Convent, the new play by Jessica Dickey, is like a mashup of Bess Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds about a disparate group of people trying to find themselves on a spiritual retreat, and Caryl …
One of the questions I often ask myself after seeing a new show is: why are the show makers telling me this story? I haven't been able to figure out the answer to that question fo…
Transgression"social, sexual and otherwise"has been the bread and butter of Neil LaBute's career. It might be the downfall of it too. Last year, allegations about some unidentified misconduc…
Something radical is happening on New York stages this season. It's mainly taking place off-Broadway and it's largely being driven by women of color who have written that most traditional of…
Most theatergoers, especially those with limited time and resources, try to figure out which shows to see through a combination of word of mouth, social media and official reviews, particula…
Over the past decade the playwright Theresa Rebeck has had four shows premiere on Broadway and at least a half dozen others open in major off-Broadway productions. And I can't figure o…
Life has gotten crazy again and I couldn't find the time to write this week. So as I usually do when this happens, I'm turning on the ghost light that theaters use when they're temporarily e…
The end of the year has sneaked up on me. I got lost in the whir of finishing the school semester where I teach, getting ready for Christmas and dealing with some health problems (nothing se…
The weather has been unseasonably warm here in the city but the winter theater festivals, including a few new ones, are plowing ahead as usual and so I thought I'd do a redux of the guide to…
Yep; I've slipped back into a hole that's going to keep me from doing a regular post today. But this isn't a disagreeable hole. I fell into it by (1) reading two fascinating books about 19th…
Love 'em or hate 'em, the 1960s continue to influence American discourse. And those tumultuous times are front-and-center in two new recent plays: Gloria: A Life, a look at the career …
As regular readers of this blog know, I'm crazy about my husband K. I also really appreciate his patience in allowing me to take up so much of my time with theater. We're just a third o…
It happens almost every fall and this year, it's even more intense than usual. There are so many shows opening that seeing them on top of making plans to celebrate the birthdays of my niece,…
