1,412 stories from New York Magazine
Theater isn't my bailiwick here at the mag, but it's my first love, and since I spent a bit of time with Jonathan Demme and the cast of Family Week for a (frankly adulatory) piece on the director, I was blindsided by the bad reviews - especially by the one in today's New York Times by Christopher Isherwood.
Sherie Rene Scott's tuneful and witty autobiographical musical, Everyday Rapture.
Linda Lavin and Sarah Paulson tear up the stage, All About Eve style, in Collected Stories.
Enron is a high-tech cartoon, trading humanity for strenuous fun.
Viola Davis, back home with Fences.
Superbly, in the form of a Pittsburgh tyrant, in August Wilson's Fences.
There's nothing opportunistic about this production, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford: He and his cast revel in the show's modest but potent charms instead of attacking the material…
Sondheim on Sondheim takes awhile to get rolling. But Barbara Cook is worth the wait.
Remember the Bush years? No? Then you, my friend, are the target audience for American Idiot, Michael Mayer's dizzyingly miscalculated adaptation of the excellent 2004 concept album by the pop-punk band Green Day. But this musical--a half-exploitative, half-lobotomized attempt to fake a youthgasm--has none of the power of that album. It's a self-described "rock opera" set in a self-created "Recent Past," and it purports to evoke, with a single tear and a power chord, the confusing days of the terror-stricken early 21st century, when we yo-yoed from cowed powerlessness to inchoate fury. Well, confusing and inchoate this show most definitely is: Its version of youthful anomie is so far off the mark, and such a muddled conflation of vague Gen-X nostalgia and generic rebellion sample tracks, that the effect is almost comical. But mostly just irritating.
The Menier Chocolate Factory: The name even sounds like some euphemistic cover for a rehab clinic. Which is more or less what it is. Great American musicals suffering from exhaustion go there for a therapeutic London production, only to reemerge on Broadway some months later, renewed. Now La Cage Aux Folles, Jerry Herman's proud, plumed '83 drag-stravaganza, has made the pilgrimage, and returned to New York (a scant five years since its last, unloved Broadway incarnation) slimmed down to fighting weight, fully in touch with its emotional core, and endowed with the scrappy cabaret flash and gratifying snap its immediate predecessor pointedly lacked.
Broadway's been very good to Brooke Adams and Tony Shalhoub. So why not go back?
