884 stories from Broadway & Me
Bill Irwin is a genius. And it's not just me saying that. The folks at the MacArthur Foundation made that official 34 years ago when they gave him one of their famous five-year fellowships t…
They say that timing is everything. And the timing could hardly be better for Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me, which opened at New York Theatre Workshop last weekend, just …
Ever since Aeschylus wrote the first Greek tragedies back in the fifth century B.C., playwrights have been creating works that wrestle with the pressing issues of their time. One of the most…
Just like the rest of us, theater makers can fall into ruts and end up doing the same thing over and over. That's what happened to John Doyle who repeated his conceit of having actors play t…
It may be a sacrilege to say this but I've never been a fan of the plays of George Bernard Shaw. I appreciate Shaw's place in the theatrical pantheon and his role as a pioneering progressive…
Drawing up a list of the fall shows I most want to see is my way of making myself feel better that summer (my favorite season) is ending. It's something I've done for even longer than I've b…
Maybe it's because I'm getting older but time seems to be passing more quickly than ever and the entire summer just flew by. One minute, I was watching my DVD version of 1776, which I try to…
Because I've always believed there should be shows on Broadway that cater to all kinds of tastes, it's not easy for me to say this but the new musical Gettin' the Band Back Together doesn't …
So many people were raving about the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene's production of Fiddler on the Roof that I felt I had to see it. At the same time, I feared it wouldn't live up to al…
There's no post today because I'm taking time off to celebrate my birthday this weekend. The celebrations include a repeat visit to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child with my theatergoin…
Maybe there were too many top chefs in the room when they were cooking up This Ain't No Disco, the rock musical that recently opened at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater. Ca…
What a difference a director can make. The first time I saw the dark comedy Straight White Men, it was directed by its playwright Young Jean Lee for a 2014 workshop production at the Public …
It's summer vacation time and tourists, who account for over 60 percent of Broadway's ticket buyers, have been streaming into the city, eager to see shows ranging from tried-and-true war hor…
Edward Bond's drama Saved shocked London audiences in 1965 with its depiction of a group of disaffected young people stoning a baby to death. That harrowing scene set the bar for genera…
"I really identified with El," I overhead a seventysomething-year-old man telling his similarly-aged wife as we all walked out of Skintight, the new comedy by Joshua Harmon about older men w…
Memorial Day came and went a month ago. The Summer Solstice breezed in last week. The Fourth of July is just a few days away. And temperatures here in New York are heading into the high 90s.…
A note from Jan: Two people can see the same show and walk away with different feelings about it. My theatergoing buddy Bill and I just saw the new production of The Boys in the Band that ma…
Although separated by five centuries and different codes of acceptable onstage profanity, the playwrights William Shakespeare and Stephen Adly Guirgis have a lot in common. Wait; hear me out…
No show reviews this week. And no real good excuse for not doing one, except that the weather is suddenly beautiful and I feel like kicking back and taking it easy. But I haven't been …
My name is Jan and I'm a Harry Potter fangirl. Seriously. I mean I pre-ordered the published script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Amazon, downloaded the Kindle vers…
We theater junkies can be a demanding lot. And sometimes we let our pursuit of the excellent get in the way of our enjoying the very good. At least that's how I've been feeling about two sho…
The irony is that I've been seeing so many shows lately that I've fallen behind on just about everything else and so find that I don't have the time to tell you about them. I'm hoping to cli…
Let the games begin. The spring theater season officially closed Thursday night with the opening of The Iceman Cometh, which means the Tony nominators will be toting up their scorecard…
Traditions says that King Lear is the most difficult role in the English-speaking theatrical canon. So as soon as actors hit their 50s, they start itching to take on the challenge. Which exp…
Few things make me happier than seeing my husband K enjoy a good laugh while he's watching a show. And so that alone would be reason enough for me to cheer the revival (and Broadway debut) o…
