It’s a paradox of theater that the most universal emotions often arise out of situations rooted in the particulars of one culture or subculture. Jonathan Spector’s epic new dramedy Birth…
Not all movies are crying out for musical adaptation. Add to that growing list A Walk on the Moon, a middling 1999 indie drama directed by Tony Goldwyn that featured a seriously miscast Dian…
What’s remarkable about director Robert O’Hara’s new production of La Cage aux Folles is not that it features an all-Black cast, with cultural references to everyone from Beyoncé to D…
Maryann Plunkett has delivered so many extraordinary performances over the years. In her latest, Erica Murray’s intimate drama The Loved Ones, she plays a sixtysomething woman living in a …
We’ve entered a brave new world in live experiences, when technology and storytelling are being mashed up in ways that blur traditional definitions of theater. The Black Mirror Experience�…
Few theaters dare to tackle the early history plays of William Shakespeare, and for good reason. The Bard was just getting his feet wet as a playwright when he wrote the three-part Henry VI …
There is an irony baked into the well-meaning but meandering new musical Label-less, a Gen Z revue created and directed by former 98 Degrees boy-bander Drew Lachey and his choreographer wife…
Imagine if Odysseus was actually the middle-aged gay dude who lives in your building, the one who nods politely but never learns your name and always seems to be rushing off to some probably…
Nearly 80 years ago, 10 directors, screenwriters, and producers were blacklisted from the entertainment industry (and jailed) after refusing to testify before a House committee about their p…
Nearly a decade ago, Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis kicked up a firestorm with a politically charged production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that presented the title chara…
The 79th annual Tony Awards really spread the love — starting with a dynamic performance from host Pink, a theater newbie whose sole Broadway credit is having written one of the Billboard …
One way to grapple with the mostly white, mostly male classics of American drama is to rethink them entirely, from a female point of view. That’s the mission of Julia May Jonas in a A Woma…
A lot has changed in the world since 1967, when 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen checked into a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. Mental health issues were more stigmatized and les…
A sign in front of the curtain at John J. Caswell Jr.’s new drama Jerome informs us that the title is not the protagonist of the show — or even a secondary character — but a “ghost c…
In less than a week, Pink will get the party started at Radio City Music Hall for the 79th annual Tony Awards. It’s been an interesting year on Broadway, with a surprisingly deep field of …
There’s a too-muchness to Eisa Davis’s new play with music that goes beyond the overstuffed typography of the title. ||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :|| is an evocation of female adoles…
As the shortest kid in his seventh grade class in a Long Island school in the 1970s, Robert Montano yearned for a way to make himself bigger, perhaps even using his diminutive stature to his…
Jean Genet’s 1947 dramatic provocation The Maids gets a new-millennium update in Kip Williams’ slick but surface-heavy new revival, now playing at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse foll…
It’s 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, and a group of white suburban dads has signed up to connect with their young daughters, ages 9 to 12, in the YMCA program known as Indian …
Heather Christian made a name for herself with Oratorio for Living Things, a singular concert-cum-theater piece that won numerous awards after its 2022 premiere. Now Signature Theatre is mou…
Thornton Wilder has been having something of a resurgence in recent years, with acclaimed productions of his two most famous plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth as well as a lovely mus…
Bubba Weiler’s transcendent one-act drama Well, I’ll Let You Go, which debuted last summer at Brooklyn’s The Space at Irondale, was my pick as the best New York theater production of l…
Hugh Jackman seems to be a one-man dynamo working for accessibility in live theater. Last year, he teamed with producer Sonia Freeman on a project called Together that mounts shows in Audibl…
The Receptionist, Adam Bock’s dark satire about the dark Arendtian currents in American corporate culture, returns to Off Broadway nearly a decade after its premiere in a solid, suitably c…
It’s Tony time, all you Broadway babies! The season that just wrapped was notably thin — just 30 new productions, compared to 43 last year — but there was still plenty of drama. And ha…