Tuesday, May 5, 2026
A few surprises with this year’s Tony nominations, but mostly they were pretty much as expected. Best Play and Musical went exactly as predicted. Ditto Revival of a Musical. In the Play Re…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:23AM[SHARE]Saturday, May 2, 2026
Heading into the May 5th announcement, here’s my take on what and who will be gifted Tony Award nominations, having seen most of the shows in contention. Note that it has been a good year …
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:00AM[SHARE]Friday, May 1, 2026
My intro to Rocky Horror was a midnight showing of the film version at the Hyway Theater in Fair Lawn NJ the summer after my senior year in high school. I went with a group that were fans. I…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:00AM[SHARE]Monday, April 27, 2026
Like Titanique, Schmigadoon seems to want to capitalize on audience familiarity—not just with the Apple TV series it’s based on but with the old-fashioned Broadway musicals of the past i…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:47AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 23, 2026
Mad & Hell, Mame & Vera, Elphaba & Glinda–one can add to this short list of famous frenemies of stage, the names Julia and Jane, the delightful and dastardly dynamic diva duo i…
SOURCE: The Contending at 05:11PM[SHARE]Monday, April 20, 2026
Trip Cullman is one of the most prolific theater directors working today both on and off Broadway as well as in London and regionally. He also happens to be one of the most gifted. The theat…
SOURCE: The Contending at 08:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 16, 2026
Twenty-five years ago, David Auburn's powerful play, Proof, won both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The original production, which I found quite moving, starr…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:00PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 12, 2026
Full disclosure, I loved Titanique off-Broadway. Saw it twice and reveled in the  unabashed zaniness, the super gay sensibility and the show's refusal to concern itself with hyper-sensiti…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 9, 2026
Gina Gionfriddo's hilarious, biting yet supremely satisfying dark comedy, Becky Shaw, has finally made it to Broadway and is most definitely the boldest, funniest show of the season to date.…
SOURCE: The Contending at 02:27PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Those pesky Andrew Lloyd Weber/T.S. Eliot Cats seem to have a lot more than nine lives. This time the divisive musical, which ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000 (toppling A Chorus Line as the…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:00PM[SHARE]Monday, April 6, 2026
1975 was a banner year for cinema"just gander at the Best Picture Academy Award nominees: Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon, Steven Spielberg's Jaws, Robert Al…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:49AM[SHARE]Monday, March 23, 2026
Boundless enthusiasm and sheer ebullience go a very long way towards making Duncan Macmillan's hopeful, if slight one-man play, Every Brilliant Thing, soar. The show is currently wowing audi…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 18, 2025
Theater on-and off-Broadway, started out quite strong in 2025, but the promise of an exciting fall never really materialized, with a few key exceptions, and instead the biggest box office hi…
SOURCE: The Contending at 06:41PM[SHARE]Monday, December 1, 2025
Maria Friedman is one of the UK's most celebrated stage performers and has been nominated for nine Olivier Awards, winning four. Her first major role onstage was originating Dot/Marie in Ste…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:45AM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 25, 2025
The musical Chess has had quite the checkered and tumultuous past. Much like Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, the show began life as a concept album, written by lyricist Tim Rice and compos…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:44AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Lincoln Center Theater's sensational new production of the musical Ragtime, which began its renewed life as a Gala produced in 2024 by New York City Center, is a theatrical wonder for the ey…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:58AM[SHARE]Monday, November 3, 2025
The memory play is a genre that has grown a bit stale since Tennessee Williams shattered it with The Glass Menagerie's Broadway premiere in 1944. But Tony-nominee Bess Wohl has breathed new,…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:11AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 11, 2025
Evita was the definite highlight of my recent London theatergoing experience. The production is truly inspired and I am so excited for it's Broadway run. You can read my rave HERE. But I did…
SOURCE: The Contending at 04:58PM[SHARE]Sunday, August 24, 2025
Even as someone who has special childhood memories tied to the show, I can admit Evita is a flawed work. It's more rock opera than book musical. The politics can get a bit muddled. And the f…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:08PM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 1, 2025
A true star performance is on display seven times a week in a smallish off-Broadway house on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Matt Rodin takes the stage at Theater 154 and metaphoric…
SOURCE: The Contending at 08:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 24, 2025
There's a (nearly) hidden, gay-themed gem playing this Pride season in Greenwich Village. A musical, seven-years in the making, that is rousing, disturbing and, ultimately, empowering. Beau …
SOURCE: The Contending at 12:25PM[SHARE]Friday, June 20, 2025
Nicholas Barasch is currently wowing audiences as young Frederic in the Roundabout Theatre Company's splendid reworking of Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera, now titled, Pirates! The Penz…
SOURCE: The Contending at 05:42PM[SHARE]Thursday, June 12, 2025
I managed to avoid reading anything about Call Me Izzy except for the obvious fact that it stars Jean Smart and it's a one-character play. Full disclosure, I am NOT a fan of one-person shows…
SOURCE: The Contending at 11:00PM[SHARE]Monday, June 9, 2025
The last three Oscar ceremonies have had very intense and competitive Best Actress races. Truth to be told, it's the category that always excites and scares me, because of how much I invest …
SOURCE: The Contending at 03:13PM[SHARE]Monday, June 2, 2025
Now that Patti LuPone has apologized: forgive her, support her or sharpen your pitchforks, but WAIT until after Broadway's biggest night. This year's Tony Awards will be one for the books si…
SOURCE: The Contending at 07:00AM[SHARE]Sunday, June 1, 2025
Who is Jack Stokes? He's an astonishingly impressive young British actor you may be hearing a lot more about in the coming years. Stokes is currently electrifying audiences in the play Shell…
SOURCE: The Contending at 06:44PM[SHARE]Friday, May 23, 2025
Tony nominee Julia Knitel seamlessly slips into a slew of characters at each performance of the new Broadway musical sensation Dead Outlaw. The brilliant, non-linear show, which began life o…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:30PM[SHARE]Monday, May 12, 2025
Tony nominee Conrad Ricamora is currently wowing audiences portraying a closeted, hypermasculine Abraham Lincoln in the wacky Broadway comedy Oh, Mary!, playwright and star Cole Escola's 'fe…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Every once in a rare while on Broadway, especially in the last two decades, a bold, stirring, wholly original musical opens that dares to combine the darkly comedic with social commentary an…
SOURCE: The Contending at 03:15PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 29, 2025
In doing some geeky Tony Award rabbit hole research. It became clear that we are, happily, in a new golden age on Broadway where there are an abundance of fabulous shows, performances and te…
SOURCE: The Contending at 08:22PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 24, 2025
Australian-born musical theater actor extraordinaire Ainsley Melham is quite the sensation this season as Dwayne, the baby-blue-eyed, Jazz-loving beau of Jasmine Amy Roger's titular characte…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 23, 2025
2025 has become one of the most fabulously fierce and competitive years for lead female awards contenders. First we had an Oscar race where no less than four truly worthy performances (Nicol…
SOURCE: The Contending at 02:05PM[SHARE]Monday, April 21, 2025
It is not going where I think it's going! It is not going where I think it's going! Oh God, I think it's going where I think it's going! This was my near-breathless reaction to experiencing …
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:45AM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Broadway Diva Jennifer Simard has been killing it on Broadway for almost two decades. Note: I use the word "diva" in the best, most fabulous definition of that word. She's currently wowing a…
SOURCE: The Contending at 09:04PM[SHARE]Monday, April 14, 2025
Certain misguided critics (and that one in particular) are gushing over a monumental mess of a musical, loosely based on a TV series, that just hit Broadway " with a thud. Yet some of those …
SOURCE: The Contending at 01:40PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Your feelings about the new Sondheim revue, Old Friends, will probably depend on your familiarity with the composer-lyricist's work as well as whether you enjoy songs sung out of context. I …
SOURCE: The Contending at 01:45PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 1, 2025
I haven't been emotionally slayed at the theater in quite a while. And I can shamefully state that Ghosts is a Henrik Ibsen play I was not completely familiar with. In terms of the Norwegian…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:00AM[SHARE]Monday, March 31, 2025
One of the many great joys in watching Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' sometimes searing, always riveting new Broadway play, Purpose, is the trio of female performances. Not to take away anything fr…
SOURCE: The Contending at 10:00AM[SHARE]Friday, March 28, 2025
Strangely, I thought about Luigi Mangione after seeing Sarah Snook's theatrical tour de force, The Picture of Dorian Gray, at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway"Okay, not really about him but…
SOURCE: The Contending at 01:28PM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Operation Mincemeat presents one of the most bizarre premises for a musical, and certainly a wholly odd choice of subject matter for a comedy. Blend the two together and add a British sensib…
SOURCE: The Contending at 02:03PM[SHARE] 
