Friday, May 17, 2013
Ever since I read "Brave New World" in high school, I've been on a wary lookout for the rise of the "feelies." These are hyper-sensory entertainments about which Aldous Huxley indelibly warn…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 03:12PMFriday, May 10, 2013
It is hardly a controversy for the ages. It is, however, part of a satisfying reality in the theater.
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 02:46PM"On Your Toes" was a Broadway musical milestone in 1936, when, for the first time, ballet was integrated into the story and, also for the first time, credit for the "dance stager" was offici…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 01:46PMThursday, May 9, 2013
There is always something strangely comforting about the disturbing strangeness of Richard Foreman's hallucinatory collages. That is, despite the unsettling dreamlike incoherence of "Old-Fas…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:27PMIf you close your eyes, "Bunty Berman Presents..." might be one of Hollywood's lesser demi-classic musical comedies from the '40s. Besides the Tin Pan Alley tunes and slurpy celestial chorus…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:27PMMonday, May 6, 2013
When theater characters pontificate about (capital-M) Making (capital-A) Art, it is hard not to listen for the phony-baloney in their words.
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:14PMSaturday, May 4, 2013
"Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," Christopher Durang's comic mashup of Chekhov themes and contemporary family life, has won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the …
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 05:28PMFriday, May 3, 2013
"Disgraced," the best play I saw last year, has won the Pulitzer Prize. You are forgiven for stifling a "Huh"?
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 02:01PMTuesday, April 30, 2013
The Cyndi Lauper-scored "Kinky Boots" earns 13 Tony Award nods, British import "Matilda" garners 12.
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 07:49AMFriday, April 26, 2013
So much for Broadway's gallop toward cutting-edge musicals and boundary-pushing content. The season, which officially ended Thursday, did have a late rush of fascinating new plays. But when …
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 02:29PMAfter an up-and-down season, Broadway officially ended Thursday on a high.
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 03:19AMWednesday, April 24, 2013
How much fun is it to have Bette Midler curled up barefoot on a sofa on a Broadway stage, chatting at us for 90 minutes in a periwinkle blue caftan with silver sparkles to match her long fin…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:51PMTuesday, April 23, 2013
Sentimental journeys don't come much more bittersweet than "The Trip to Bountiful," the wistful Horton Foote serio-comedy that lured Cicely Tyson back to Broadway for the first time in 30 ye…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:27PMMonday, April 22, 2013
Fiona Shaw has haunted T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" in an abandoned theater on 42nd Street. In her Tony-winning embodiment of "Medea," she made an ancient story as horrifically human as the…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 07:07PMSunday, April 21, 2013
Alan Cumming has played a wild variety of outrageous characters since the Scottish-born actor made his American debut as the pansexual Emcee in "Cabaret" 15 years ago. Until now, perhaps non…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:51PMThursday, April 18, 2013
The theater season isn't even officially over for another frantic week. But Broadway already has its tourist-ready 19th century potboiler for summer visitors who have seen "The Phantom of th…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:50PMForget all the theatrical blood on the walls in rehearsals of "Orphans." Forget the noisy firing of Shia LaBeouf, the ugly leaked emails and anything you've read or heard about Alec Baldwin'…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:50PMWednesday, April 17, 2013
There was a time when every season had a play or even two by Richard Greenberg -- who won his 2003 Tony for "Take Me Out" and unfair notoriety when Julia Roberts made her 2006 Broadway debut…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:30PMTuesday, April 16, 2013
In December, Broadway luxuriated in a muscular revival of "Golden Boy," a pivotal 1937 period piece that brought Clifford Odets his first uneasy fame and fortune as a New York playwright wit…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:08PMMonday, April 15, 2013
Nathan Lane has always been a walking, talking (singing, dancing, joking, dazzling) embodiment of both comedy and tragedy masks. Unless one has followed his career from the serious start, ho…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:48PMSunday, April 14, 2013
When we first meet Berry Gordy in "Motown the Musical," he's a bitter guy refusing to go to the 25th anniversary celebration of his music label, his monster hits and the artists he nurtured.…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:27PMFriday, April 12, 2013
Elaine Stritch sat in her usual place on the tiny raised stage at the Café Carlyle, the pricey 100-seat cabaret/supperclub in the hotel where the actress has lived for more than a decade.…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 01:41PMThursday, April 11, 2013
Annie and Cinderella know plenty about evil grown-ups, as Broadway has been telling us in this season of plucky musical heroines. But neither has had to deal with the daft adult meanies who …
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:25PMFriday, April 5, 2013
The biggest casting upsets of the spring season have been positively inhuman.
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 01:18PMThursday, April 4, 2013
Dissertations will surely be written about how, in the three decades since "La Cage aux Folles," drag-queen musicals became their own feel-good genre on Broadway.
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:03PMTuesday, April 2, 2013
When "The Last Five Years" had its New York premiere downtown in 2002, it was impossible to imagine anyone but Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott in Jason Robert Brown's two-character mu…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:23PMMonday, April 1, 2013
'Go to the morgue and count the bodies," the hard-boiled tabloid editor growls at the hungry young reporter. His point -- meant to be both morbid and inspirational -- is that everything betw…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 07:00PMFriday, March 22, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
"Hands on a Hardbody" may well be the best musical ever written about 10 people holding onto a parked truck. But if you go into the show wondering why a gifted creative team would want to ad…
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:21PMWednesday, March 20, 2013
Girls were supposed to dream about becoming fairy-tale princesses. But everyone I ever knew, or at least anyone I liked, wanted to be Holly Golightly.
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:56PMSunday, March 17, 2013
Theatergoers are furiously taking sides about "The Flick," the latest work from Annie Baker, one of the most interesting young playwrights around. The far-from-superficial question is about …
Linked From Newsday Subscription at 06:49PM 
