The word "opera" doesn't mean singers roaring at the top of their lungs in stock roles and sustaining fever-pitch drama without respite.

Elizabeth Swados has always gone her own way, and her new music-theater piece is stamped with some of her familiar idiosyncrasies: the childlike perspective; the atonal operatics; the surreal dramatic landscape…

In the Mint Theater Company's sterling production of this early D.H. Lawrence drama, it's immediately evident that D.H. Lawrence was a natural-born playwright.

The ultra-literary Mint Theater's latest project is the New York premiere of D.H. Lawrence's strange, unjustly forgotten play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, about a mistreated wife at the end of her rope. Helmer Stuart Howard gives the compact piece a delicate staging that accentuates its characters' depths, and fine performances by Julia Coffey and Eric Martin Brown flesh out its central troubled marriage. The production is a major get for bookworms and theater buffs alike, repping a rare chance to see Lawrence's world alive on stage.

Like "The Daughter-in-Law"—another play by D.H. Lawrence that was presented by the Mint Theater Company—The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd demonstrates that the author never got his proper due as a playwright.

While many musicals tend to lose their luster, appeal, and popularity with future generations, Guys and Dolls has only to re-validate itself by right of its wit and charm. One can only wonder why acclaimed director Des McAnuff wasn't able to inspire his four key players to give more than merely perfunctory performances.

Did someone forget to baptize Guys and Dolls? Seems unlikely—but how else to explain why a nigh-perfect musical entertainment has been plunged into limbo, suspended between cartoon and noir in director Des McAnuff's appalling revival?

The first Broadway revival of the musical Guys and Dolls since Nathan Lane and Faith Prince cracked up the Rialto with their follies nearly two decades ago offers a sense of what it must have felt like to have been one of the victims during the St. Valentine's Day massacre.

Des McAnuff's revival of the classic musical Guys and Dolls that opened on Broadway last night has everything we've come to expect from this razzle-dazzle showman, both for good and for ill.

The trouble with director Des McAnuff's Broadway revival is that too often it plays like a very good community theater production, albeit one with considerably pricier sets.

Guys and Dolls is a crack gadget whose only purpose is to give pleasure. Des McAnuff's uneven, charm-challenged production doesn't entirely kill that pleasure, no matter how hell-bent on wreckage it sometimes seems to be.

The opening image in Des McAnuff's strangulated revival is of Damon Runyon pounding his typewriter, framing the production unequivocally in a fictional world. But the unintended effect has been to process the a…

Imagine having dinner in a fabulous restaurant with two couples. One pair is delightfully witty and has sizzling chemistry; the other two seem so awkward that it's almost painful to be with them. That's something akin to the uneven, frustrating experience offered by the new revival of Guys and Dolls that opened Sunday at the Nederlander Theatre.

Director Des McAnuff has put together a perpetual-motion, high-concept, high-tech revival of Guys and Dolls. Unfortunately, the curiously bland results don't translate into high entertainment.

In the crapshoot called Broadway, Guys and Dolls is as close as the theater gets to a sure thing. Or at least it seemed that way until Des McAnuff's tarted-up and dumbed-down revival opened last night at the handsomely remodeled Nederlander Theatre.

"Take back your mink, take back your pearls," fumes the fed-up fiancée Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. Des McAnuff, who directed the flatfooted new Broadway production, needed to take some things back, too.

At the Nederlander Theatre, where Des McAnuff's glitzy revival of the 1950 classic opened last night, they dazzle us with their handsome costumes and their clever projections. They serenade us with an 18-piece …

The uninspired new revival of Guys and Dolls provides a valuable lesson in the importance of chemistry by demonstrating what can happen without it.

Lauren Graham swooped into the opening night party for Guys and Dolls yesterday evening with the radiant air of someone who had come home again, and in a way she had.

An interactive look at craps, Automats, and other references in the revival of Guys and Dolls.

I'm a little surprised by Des McAnuff. I would have thought that a few weeks into rehearsal, he would have been dissatisfied with his reconceived opening of Guys and Dolls. Why didn't he admit to himself, the cast and crew, "No, it doesn't work. Let's try something else."

The Metropolitan Room will present a return engagement of "Strings Attached," the cabaret show starring Anne Steele.

'Rent' relives heady days of youth in pre-9/11 New York.

As Kaspar Hauser, Preston Martin turns in a sensitive, touching and totally enthralling performance.

A very pretty show and technically almost brilliant. But it ultimately felt cold

Toyer is a mess a scaremongering two-hander that wastes the talents of actress Alice Krige.

Once he warms to the show's rigors, his laid-back talent and grace with the audience do shine through. If he and Barnes can tighten up the script and shed additional light on the larger meaning of Simon's struggles, the rest of Tales of an Urban Indian could prove to be every bit as engaging.

Frank McGuinness' frustrating new play is inspired by the gay male couple who founded Dublin's Gate Theatre.

The invaluable Mint Theater recreates the atmosphere of D. H. Lawrence's own suffocating youth in a mining village

The Mint's New York premiere of D.H. Lawrence's play gives us an early glimpse at an artist of great stature in the process of finding his voice.

Demo recordings originally made for rehearsal purposes in which composers can be heard singing and playing their own songs were recently released.

You could probably write a story about Stephen Schwartz's Broadway and Hollywood musicals simply by using titles and lyrics from his songs.

Playwright's hard work finds its way onto stages in Austin.

"It's an invention," said actor Kerry O'Malley.

Like the characters in her new play, Zoe Kazan is forging her own identity in a world where her name is already famous.

"Garden State Jubilee," a weekly radio variety show taped before a live audience in Teaneck and airing 9 p.m. Saturdays on WRCR-AM (1300), is to some extent a retooled edition of "The Uncle Floyd Show," the UHF…

Last month, Pleasantville's Ali Ewoldt, who played Cosette in the recent Broadway revival of "Les Miserables," dropped in on director Michael Limone's rehearsal to offer tips about acting in general and "Les Mi…

Galileo and pope square off in Goodwin's debut

He's doing two shows at once, playing the dad in August: Osage County and an old veteran in Heroes. What's his night like?