Chicago On Tour: The Velma Make-Over Janet Lomax, co-anchor of 10NBC News on WHEC in Rochester, NY, gets the "Velma" treatment. From: chicagothemusical Views: 618 2 ratings Time: 02:26 More in E…

I mean, I should probably get back into the habit of writing this stuff during the day, at work, when I'm chained to a desk for five hours with a phone that rings maybe every 20 minutes. But gchat and refreshi…

Doug Hughes Discusses "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" at New York Theatre Workshop Acclaimed theatre director Doug Hughes discusses his work on the play "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". The s…

Signature Theater specializes in right-sizing hefty musicals for today's budgets, as with Les Miserables last season and earlier with Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro. Its latest undertaking is Hammerstein and Kern's 1927 staple Show Boat, reduced from 48-plus performers to a manageable 25 and staged on a modest set without a paddlewheel in sight. While the resulting production offers an appealing display of the musical's timeless melodies, it sorely misses the colorful trappings and can't hide an antiquated book that will appear ever so distant to 21st-century auds.

I don't know what exactly brought The Merry Widow to mind as I was watching Thom Thomas's immensely entertaining A Moon To Dance By, which had its premiere last February at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. But I can attest to with assurance that Franz Lehar's adored heroine doesn't hold a candle to Thomas's, whom Jane Alexander is giving a sensually ripe portrayal.

Paula Vogel's A Civil War Christmas, the holiday offering at the Huntington Theater, is a grandly, even madly ambitious, event. On Christmas Eve, 1864, we career from the battlefields of northern Virginia (full of African-American soldiers) to Mary Todd Lincoln hunting down a Bavarian-style Christmas tree, to a little girl lost in the snow while fleeing imaginary slave-catchers. This is a noble step towards the creation of a new genre in American theater, a hybrid of British pantomime, a church pageant, and a Dickens novel with a multicultural spin.

Thomas Edison lit up the world. And Sarah Ruhl, whose reputation as a playwright of great imagination has been gilded with the stardust of prestigious awards and productions, has harnessed a by-product of the a…

If it's a promotional cliché to say that The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular is part of New York's holiday season tradition, it's also a fact.

Brian Kulick's The Age of Iron at Classic Stage is not for purists. Blending Thomas Heywood's Iron Age with Shakespeare's satirical Troilus and Cressida, Kulick retells the epic story of the Trojan War with a new twist. Kulick's concept panders its theatrical wares with a sharp-eyed intelligence and some fine acting, though the concept fails on several dramatic levels.

Classic Stage Company's melding of Troilus and Cressida and The Iron Age boasts beautifully conceived performances and a top-notch physical production.

When did Classic Stage Company get into the bloated, mindboggling miniseries business?

Zero Hour is an informed, absorbing, highly entertaining one-person play written by and also starring Jim Brochu. It happily serves not only as a showcase for the actor but also as a delectably insightful homage to the great comic/dramatic actor Zero Mostel.

Jim Brochu gives a remarkably accurate performance as actor Zero Mostel in this entertaining solo show.

Jim Brochu not only creates an astonishing physical resemblance to Zero Mostel, capturing his distinctive body language and vocal patterns, Brochu goes deep under the skin to reveal the man's complicated psyche…

"Everything is less than zero," sang Elvis Costello in 1977, and if anyone would have wholeheartedly agreed, it was Zero Mostel. Jim Brochu paints a remarkably sympathetic portrait of the famously egomaniacal performer in his solo show Zero Hour, about the life and times of a guy who survived everything from the blacklist to a disagreement with an out-of-control bus and still managed to thrive. Writer-performer Brochu, who's been doing the show for years, nicely mimics Mostel's blustery style and tosses off an assortment of the actor's best Borscht-belt gags into the bargain.

Any staging of the musical Dreamgirls has a lot of history to contend with. Anyone who saw the now legendary original 1981 production so brilliantly directed by Michael Bennett will never forget it, and the 2006 movie version was no slouch either. The current revival, playing a limited run at the Apollo Theater before beginning a national tour and a possible return to Broadway, is unlikely to erase anyone's memories. But it generally gets the job done, and anyone approaching the show without too much baggage is likely to have a fine time.

This national tour production of the 1981 hit girl-group musical is far from a knockoff of the original and is a dream come true.

There's bad news and good about the much-anticipated revival of Dreamgirls, kicking off, like the action of the show itself, on the storied stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater before a national tour. Cultists of the 1981 musical about an African-American girl group's rise to success might have been hoping for a Broadway-caliber production that would demand a midtown New York return. In most ways that count, this staging falls short of that wish. But as a road property, it's top-tier, packaged to travel and stuffed with vocal talent that does justice to Henry Krieger's sensational songs and helps compensate for stiff acting and a shortage of emotional clout.

In some of its key elements, this revival—first mounted in Korea and heading to Baltimore on a national tour after its five-week run here—is a rough facsimile of the original. But this Dreamgirls is a show with killer looks, music to spare, and a couple of new stars in its pocket.

How smart to kick off a new touring revival of Dreamgirls with a few weeks at the Apollo Theater. Of course, both the 1981 show and the 2006 movie begin with a talent contest at the legendary Harlem landmark, which for 75 years has been introducing newcomers and showcasing stars through the ups and downs of West 125th Street. With a gifted company of virtual unknowns, the musical plays with and within the wonderfully restored theater as if both were forever young.

It's showtime at the Apollo for Dreamgirls. The new touring version of the Broadway classic launched yesterday in Harlem, and although the show could use more scenic pizazz, it's lively and packed with talent.

And I am telling you: You are going. Granted, this revival of Dreamgirls didn't bode well. A touring production hatched in South Korea, it feels spare not by design but by necessity. William Ivey Long designed hundreds of costumes, but the wigs look kinda cheap, the orchestra is too small and the basic set consists of five floor-to-ceiling rotating panels that double as LED screens. Warning bells also accompanied the name of director-choreographer Robert Longbottom, the man who just mangled Bye Bye Birdie. And yet, this "Dreamgirls" is incredibly entertaining, even when the seams are showing.

Robert Longbottom's revival of Dreamgirls is a bluntly drawn, pastels-saturated production.

Bless Howard Sherman and Ben Hodges. They're responsibly for a stirringly marvelous book called The Play That Changed My Life, which is subtitled America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them. (Applause, 179 pp, $18.99).

New releases from Rihanna, Kris Allen, Adam Lambert, Shakira, Susan Boyle and Leona Lewis.

The singer Ann Hampton Callaway brought the house to its feet as the New York Pops orchestra celebrated the centennial of the songwriter Johnny Mercer.

This first-rate adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer's novella combines elements that are more original, sensitive, personal, even courageous than we're accustomed to find in musical theater. But The Light in the Piazza suffers from two serious flaws.

The Philadelphia Theatre Company's version of The Light in the Piazza is a unique accomplishment, adapting the look of New York's spacious Lincoln Center production to a smaller stage. It's a great re-interpretation of a gentle musical about fragile people.

It is a grand and glorious concert that should satisfy everyone who loves terrific singing and is able to feel the excitement that is stirred by this grand company.

In botched hands, Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost can be a labor indeed. Leave it to a proven company to make something very difficult look very easy

This scenically alluring touring production from England of "Love's Labour's Lost," which opened Friday at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, put me in mind of an Elizabethan greeting card - or at least one of th…

Brian Kulick merges Shakespeare with Heywood at Classic Stage

Timing, as they say, is everything, and Zero Hour doesn't have it.

Richard Seff takes a look at Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and finds much to like with the 2 actor 22 character Love Child.

Sarah Ruhl and "Finian's Rainbow" score.

To coin a phrase, it's pleasurable, but fleeting. Soon after the initial feeling of well being you discover that something is still wanting.

Sarah Ruhl's first Broadway play is raw, fascinating and madly entertaining.

It's hard not to respect this show and the professionalism it shows. But it's impossible to take it very seriously as anything more than tabloid dabbling. That may be sufficient.

Charlie Reuter covers it all, from the orchestra pit to the stage