Since yesterday was Valentine’s Day, my husband K and I took some time out to celebrate the great good luck of being able to share our love and lives with one another. But&nbs…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMThe producers of the show now known as The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess announced this week that their controversial remix of the classic musical about lovers in a poor black fishing co…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 05:25PMDoes it make me a heretic to say that I’m not yet sold on “Smash”? NBC has certainly done everything it can to push its new series about the making of a Broadway musical, including buy…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMThe trouble with seeing the revival of a groundbreaking play is that the ground has already been broken—and has probably been well trod. Trying to recapture the impact of the thing is like…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 04:40PMOne of the big mysteries of the recent theatrical past is why Margaret Edson hasn’t written more plays. Wit, the first—and only one—she wrote was the surprise hit of the 1998-199…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMPeople have been going to the theater to see stars since Thespis broke out of the chorus in the 6th century, barnstormed the cities of ancient Greece and gave his name to the acting professi…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMEvery once in awhile, I like to venture outside my theatergoing comfort zone. One of the surest ways for me to do that is to see a play by the comfort-be-damned playwright Young Jean L…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 07:59AMThere are some plays that you out-and-out love. And then there are others that you feel you ought to admire. The latter is the way I feel about Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMMy good friend Andrea recently came to New York for the first time in four years and, of course, she wanted to see a Broadway show. After some research— reading the Times and talking…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 07:59AMThe Soviet Union was the bogeyman that threatened what Superman used to call “The American way” when I was a kid. It lost the gig when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Since the…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 09:59AMDespite recent balmy temperatures, the winter frost is beginning to settle in. The new year isn't even a week old and two shows have already announced that they’re folding their tents beca…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMWhat are they teaching in drama schools and playwriting workshops? I ask because so many playwrights today seem to think all they need is snappy dialog and then voilà, they hav…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 07:59AMIf you read as many “10 Bests” lists as I do around this time each year, it quickly becomes obvious that the lists say a whole lot more about the people making them than they do about an…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:32AMLet’s be honest: what I think about Bonnie & Clyde isn’t going to matter one bit because the show has already posted its closing notice and will be moving out of the Gerald Schoenfel…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:59AMNo post today but, instead, heartfelt wishes that you and yours have a holiday filled with love, laughter, the company of good friends... and, maybe, some good theater too.
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:55PMSomewhere Lorraine Hansberry must be smiling. When A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1959 on, she was the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadw…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:39PMThe shrinks who psychoanalyzed Broadway’s best back in the early ‘60s must have been doozies. How else to explain the fact that two of the most high-profile flops from that period …
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMThe first thing I noticed when my husband K and I walked into the Longacre Theatre to see David Henry Hwang’s new play Ch’ing•lish was the unusually large number of Asian faces in the …
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 06:13PMNo post today. My husband K and I are having our apartment painted. The painters arrive early on Monday morning and so we've spent the last few days packing up things (it's amazi…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:57AMRepertory companies were once mainstays of the theater but, with rare exceptions like Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, they’re become rarities nowadays. It’s just too expensi…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 06:59AMLike every exclusive society, the world of theater lovers has its unspoken rules. For starters, we’re all supposed to genuflect to everything by Shakespeare, mostly everything by Che…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:59AMphoto by Joan Marcus Everybody knows that theater is a collaborative art, with its elements—the acting, the directing, the design, lighting and the play itself—all leaning on one anothe…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:59AMYou gotta love the folks at Lincoln Center Theater. Or at least I do. Artistic director André Bishop and executive producer Bernard Gersten do what too few of their not-for-prof…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMTheater doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A show like The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs took on a different meaning after the Apple co-founder’s death. And Wild Animals You Sh…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:59AMMy husband K is in love with the actress Nina Arianda. Which is OK with me because—like every other true theater lover in New York right now—I, too, am in love with Arianda, the st…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:59PMKatori Hall became the first African-American woman to win the Olivier Award for Best New Play when The Mountaintop, her meditation on the last night in Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, play…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:59AMThere’s not much scenery on the stage at The Public Theater’s Newman theater space where a new production of King Lear opened this week but that doesn’t stop nearly everyone on stage f…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 09:52AMNo matter how talented they are, ample-bodied and strong-featured actresses like Mary Testa usually play the funny best friend or the sassy sidekick instead of the leading lady. And so…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMMaybe I’m the wrong demographic for Asuncion, the new play by Jesse Eisenberg that just opened in a Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production at the venerable Cherry Lane Theatre. O…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:59AMLots of people seem almost angry that they don’t like Relatively Speaking, the trio of one-act comedies now playing at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It averaged a D+ on StageGrade, wh…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 06:59AMCynics have long said that dying young can be a career boost in show business. But I doubt that even the most sardonic of them meant that the good fortune would redound on someone othe…
SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 09:40AM
