Thursday, January 23, 2020
By JK Clarke It takes an extraordinarily special talent to take Shakespeare’s more problematic—or “less compelling”—plays and make them not only interesting, but …
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 04:51PM By JK Clarke Upon introducing their evening of songs Tuesday night at Pangea, Barbara Bleier and Austin Pendleton explained they called the performance—which played every…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 05:52AMMonday, January 20, 2020
By Samuel L. Leiter Emojis! Those ubiquitous computer images we attach to our emails offering shortcut messages showing feelings, foods, celebrations, machines, weather, flags, a…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 03:11AMWednesday, January 15, 2020
by Samuel L. Leiter You know those CNN documentaries that cover an entire decade in an hour? “The Sixties”? “The Seventies”? “The Eighties,” etc.? Film and video cl…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 07:15PMSunday, December 29, 2019
By JK Clarke As a society, here in the US of A, it’s fair to say we hardly spend much time thinking about Idaho. Sure, there’s the odd joke or two about potatoes and th…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 06:11AMSaturday, November 9, 2019
By JK Clarke Edmond de Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac is a story that lends itself to reinterpretation and modernization. With a simple, straightforward theme about…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 08:19PMThursday, October 17, 2019
By Samuel L. Leiter I admit it. I’m guilty. I sat through Linda Vista, by actor-playwright Tracy Letts (August: Osage County), at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theatre, and e…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 03:44AMMonday, October 14, 2019
By JK Clarke Fans of both Andrus Nichols and Kate Hamill were recently thrilled by the news that the two had formed a new theater company, The Coop. Nichols’ conspicuous …
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 04:59AMFriday, October 11, 2019
By JK Clarke Tennessee Williams’ very accomodating production notes in The Glass Menagerie—a play for which he coined the term “memory play”—encourages a freedom …
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 05:37PMFriday, September 20, 2019
By JK Clarke I’ve always contended—as have many others who care about such things—that while editing or abridging Shakespeare’s plays for the purpose of a production i…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 05:37AMTuesday, August 6, 2019
By JK Clarke Coriolanus is one of many Shakespeare plays that can be played for its uncanny prescience in modern times, though it doesn’t always have to be. Like Ju…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 01:24PMMonday, August 5, 2019
By JK Clarke Fish-out-of-water incarceration stories are nothing new. From the wrongfully imprisoned (Hugo’s Les Misérables) to the belatedly, unexpectedly indicted (…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 02:44PMTuesday, June 18, 2019
By Samuel L. Leiter Gordon Dahlquist’s [Veil Widow Conspiracy] is a dramatically veiled construct embedding three stories, one within the other, like a play-within-a-play-wi…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 10:04PMSunday, June 9, 2019
NEW YORK. June 9, 2019. The 73rd Annual Tony Awards are taking place right now at Radio City Music Hall, broadcast on CBS, hosted by James Corden. Leading the nominations was the …
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 08:05PMWednesday, May 29, 2019
By JK Clarke As the preeminent American playwright of the late-20th century, Sam Shepard drew on life experiences to create his best plays, works of realism that portrayed contem…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 09:33PMTuesday, April 30, 2019
The 2019 Actor’s Fund Gala took place Monday evening at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, honoring The Actors Fund will celebrate Tony Award-winning playwright and actor Ha…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 12:59PMPhotos: Shoshana Medney NEW YORK. APRIL 30, 2019. The 2019 Tony Award Nominations were announced this morning at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center by Bebe …
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 12:14PM By JK Clarke If you’ve seen the latest Cohen Brothers film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix), you’d hardly expect that the actor playing the title character, Tim Bla…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 03:49AMWednesday, April 17, 2019
By Samuel L. Leiter The official diplomatic phrase for the events behind this play are the “1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.” One of modern history’s bloo…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 11:36PMSaturday, April 13, 2019
by Samuel L. Leiter This week, I watched the great Broadway librettist and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II get hammered twice. The first was Daniel Fish’s radical redo of R…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 05:16AMFriday, April 12, 2019
By Matt Smith “I’ve been so many places in my life and time / I’ve sung a lot of songs and I’ve made some bad rhymes / I’ve acted out my life on stages / With ten…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 01:47PM By Ron Fassler According to the program notes, The Mad Ones are “a New York City-based company that creates ensemble-driven work through the ongoing collaboration of co-A…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 01:06PM By Brian Scott Lipton If you’re a theatergoer who truly subscribes to the philosophy of “if it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage” or “the play’s the th…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 12:39PM by Carol Rocamora It’s a play with an outrageous premise—and Suzan-Lori Parks wants it that way. As a playwright who has been writing about race and American history fo…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 03:03AMThursday, April 11, 2019
By Tania Fisher Now playing at The Theater for the New City, Shareholder Value is set against the backdrop of the fiscal crisis of 2008, and is loosely based on the debacle…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 02:35PM by Carol Di Tosti Happiness is a sleight of mind. When it is founded on lies, duplicities and secrets, it will never last, even though one may desperately cling to its illu…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 01:40PMSaturday, April 6, 2019
by Samuel L. Leiter A few months ago, I asked my friend Richard, house manager of Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater, what was next on the venue’s agenda. When he an…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 06:02AMThursday, April 4, 2019
by Carol Rocamora Everything about Peaches is shocking—from the pink color of her big hair to her shiny pink alligator suit to the stream of profanities that spew from her m…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 11:10PMWednesday, April 3, 2019
By Joseph Pisano Despite an initial Broadway run that was, to say the least, severely abridged, few theatrical works have as culturally schismatic a performance history as …
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 11:41PMSunday, March 31, 2019
By Samuel L. Leiter Off-Broadway’s Red Bull Theater (Jesse Berger, artistic director) loves to take risks by staging infrequently seen, even obscure classics (okay, their up…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 11:50PM By Ron Fassler Sondheim: Wordplay at the Kaufmann Concert Hall on Saturday night was genuine truth in advertising. For surely there has been no Broadway lyricist who has pl…
SOURCE: Theater Pizzazz at 10:23PM 
