Saturday, December 23, 2023
Some of what follows appeared here ten years ago. Hoping it stands up to a re-reading and amuses first timers.) As a struggling actor back in the day, I drove a cab, tended bar…the usua…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:20PMMonday, November 13, 2023
I became an ardent fan of playwright Theresa Rebeck in 2007 with “Mauritius,” her Broadway debut. About a disputed inheritance of that British colony’s rare and extremely valuable 1847…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:00PMThursday, October 19, 2023
Most actors will tell you they would rather play the villain than the hero. The bad guys are often more complex, sometimes amusingly so, and they dominate their scenes. The appeal may be inb…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:38PMTuesday, May 16, 2023
In the early 1950s Murray Melvin acted with the Hampstead Drama Group, north London. My parents, Constance and George Hawkins, did too, and George was its “props maker”. A child at the t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:24AMSunday, February 5, 2023
There is some practical insight in “Colin Quinn: Small Talk,” the actor/comic/writer’s solo standup gig at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village. Who knew, for example, that t…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:46PMMonday, January 2, 2023
Most full-scale musical shows run several weeks of previews before submitting to critical evaluation; some even longer, with mixed results (cue “Spiderman”). The New York Gilbert & S…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:06PMFriday, December 30, 2022
When Mani Soleymanlou began acting, he was offered roles as stereotypical outsiders. That he now stars as a cop named Coco is indicative of broader shifts in a changing Quebec.
SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 05:24AMMonday, December 5, 2022
It is an unusual opening number for an orchestral jazz concert/revue: a strikingly evocative solo rendition of the legendary Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Even more unusual, the w…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:42PMTuesday, November 29, 2022
You need not be closely familiar with William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” or with his personal life to enjoy “& Juliet.” References to both are deployed liberally througho…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 06:23PMSunday, November 20, 2022
A “Shaggy Dog” story is one with a high-stakes build-up and much activity that comes to an anti-climactic conclusion, like an elongated joke with an unfunny punchline. A serious shaggy d…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 08:13PMSunday, November 13, 2022
My first Mike Birbiglia show was “Sleepwalk with Me” in 2008 at the Bleecker Street Theater, where some of the 199 seats were behind poles. The 80-minute self-written monologue recounted…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:01PMTuesday, November 8, 2022
Most solo shows are one act affairs that run about 90 minutes or less. “Walking With Ghosts” is just Gabriel Byrne, sharing memories and spinning tales for well over two hours in two act…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 12:09PMWednesday, October 26, 2022
If you want to know what a stage director does (or can do) for a play, you might want to first read Alice Childress’s “Wine in the Wilderness” and then get yourself to Two River Theate…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:19PMThursday, October 20, 2022
On consecutive evenings last week, I saw what are likely the longest and shortest works, in terms of running time, currently on New York stages. The long one, clocking in at well over three …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:58PMFriday, October 7, 2022
As much as I admire and am entertained by fine classical acting – at Stratford and in Central Park, for instance – and by complete-package musicals (“The Prom” and “Into the Woods�…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:39PMTuesday, September 27, 2022
The term “world music” has never been adequate to the task we’ve set it—even in its most benign reading, it implies a division between the listener and the rest of […]
The post The…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 09:15PMSunday, September 25, 2022
This piece is prompted by the current Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which I am scheduled to see on October 12. Neither a review nor an analysis, it is just…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:27PMFriday, September 9, 2022
“Strings Attached” is about three physicists, an American woman and two British men, on their way by train from Cambridge to London to see Michael Frayn’s science-based play “Copenha…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:23PMTuesday, August 30, 2022
An esteemed scholar once wrote about “Waiting for Godot” that “We all bring to Samuel Beckett’s play whatever is uppermost in our minds.” As tidy as that seems, my “Godot” expe…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:58PMTuesday, August 16, 2022
Mrs. Nugent should have quit while she was ahead. When she went to the Brady home to complain that her son Philip was being bullied by Francie Brady, Francie’s ma was ready to punish him. …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:05PMTuesday, July 26, 2022
Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” reportedly his own personal favorite, has weathered so many revivals and revisions since its 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning premiere that all…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:18PMThursday, July 21, 2022
It’s a common refrain in the city: Chicago summer is so worth the wait. Newbies and transplants can feel the buzz of opportunity in the air when the weather starts to turn. Visceral summer…
SOURCE: chicagoreader.com at 05:30PMMonday, July 18, 2022
It is fascinating to imagine the processes that went into mounting the Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.” Not only Stephen Sondheim’s exquisite music and lyrics and James Lapine’s…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:31PMTuesday, July 5, 2022
As written for MediaNews Group in Michigan: However you define Power Couple, you will not find a more representative theatrical pair than actor Colm Feore and director-choreographer Donna Fe…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 08:55AMThursday, June 9, 2022
From 1968 to 1973, “SOUL!,” America’s first Black-hosted nighttime TV talk show, celebrated Black literature, poetry, music and politics, largely in interview formats. In 1971, prolifi…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:11PMThursday, June 2, 2022
One of my favorite theater memories is of seeing Phil Silvers in “Do Re Mi” in 1960. In a scene where his character is producing a recording session, Silvers tells the six on-stage music…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:06PMMonday, May 16, 2022
There are many reasons for taking a date to a community theater production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Maybe you are both studying English Lit or are enrolled in acting classe…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 07:49PMTuesday, May 3, 2022
The following article appears in the May edition of the Canadian national Mensa magazine, MC2, and online and in the print editions of MediaNews Group in suburban Detroit. One hundred…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:10AMMonday, April 11, 2022
Between 1961 and Y2K, Neil Simon was represented on Broadway by thirty plays, winning four Tony Awards (one honorary) and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (“Lost in Yonkers”). The plays…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:45PMThursday, March 3, 2022
Think about the last ten new plays you saw. Were most of them really well written, with cohesive plots and well-developed characters? Were they thought-provoking and/or amusing? Well, that a…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:51PMTuesday, February 22, 2022
In years past I have seen several plays performed in foreign (to me) languages. “Death of a Salesman” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” both familiar works, were perfectly clear in Yiddish,…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 09:39PM 
