Monday, September 18, 2017
There is little that I can add to the praise that has been heaped upon Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” virtually from the hour it opened on Broadway in 1959. Ms. Hansberry,…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:29PMFriday, September 1, 2017
“Prince of Broadway” has been variously compared to a highlight reel, a mix-tape and a best-of list. Simply stated, “Prince” is a compilation of musical numbers from sixteen of the t…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:07PMMonday, August 21, 2017
For starters, the F in “F Theory,” world-premiering at New Jersey Repertory Company, does not stand for what you are thinking. No; it represents friendship, in this case not even with be…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:33PMTuesday, August 15, 2017
Pinpointing a target audience for some shows is easy. Ten-to-twelve-year-old girls whose parents took them to “Annie” were seen a decade or so later with one another at “Rent,” while…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:25PMSunday, August 6, 2017
Settings and casting variations on Shakespeare are virtually infinite. “Othello” in an Army barracks? “Shrew” on a Dude Ranch? A female Prospero or even Richard III? A campy “Peric…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:36PMSunday, July 23, 2017
In life there are the care-givers, the care-receivers, and those who simply don’t care. All three are represented in Scott McPherson’s “Marvin’s Room,” finally debuting on Broadway…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:22PMThursday, July 13, 2017
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a degenerative disease found in people who have suffered repeated blows to the head. Symptoms, which manifest themselves eight-to-ten years later…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 09:18PMWednesday, July 5, 2017
William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw are the raisons d’être for the Stratford and Shaw Festivals in Ontario, where those venerated playwrights (and others) are staged by world-clas…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 09:16PMSunday, June 18, 2017
With the year nearly half spent, some random observations before leaving for Ontario to cover the Stratford and Shaw Festivals for Digital First Media newspapers in Michigan (and online) and…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:56PMMonday, June 12, 2017
Anyone who does not believe truth is stranger than fiction hasn’t been following the news lately…or has never heard about Joe Monaghan, whose story is encapsulated in the playbill of Two…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:49PMMonday, June 5, 2017
Some Broadway plays and musicals succeed or fail regardless of Tony Award consideration, but the fate of many more depends heavily on nominations, not even considering wins. Ticket sales for…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 06:27PMThursday, June 1, 2017
Part of my enjoyment of Red Bull Theater’s “The Government Inspector” derived from not knowing how accurately Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation translates Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:00PMMonday, May 22, 2017
The set for “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me” features a metal-frame stand-up desk upon which set microphones, a tape deck, amps and speakers, various other electronic devices and, oh yes, a …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:17PMMonday, May 8, 2017
There is an intriguing one-act, 80-minute play on the New Jersey Repertory stage. Unfolding in the fertile theatrical setting of higher-education academia, it deals with faculty jealousy, co…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:15PMTuesday, April 18, 2017
“The Women of Padilla” is a very well-written play, a realization I came to while reading it a couple days after seeing it at Two River Theater. If ever a play was suited for Two River�…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 05:39PMMonday, April 17, 2017
Two-thirds of “The Play That Goes Wrong” is hilarious. The other half (apologies to Yogi Berra) is just funny. If you’ve ever appeared in a play, or produced, directed or stage-managed…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:04PMWednesday, April 12, 2017
Two-thirds of “The Play That Goes Wrong” is hilarious. The other half (apologies to Yogi Berra) is just funny. If you’ve ever appeared in a play, or produced, directed or stage-managed…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:51PMMonday, April 3, 2017
Some years ago I picked up a 1939 edition of John Gassner’s “20 Best Plays of the American Theatre” at the Cincinnati Public Library’s Buck-a-Book sale. Among the titles are some tha…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:11PMFriday, March 31, 2017
“Miss Saigon” was the first play I reviewed for the Two River Times in Red Bank, NJ – or for anywhere, actually, since a stint on a Rhode Island weekly during a long-ago college summer…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 11:29PMThursday, March 30, 2017
“The Price” is not a comedy – far from it. But Arthur Miller’s seldom-staged play demonstrates something his other plays do not – that Miller could indeed write funny. Not just the…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 02:38PMFriday, March 24, 2017
It’s said that there are only seven plots. If so, who’s sleeping with whose husband/wife/SO must be at least two of them. The details of such assignations are revealed late in “Multipl…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:38PMMonday, March 20, 2017
Any people who don’t believe in the Magic of Theatre would be well advised to get themselves to “Come From Away,” where a dozen diverse performers, aided by some chairs, a few coats an…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:48PMWednesday, March 15, 2017
Before Lin-Manuel Miranda chose Ron Chernow’s 827-page biography of Alexander Hamilton to read on vacation, “In the Heights” had established him as a composer-lyricist to reckon with. …
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:17PMWednesday, March 8, 2017
Tradition has it that Queen Elizabeth, enamored of Falstaff from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, asked the playwright for a play depicting the character in love (a likely apocryphal ‘alt…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:39PMThursday, March 2, 2017
One of the two male characters in “All the Fine Boys” is well past boyhood and neither fits the definition of fine. Joseph (Joe Tippett), at 28, is, in fact, very un-fine; the other, Ada…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:34PMMonday, February 20, 2017
If good intentions were reason enough to skew a review to the positive, “Ring Twice for Miranda” would merit a rave. With one line toward the end, playwright Alan Hruska makes his intent…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:04PMFriday, February 17, 2017
“American Son” is an intense, racially-charged, cautionary tale in which the title character hovers over every minute but does not appear in person. The play is set at 4AM in the waiting…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 01:21AMFriday, February 10, 2017
Great art it’s not, but if you’re looking for a recipe for farce, all the ingredients can be found in “A Comedy of Tenors,” Ken Ludwig’s sequel to his enormously successful “Lend…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 10:24PMMonday, January 30, 2017
If you wished to come back as a Greco-Roman God, you could do far worse than to opt for Dionysus (Greek), also known as Bacchus (Roman), the god of wine, fertility and agriculture as well as…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:14PMThursday, January 26, 2017
Seeing different August Wilson plays directed and acted by the same theater artists must be like it was for Elizabethan theatergoers watching the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later The King’s…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 03:30PMSaturday, January 7, 2017
The last time I walked by the TKTS booth on Time Square at 47th Street, 22 Broadway shows were offering same-day discounted tickets, most for half-price plus a two dollar service charge. Sev…
SOURCE: sceneonstage.com at 04:25PM 
