Friday, November 29, 2013
The name Dennis Kelly didn’t register with me when I noted it in the playbill to his play Taking Care of Baby, which the Manhattan Theatre Club is currently presenting off Broadway. I shou…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:06AMMonday, November 18, 2013
International stage star Mark Rylance has offered us a holiday season treat by bringing us his remarkable Shakespearean double header of Richard III and Twelfth Night. He’s packed his …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:48AMThursday, November 14, 2013
It all looks so simple, the making of a hit musical, when the creators and cast have done it right. After Midnight is a suitable example of the kind of success about which one might ask: …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:00AMTracee Chimo’s performance as “Diana” in Bad Jews is not going to make any new friends. Her work in this acerbic new play by Joshua Harmon is masterful and brave as she t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:19AMWednesday, November 13, 2013
Some seasons ago, the Roundabout Theatre Company brought us a British import of a stage adaptation called The 39 Steps, which used the Alfred Hitchcock film of 1935 as its source. The play m…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:40AMMonday, November 11, 2013
54 Below is the smart cabaret just underneath Theatre 54 in New York. It features the best of the Broadway performers who show up regularly between engagements on the legit stage, and its …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:32PMFriday, November 8, 2013
In 1947 when The Winslow Boy first hit Broadway, its author Terence Rattigan was in great favor, churning out hit after hit beginning with 1937′s French Without Tears and continuing we…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:17AMTuesday, November 5, 2013
Bruce Norris won the Pulitzer in 2011 and the Tony Award in 2012 for best play when his Clybourne Park played on Broadway after a successful run off Broadway in 2010. Critics and public al…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:02AMMonday, November 4, 2013
Harold Pinter arrived on the London theatre scene in the mid 1950s along with John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Edward Bond, David Storey and Arnold Wesker, among other playwrights who were det…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:52AMFriday, November 1, 2013
A strange thing happens when good actors find themselves cast in a play in which their characters are ill defined or not defined at all. These actors, trapped on their own, make choices in o…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:58AMMonday, October 14, 2013
Jack Canfora, whose plays have been winning him a promising reputation, has now offered us Jericho at 59 East 59th Street under the direction of Evan Bergman with whom he’s worked se…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:50AMWednesday, October 9, 2013
What a nice surprise to be able to welcome back the lesser known Bernard Shaw play You Never Can Tell. Even its light hearted title suggests that immediately after Mrs. Warren’s Prof…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:06AMMonday, October 7, 2013
It would have been a fitting tribute to Horton Foote had he been able to see two of his progeny packin’ ‘em in during the same season on and off Broadway. For The Trip to Bountif…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:47PMI suggest that Norbert Leo Butz run for President in 2016. I’d make it “Mayor of New York City” this coming November, for we shall need him then, but he’ll be other…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:09AMTuesday, September 17, 2013
George Kelly is one of those excellent playwrights who flourished in the Golden Age of Broadway. Born in 1887 in Schuylkill Falls, Pennsylvania, he was the seventh of ten children born to th…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:20AMThursday, August 22, 2013
I saw Pippin three times during its original four and a half year New York run in the 1970s. I enjoyed it thoroughly but I always thought of it as a minor musical which a major director (B…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:00PMMonday, August 19, 2013
Last summer, Mark Lamos directed a production of Harbor, a new play by Chad Beguelin, at the Westport Country Playhouse, where Mr. Lamos presides as artistic director. It did well there, had…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:57AMSaturday, August 17, 2013
I must admit the very title of this new musical caused me concern. I didn’t think there would be much in it with which I could identify. I knew it had a rock score and that didn’…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:29AMFriday, August 16, 2013
The 17th annual New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC)is upon us and though I’ve never covered it before, one new play came to my attention and intrigued me enough to ven…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:47AMFriday, July 26, 2013
The tenth anniversary season of this valuable festival, New York Musical Theatre Festival, is just concluding. By final curtain on July 28th, it will have presented some 350 new musicals i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:09PMThursday, July 25, 2013
If you’ve been contemplating a summer visit to lower New England for some swell weather, beautiful rain nourished greenery and even good theatre, you might consider an afternoon or eve…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:10AMWednesday, June 12, 2013
June 11, 2013 — As is the custom, two days after the Tony Awards, Actors’ Equity Association gathers together its Council for a meeting in which policy is discussed. The “…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:10AMTuesday, June 11, 2013
The Mint Theatre, under the artistic directorship of Jonathan Bank, produces worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten. It’s an invaluable part of the New York …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:42AMMonday, June 10, 2013
From a warmly remembered film of the same name, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, together with director Michel Greif, have fashioned a warm and loving musical play. Richard Greenberg tackled…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:27AMTuesday, May 28, 2013
A phoenix has risen on Broadway. Out of the ashes of a very pleasant TV Special by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, once thought of as enchanting, but now considered something of …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:08AMThursday, May 16, 2013
In 1949 Clifford Odets, after years of cashing in on his early successes with the Group Theatre, returned to Broadway with The Big Knife, which was to be his bitter comment on the price he …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:47PMTuesday, May 14, 2013
Cicely Tyson now joins Laurette Taylor in the small pantheon of actresses who have given us monumental performances onstage; Ms. Taylor of course, for her Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:57AMTuesday, May 7, 2013
I feel I’ve had to do almost as much research as the actors who perform in the Lincoln Center Theatre’s production of Richard Nelson’s Nikolai and the Others. That’s …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:25AMMonday, April 29, 2013
Playwright Jonathan Tolins has managed to take material that could have inspired a campy gay play limited in its appeal to those whose idea of first class entertainment is a Saturday night s…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:41AMThursday, April 25, 2013
The Divine Miss M has finally, after forty years, found her way to a Broadway stage in a legit play which could be called The Divine Miss M, but isn’t, because that title was already…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:37AMLyle Kessler’s career has been pretty well defined by an early play of his, Orphans. There have been other plays, but nothing that created the stir that this one did. It’s bee…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:38AM 
