Friday, March 23, 2012
I’ve written about the work of the Actors Company Theatre (TACT) before, and here I am again to report to you on Neil Simon’s Lost In Yonkers which is the company’s spring …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:47AMTuesday, March 20, 2012
Edward Albee has a lot of explaining to do. In the lobby of the newly opened Pershing Square Signature Center way out west on 42nd Street, there is a wall devoted to photos and quotes from t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:36AMMonday, March 12, 2012
Even the lower standards set for success in today’s musical theatre are hardly met by the currently reconceived revival of the musical Carrie. It’s always a pleasure to welcome…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:48AMThursday, March 8, 2012
I’m stepping out of my field just this once in order to make you aware of Sean Egan’s new biography of playwright James Kirkwood. You may not recognize his name, but you know h…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:57AMMonday, March 5, 2012
Nina Raines’ Tribes began life at the Royal Court in London, where it had rave reviews and numerous honors, including an Olivier Award nomination for Best Play. No wonder then that an …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:47PMMonday, February 6, 2012
Theresa Rebeck is a playwright who combines the politically active mind of the late Lillian Hellman and the brittle wit of the late Jean Kerr, two formidable playwrights who greatly enriched…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:15PMMonday, January 30, 2012
I caught a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying this week, and as I watched young Nick Jonas prancing about as J. Pierrepont Finch in the current Broadway revival of …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:17PMFriday, January 27, 2012
Margaret Edson is that rare bird, a playwright whose first play, Wit, earned a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That alone makes her unique, but she becomes more so when we realize that she has n…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:49AMMonday, January 23, 2012
The battle has begun. I’ve been reading followup columns from the critics of the New York Times and other prominent commentators admitting that some of their nitpicking reviews of the …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:14AMWednesday, January 18, 2012
Athol Fugard, South African playwright, had been writing plays for 20 years when The Road to Mecca was first mounted in 1988. Clearly a personal diatribe against the platitudes inherent in s…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:47AMSaturday, December 31, 2011
I don’t usually take you along with me when I go trouping off/off Broadway, but I’m making an exception because last evening I stumbled on a special treat and as it will run thro…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:04AMFriday, December 23, 2011
David Hyde Pierce clearly likes to keep working, for which we are grateful. Ever since his long run as Frasier’s brother Niles on the sitcom “Frasier,” he has returned to…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:04AMMonday, December 19, 2011
Back in what now seems like the “not so good old days,” each Broadway season seemed to offer at least one fun filled show about athletes (all male then) and the ladies in their…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:32AMThursday, December 15, 2011
Here we have a comedy, a first, dealing with meeting the needs of the USA and China when doing business together. In Chinglish, David Henry Hwang’s play, a smalltime American busines…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:34AMMonday, December 12, 2011
There are several Hugh Jackmans. The most familiar perhaps is the X Man “Wolverine,” but that hairy ape has little to do with at least four other Jackmans on display in this ev…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:55AMWith 75 plays under his belt, it would appear that Alan Ayckbourn can find two hours worth of entertainment and enlightenment in any of his own actual or imagined experiences as he lives o…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:32AMFriday, December 2, 2011
It took 25 producers and/or production companies to offer Frank Wildhorn a seventh crack at Broadway after his six previous attempts didn’t quite work out. His first, Jekyll and Hyde, …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:40AMWednesday, November 23, 2011
The Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut is to be commended for unearthing City of Angels, a 1989 hit Broadway musical that is rarely done. It’s a very different sort of m…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:04AMThursday, November 17, 2011
The closet is, at last, wide open. No more need for gay characters to parade around pretending to be women, which was the game played in the mid-nineteenth century. When even a hint of the…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:26AMMonday, November 14, 2011
David Ives’ contribution to our Broadway season, courtesy of the Manhattan Theatre Club is, as the King of Siam used to say, “a puzzlement.” Starting as a hilarious backs…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:41AMFriday, October 21, 2011
Relatively Speaking is the collective title for three one act plays by three who usually turn their talents toward the screen. Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen are three stagestruck …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:05AMThursday, October 20, 2011
The various Manhattan not-for-profit theatres have done us all a great service by offering a home to a dozen talented playwrights. Theatres like Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center Theatr…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:08PMMonday, October 17, 2011
It’s nowhere near June yet love and marriage seems to be in the theatrical air as Hallowe’en approaches. On October 14th. the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:50AMWednesday, September 28, 2011
The Disney Company has clearly put a good deal of Lion King money into this attempt to reinvent a movie of theirs from 1992: Newsies. The film lost almost $12,000,000 so one might wonder why…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:06AMSay thanks to whomever you say thanks to, for we have a new playwright among us. His name? Jeff Talbott, and he is the recipient of the first ever Arthur Laurents-Tom Hatcher Award, which ho…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:43AMTuesday, September 20, 2011
Jonathan Bank runs a pretty tight ship over there at the Mint Theater Company, one of our off-Broadway treasures. In the most unpretentious of black box theatres on the third floor of a 43rd…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:15AMI don’t usually cover the Cabaret world, but as Michael Feinstein and Linda Eder have both graced Broadway stages on their career trajectories, I thought you might like to know how the…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:49AMTuesday, September 13, 2011
Sondheim’s Follies is back on Broadway, and in this time of earthquakes, hurricanes and political chaos, that’s a good thing. Set in 1971, for two and a half hours it permits us …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:33AMWednesday, August 3, 2011
This import from the National Theatre in London, at the Beaumont Theatre in LincolnCenter, is more an experience than a play, and as such it’s a hum-dinger. As a play it is less than…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:43AMTuesday, July 19, 2011
A weekend motor trip through Western New York state and Connecticut brought me to Ithaca where a new comedy by Tim Pinckney was having a world premiere at the newly refurbished Hangar Thea…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:16PMYes, Tyne Daly as “Maria Callas” is the primary reason to see this smashing revival of Terrence McNally’s play Master Class at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre on Broadw…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:00PM 
