Sunday, October 5, 2025
Torera vividly depicts the life of Elena, the daughter of the housekeeper in the house of a great torero, who desperately wants to be a bullfighter. The son of the torero is Elena's best fr…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:36PMWednesday, October 1, 2025
At the start of This Is Government, written by Nina Kissinger and directed by Sarah Norris, three young adults sit in a drab congressional office (nicely realized by Daniel Allen). Against t…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:06PMTuesday, September 23, 2025
Roughly a third of the way through The Essentialisn't (great title), writer-director-performer Elisa Davis quotes Wikipedia:
“Essentialism is the view that every entity has a set of attri…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:06AMThursday, September 4, 2025
Kelly Bishop writing a memoir--doesn't that sound exciting? The stories she must have! The gossip! The attitude!
Nah. The Third Gilmore Girl is a short, polite, mildly interesting book. S…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:42PMIt's easier to enjoy Twelfth Night, or What You Will, the inaugural production at the newly redone Delacorte, if you accept that it's not exactly Twelfth Night. The show is lively, funny, a …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:42PMMonday, August 4, 2025
While the subtitle of this book calls Elaine May "Hollywood's Hidden Genius," it also gives full attention to May's theatrical career, which has included writing, acting, and directing.
May …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:36AMMonday, June 9, 2025
It could have been worse. It could have been better. Sandra got a very respectable 18 correct. Liz and I tied with 13. It was a fun Tonys ceremony. Happy New Season!
(BTW, the √s are supp…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:32PMMonday, June 2, 2025
Lenon Hoyte (Aunt Len) was the founder and proprietor of Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum in Harlem. She died in 1999. In the amazing Harlem Doll Palace, which just finished a run at the HER…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:18PMIn the late 1970s, The Public Theater presented the Yale Rep production of Sganarelle: An Evening of Molière Farces. It was a wonderful evening. One performer was particularly good: Mark L…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:18PMWednesday, May 21, 2025
Jan and Nick, a young married couple, have just moved into an apartment in the East Village. It's 1977, they're in their mid-20s, and they've been together 7 years. Their marriage is happy b…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:24AMTuesday, May 13, 2025
Adam Szymkowicz's entertaining The Fat Cat Killers combines an incompetent-criminals comedy with a take-down of capitalism. Rather than building on or complementing each other, the two comp…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:36PMSaturday, May 10, 2025
Although we have not previously shown great acuity in Tony prediction, here we are again. Hope springs eternal!
This year’s list of Tony nominees reveals a healthy, exciting season. Lookin…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:36PMWednesday, May 7, 2025
From the press release for We Do The Same Thing Every Week:
Dick and Jane are bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon. A six-foot tall cat shows up, and hijinks ensue. Later, elsewhere, Dick and J…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:36PMSaturday, April 26, 2025
Caryl Churchill is not in love with the sound of her own voice. (Many playwrights are, along with many people in every walk of life.) While Churchill has a tremendous amount to say, her writ…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:32PMThursday, March 6, 2025
That the American justice system is worse than broken--dangerous, dishonest, racist--is not news. Some innocent people have been coerced into confessing, others have accepted plea bargains r…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:32AMTuesday, March 4, 2025
I am not a fan of Arthur Miller's. But I like to revisit works to see if I've missed something. Having recently reread Death of a Salesman and seen the The Village Theater Group productio…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 07:12PMWednesday, February 26, 2025
In Garside's Career, written by Harold Brighouse before the first World War, Peter Garside is a skilled mechanic and avid Union member in 1914 Midlanton, England. He has just completed a uni…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:18PMThursday, February 13, 2025
The delightful NAATCO-Play on Shakespeare all-femme, all-Asian-American production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline only runs through Feb. 15. If you are a fan of first-class theatre that is bea…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:42AMSaturday, February 8, 2025
Mrs. Loman, Barbara Cassady's sequel to Death of a Salesman, starts right after Willy's funeral. Linda Loman, her sons Biff and Happy, and next door neighbor Charley and his son Bernard gath…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:32PMWednesday, January 29, 2025
When the curtain came down on Act 1 of Gypsy, my friend Susan said, "She's so wrong and she's so good." Excellent summation!
I was one of those who greeted Audra's casting with, she's miscas…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 08:36PMTuesday, January 21, 2025
Based on both the reviews and word of mouth, I went into Target Margin's "re-envisioning" of Show Boat (here called Show/Boat: A River) with low expectations. Sadly, it lived down to them. …
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 11:54PMMonday, January 13, 2025
A built-in weakness in some comedies of ideas is that one side of an argument may simply be right. As someone who believes strongly in vaccines, I thought Eureka Day might have to wrestle w…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:18PM I reviewed Women Writing Musicals on Talkin' Broadway.
One of the stranger parts of aging is watching time go from "now" to "then" to "retro" to "no one on Jeopardy knows the answer." Thi…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 03:06PMIn the new book Women Writing Musicals, Jennifer Ashley Tepper and Applause Theatre & Cinema Books rescue one important part of theatre history: women writing musicals. And it is full of jui…
SOURCE: TalkinBroadway at 01:01PMWednesday, December 4, 2024
Last month I had the pleasure of attending the TRU (Theater Resources Unlimited) benefit. The TRU mission:
TRU was formed to promote a spirit of cooperation and support within the general t…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 12:12AMSunday, November 3, 2024
Last week, the wonderful MasterVoices presented the Gershwins' Strike Up the Band. In 1927, its book, about a war over cheese tariffs, was written by George F. Kaufman with a pretty satiri…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:42PMFriday, October 11, 2024
Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) wrote 30 plays, a few of which were produced on Broadway, along with screenplays and poetry. Nowadays he is known--when he is known at all--for having written Green Gr…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 06:32AMFriday, October 4, 2024
What is honor? That's a particularly relevant question as we head into the election. Is honor reputation? Or is it something between a person and herself? What value does honor have? Do most…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 10:12PMSaturday, September 21, 2024
The American Classical Orchestra (ACO), described by its founder/conductor as "our labor of love," utilizes period instruments to better produce classical pieces as the composers composed th…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 05:12AMSaturday, September 14, 2024
Annette is winning at life. She has just negotiated a major promotion; her boyfriend Charles is attractive, considerate, and wealthy; their major life challenge is whether to stay in the Upp…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 09:06PMFriday, September 13, 2024
One is not supposed to focus so much on trees that you miss the forest, right? I get that. But what if they're really big, ugly, focus-grabbing trees?
I suspect that Client-Attorney, Alex…
SOURCE: Show Showdown at 02:32AM 
