311 stories by "Broadway & Me"
The Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith wrote She Stoops to Conquer in 1771 but The Actors Company Theatre's revival of this classic farce works hard to be contemporary. Maybe too hard. Befo…
Well, it's late in the day and I still haven't had a chance to write today's post so I'm going to drag out the old ghost light that theaters turn on when they're temporarily empty. Octo…
Neil LaBute made his name in the '90s by creating narcissistic characters who do mean and horrible things to the other characters in his films and plays. But over the years, this prolific pl…
Immersive experience is the phrase that everyone keeps using to describe The Encounter, the unusual one-man show that is playing a limited run at Broadway's Golden Theatre through Jan. 8 whe…
Marie and Rosetta, which has been extended at the Atlantic Theater's Linda Gross Theater through Oct. 16, aims to be a crowd-pleaser"and it certainly is. Just about everyone left the theater…
UThe gender-fluid performance artist Taylor Mac isn't so much doing a show as he is hosting a party with A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,which is playing at St. Ann's Warehouse only thr…
It may be hard to remember now but many people believed that Barack Obama's presidency would take the country into a post-racial era, where, as Martin Luther King Jr. once dreamed, people wo…
Aubergine is both a fancy name for eggplant and the title of Julia Cho's new play, now running at Playwrights Horizons through Oct. 2. The company has been touting it as a savory stew …
Besides Claire Boothe Luce's catty comedy The Women, Euripides' breast-clawing tragedy The Trojan Women, the feminist cri de coeurs of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Ntozake Shange's for co…
Maybe we're all still suffering from a Hamilton hangover but excitement about the upcoming theater season seems more muted than it has in past years. Still, the new shows are beginning to op…
In the old days, plays were expected to be well made and largely about people who well mannered and well off. But in the years after World War II the working class playwrights known as the A…
Even though the theater world slows down in summer, the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day is my favorite time of the year. And this year, I kicked back and was even lazier than usual (…
People write plays for all kinds of reasons and after we saw the new show that opened at Second Stage Theatre this week, my theatergoing buddy Bill speculated that playwright Leslye Headland…
The intense drama Quietly extended its run this week and is now scheduled to play at the Irish Repertory Theatre thru Sept. 25. I'm always glad to see a show find a larger audience"even…
"Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" asks the final line of the musical Hamilton. It, of course, famously answers its own question by having black and brown actors play the Foun…
The hottest ticket of the summer is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which opened at London's Palace Theatre last weekend and is already sold out through next May. But on this side of the …
You wouldn't think that the subject of slavery would be an obvious choice for comedy. And yet the writer James McBride pulled it off with "The Good Lord Bird," his comedic novel about a youn…
Maybe it's the summer heat. Or maybe too many of you are out of town. Or maybe it's a reluctance to take a chance on an unknown show. Whatever the reason, there weren't as many entrants in t…
We're now in the midsummer of this year's theater festival season. It's the time when small companies and fledgling productions get a chance to strut their stuff. Some of these showcases, li…
With temperatures climbing into the 90s, we're in the midst of the summer's first real heat wave. And consequently, everything is slowing down, including show openings"and now B&Me. I'll…
Since getting her B.A. at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and an M.F.A from Columbia University barely a decade ago, Rachel Chavkin, whose acclaimed production of Natasha, Pierre and the Grea…
Spring's incessant flow of show openings slows to a trickle in the summer so theater junkies like me have to look elsewhere for our fixes. I recently found some solace in theater-related exh…
The Tonys and all last season's other theater celebrations are now behind us, several original Hamilton cast members (including the show's creator Lin-Manuel Miranda) are scheduled to take t…
Outsiders are Samuel D. Hunter's specialty. But his aren't the heroic or charismatic figures that command center stage in most narratives. Instead, they are the more commonplace misfits soci…
Now 54, Matthew Broderick made his stage debut as a teenager in the original 1982 production of Torch Song Trilogy, won a Tony Award the next year for his performance in Neil Simon's autobio…
