311 stories by "Broadway & Me"
Yep, I'm back in the hole again so no post today. But, aside from the bunch of shows I did manage to talk about on Wednesday, I hope you will check out the roundtable discussion I had …
March Madness is the term used to describe this time of the year when college basketball teams compete for their national championship. But for me, it means the time when the spring theater …
Heavy loads of work and other obligations have put me in a hole. I'm working my way out but it may take another week or so before I can post again. I'll try to sneak in an occasional tweet (…
Most parents want their children to have a better life than they did. But a few want to better their own lives by living through their kids. That latter group is the one that interests playw…
So much of my time is spent trying to keep up with shows that open on Broadway and those produced by the larger off-Broadway companies that I rarely get to see smaller off-off Broadway shows…
Like the playwright John Patrick Shanley, I was a kid from a working-class family who got a scholarship to a New England prep school and it changed my life in all kinds of ways. So I was rea…
Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly, which had a brief Broadway run back in 2011, was such a refreshing look at African-American life in contemporary America that I had to talk myself out of jumping o…
I get sentimental around this time every year because tomorrow is Valentine's Day, a chance for me to celebrate how lucky I am to have my husband K in my life. And because it's also th…
Some roles become so identified with one actor that others shy away from doing them. Here I'm thinking of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (although the British actress Sheridan Smith recently dare…
Health problems (nothing dire but serious enough to have screwed with my schedule) are keeping me from posting today. So as I usually do when I can't write here, I'm putting up the ghost lig…
Maurice Hines and his younger brother Gregory were barely out of diapers when they started in show business. Known as The Hines Kids (and later as Hines, Hines and Dad when their drummer fat…
Just a couple of days ago I was yapping on in another post about how "as long as a show is well made, it's OK with me even it if isn't what I think of as 'my kind of show.'" So I suppose I'v…
Theater snobs complain that Broadway has become too focused on shows that will appeal to the tourist trade. But the populist in me doesn't have a problem with that. As long as a show is well…
My husband K and I are off for a no-Internet-access vacation so I've put on the ghost light that theaters set up when they're temporarily vacant. But I'm leaving plenty of good stuff for you…
Everything I've read about Stephen King suggests he's a really nice guy. He's been married to the same woman for 45 years. He gives away about $4 million a year to worthy causes. And he work…
I'm usually no fan of director John Doyle's work. It always strikes me as too self-congratulatory about how clever it is. But Doyle's revival of The Color Purple knocked me out. And that's a…
Marjorie Prime, the Pulitzer Prize finalist running at Playwrights Horizons through Jan. 24, is intentionally unsettling. Playwright Jordan Harrison has set it in the near future when today'…
Last year was a great year for theater. Lots of things to see. And lots of it good. Really good. And yet, as so often happens, a critical consensus has formed around just a few. The Humans, …
There's an affinity between Shakespeare and music that rivals the synchronicity between peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes what results is lip-smackingly good like Kiss Me Kate, Cole Po…
There will be no regular post this weekend. Instead, I'm just going to wish you and yours a Christmas sparkling with peace, love, laughter and, of course, the good cheer of good theater. Dec…
With her outsized features, brassy voice and campy sensibility, Jackie Hoffman is an inveterate scene stealer. And that's a problem for the revival of Once Upon a Mattress that is playing in…
Allegiance, the new musical about the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, isn't doing well at the box office. On the one hand, that's understandable. It's an old-fas…
Who doesn't love a good Christmas fable? And over the past decade or so, one of the most popular has become the story of the impromptu cease fires that sprung up between British and Ge…
Do you have to understand a show in order to like it? I've been asking myself that question since seeing, back-to-back last week, Night is a Room, a cryptic drama playing in Signature …
