5,910 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
Nearly every president has been depicted on the stage at one time or another. There are currently three on Broadway — in a single show, “Hamilton” which opened Off-Broad…
"I love you," Stephen says to his wife Amy. "I love you," Amy replies. "Please don't respond verbally," Stephen admonishes her. He is a cognitive neuroscientist conducting an experiment. He …
Some of the theater posters Frank Verlizzo designed hang on the famous flop wall of Joe Allan's restaurant. Some hold a prominent place in the homes of grateful Broadway stars. But many are …
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent an agent to see the out-of-town tryout of "A Raisin in the Sun" to determine if the play had Communist content. The FBI did not do this with every show that…
In honor of Valentine’s Day, here are Broadway plays about love dating back to 1750,  photographs of stage kisses dating back to 1887, and recaps of some of my love and kisses po…
For the next two days (February 13th and 14th), the following productions are offering free tickets for certain seats at various future performances, courtesy of Goldstar’s Comp Train,…
Playwright Young Jean Lee wrote an Op-Ed this week about the advantages of affirmative action in education and diversity in the theater. Looking at some of the faces below of the people who …
Off-Broadway Week starts today, offering two tickets for the price of one to 34 shows playing Off-Broadway, through February 24th. The shows range from musicals that have been running for de…
Watch musical numbers from each of the nominees for the Grammy for best musical theater album of the year: The Band’s Visit, Carousel, Jesus Christ Superstar, My Fair Lady, and Once on…
Paul Zimet came up with the idea for Talking Band’s 57th show, “City of No Illusions,” when he met two sisters who own a funeral parlor in Buffalo, New York. “They ta…
The strange doings in Virginia have brought blackface back in the news. Reaction to the unearthing of a photograph on the 1984 medical school yearbook page of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam att…
More than half a century has passed since the Berrigan brothers, both of them priests, along with seven other Catholic activists, broke the law to protest the Vietnam War. On May 17, 1968, t…
Theater is not the only activity vulnerable to bad reviews. A sportswriter called last Sunday’s football game “the worst Super Bowl ever…” (“boring, lame, no…
No other company went as full-Broadway as Skittles, which, in lieu of a commercial during the Super Bowl, staged on Super Bowl Sunday a one-day, 40-minute live “Skittles Commerc…
"My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black," says Keyonn Sheppard as Bayard Rustin, close adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr.,  main orga…
This month there are no Broadway openings, but ample glamour Off-Broadway. Freestyle Love Supreme, the improvisational hip-hop group that Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail conceived  …
In the first Broadway revival of Sam Shepard's 1980 play, Ethan Hawke portrays Lee, a drifter, a drinker, and a thief who disrupts the life of his younger brother, Paul Dano's Austin, an Ivy…
In the first Broadway revival of Sam Shepard's 1980 play, Ethan Hawke portrays Lee, a drifter, a drinker, and a thief who disrupts the life of his younger brother, Paul Dano's Aust…
Most wouldn’t see a link between stone-cold killer Chris Partlow from HBO’s The Wire, flashy pimp-turned-porn-star Larry Brown on HBO’s The Deuce and Tom Robinson, a black …
How well were you paying attention to the New York theater news and reviews in January? Answer these 11 questions and find out.
It was a good week to test your view of New York — the 1990s Bohemia  presented in Rent Live on Fox (which was largely Rent Recorded), or the grittier view expressed by the cityR…
To the seven young performers who tell the stories of their lives in "Generation NYZ," New York means subways and pizza and opportunity, but also cops and catcalling and homelessness. They a…
“Rent Live” was seen by just 3.574 million viewers, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings, and received mostly negative reviews, according to Rotten Tomato, which gave it a…
When at the age of 17 composer Richard Rodgers met 24-year-old lyricist Lorenz Hart in 1919, he instantly acquired “a career, a partner, a best friend and a source of permanent irritat…
In the month before Rent opened Off-Broadway in January, 1996, Idina Menzel was singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings" at a bar mitzvah at Leonard's of Great Neck for the thousandth time; Daphn…
