5,910 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
"Emojiland," an entry in the 2018 New York Musical Festival, is set inside a smart phone, with the resident emojis facing a "textistential" crisis —Â the phone is due for a software…
Billie is a published poet and a professor, who has been married to her husband Marvin for 25 years. She can't sleep. She has trouble finding her things, and blames Marvin for rearranging th…
Son: What is a traitor? Lady Macduff: Why, one that swears and lies. Son: And be all traitors that do so? Lady Macduff: Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged. Son: Who must …
During the 1911 fire that burned Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park to the ground, one of the animal attractions, a black lion, with his hind quarters ablaze, scrambled up the stair…
Starting today, your public library card gives you free admission to some three dozen cultural institutions  through “Culture Pass.” It’s mostly museums now, but the lis…
Those who doubted that a Yiddish-language production of "A Fiddler on the Roof," directed by Joel Grey, would turn out to be a great joy ("a shtik naches") might react to Jackie Hoffman'…
"Interstate," an entry at the New York Musical Festival, is about two New Yorkers who form a band called Queer Malady and tour the country: Dash is a Chinese-born trans man and spoken word p…
The Theater Collection at the Museum of the City of New York contains over 190,000 objects that document theatrical performance in New York City from 1785 on. These include more than 30,000 …
The title of this musical, a selection of the 2018 New York Musical Festival, comes from Operacion Pedro Pan (Operation Peter Pan), Â which between 1960 and 1962 brought more than 14,000 c…
In her actual medieval memoir, which was rediscovered in the 1930s, Margery Kempe seems almost as extreme in her devotion as her 15thcentury contemporary, Joan of Arc. The English woman tell…
Six actresses — from Tatiany Maslany of “Orphan Black” making her New York stage debut, to Tony winner Blair Brown — play the title character in “Mary Page Marl…
One of the real people that The Civilians theater troupe interviewed to put together "Gone Missing" resists the assignment, which is to tell them stories about objects she has lost, such as …
Choose the show that you are most looking forward to. The list below is for shows that have opening dates on Broadway between now and the end of December 2018, as of this writing, and they a…
“I had one of the all time best conversations with a Condescending Theatergoer Who Sat In Front Of Me at intermission of My Fair Lady,” Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote in the first of a…
There’s more to life than online binging, and plenty to do in New York now that summer is here in full force: Free outdoor movies every day of the week Free Broadway concerts New theat…
The title alone would lead you to expect a stiletto-sharp political satire; why else would a theater in Tribeca present a solo play about the wife of George W. Bush, routinely ranked  as …
You can watch a free movie outdoors in New York City every night this summer from now on — and whole movie series every weeknight except Tuesdays. The movies vary widely: current block…
Below are a dozen new or forthcoming books about theater, plus a bonus of two books likely to be of interest to theatergoers, which I list under the category Theater Adjacent. Not all these …
"Borders," we're told in the program, was the most "decorated play" at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and will have been performed on five continents by the end of 2018. The play was "in…
The United States of America was founded in protest and resistance; most of the text of the Declaration of Independence is a protest against the actions of the British Crown. It is Americans…
On the Eve of the Fourth of July, my biannual poll:Â What is your favorite Broadway musical that takes actual American history as its subject.
Summer’s here, it’s time for theatergoers to take stock of the 2018-2019 Broadway season line-up taking shape; to attend NYC summer theater festivals or to plan thea…
Two shows are opening on Broadway in July — Young Jean Lee's “Straight White Men,” which marks the Broadway debuts of Armie Hammer and Josh Charles, among others; and ̶…
Jason Robert Brown was in his twenties when he composed his first musical, "Songs For A New World," its first production in New York lasting just 12 performances and changing people's lives.…
In a country whose president marries younger models and reportedly hires government officials based on their looks, we could certainly benefit from some insights into Americans' obsession wi…
