5,915 stories by "JONATHAN MANDELL"
My Broadway gift guide has proven popular enough in the past couple years that I am updating it for 2014, with information on theater tickets, theater subscriptions, play scripts, cast re…
Broadway’s schedule is irregular this Thanksgiving holiday week. Below is the calendar, with links to my reviews. Only three shows will have a performance on Thanksgiving Day, but …
A week full of openings, Great Britain celebrated #LoveTheatre Day, Â Elaine Stritch remembered, Mike Nichols mourned, and I’ve given into the promotional fever and include trailers …
Glenn Close returns to Broadway after an absence of many years, as Agnes to John Lithgow’s Tobias, Â a wealthy middle-aged couple whose seemingly serene suburban existence is reveale…
Move over, Encores! In their second musical restoration after Sondheim and Lapine's Passion last year, the Classic Stage Company now brings us Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro, billed as th…
The rowdy brothers of Young Jean Lee's play "Straight White Men," play a board game called Privilege, where Jake draws a card that says: "What I said wasn't sexist/racist/homophobic because …
Daisy and Violet Hilton, twin sisters permanently connected at the hip by a ribbon of flesh, were spectacularly popular entertainers in the 1920's, so it seems fitting that "Side Show," a mu…
Several years before Simon Stephens adapted "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" for the stage (now on Broadway), the playwright wrote the far more in-your-face "Punk Rock," a…
They've asked us not to reveal the ending of "The River," a play by Jez Butterworth (author of "Jerusalem") starring Hugh Jackman as a man who likes to fish. But I'm not sure what difference…
It took me nearly to the end of "Our Lady of Kibeho," a play by Katori Hall based on a true story about three Catholic schoolgirls in 1981 Rwanda who reported having a vision of the Virgi…
“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for 4,000 years and has never succumbed,” John Steinbeck said, and I quoted on Twitter several times in the…
My first Tweet as @NewYorkTheater, five years ago today: Check out New York Theater on Facebook too http://tinyurl.com/yzjyg7e — Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) November 14, 2009 Fi…
Broadway Revealed: Behind the Theater Curtain, an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center through January 31, offers an odd glimpse of what goes i…
Heidi Schreck, the playwright of "Grand Concourse," is also an actress who performed in Annie Baker's "Circle Mirror Transformation" and served as actress and writer for the Showtime series …
So much theater about theater has opened on Broadway in the last few weeks that it feels like a declaration of surrender – let’s just cater to the (ever-shrinking) in-crowd ̵…
There are dangers in creating a fictional work for stage or screen about a real person, as playwright and screenwriter Doug Wright explains: “Whenever you write about a historical figu…
Pippin pops, Hugh Jackman bleeds, ageism is rampant, playwright Doug Wright doesn’t trust critics, and Cafe Edison is closing. But it wasn’t all bad news in the week in New Yo…
Ozzie and Harriet's son David comes home from the Vietnam War blind and traumatized in David Rabe's "Sticks and Bones," a play written during the Vietnam War that is getting a starry revival…
What would you do if a Buddhist monk appeared at your door, claiming your three-year-old son was the reincarnation of a revered Tibetan Lama, and wanting to take him from you and raise him i…
For 58 years, Simon Wiesenthal hunted Nazis. By the time he retired in 2003, he had brought 1,100 of them to justice. "I'm not a lawyer, a detective or a government agency," he says in th…
The Library of America has just published “American Musicals: The Complete Books and Lyrics of 16 Broadway Classics, 1927"1969″ in a boxed set of two volumes. Here is what it inc…
The newly announced Broadway transfer of “Hand of God” came accompanied with a sly advertising campaign to turn their “weaknesses” into strengths. But some of the bes…
They look as if they could be refugees from The Addams Family, dressed in black and standing under ghoulish white light in the middle of the stage at BAM's Harvey Theater, these six characte…
Three Broadway shows — The River, Side Show and A Delicate Balance – are opening in November, as are some two dozen Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway# plays and musicals.  …
How well were you paying attention to the theater news in October? Answer these 10 questions to find out.
