955 stories by "Jesse Green"
It's not impossible to find the right tone for a musical comedy about a gruesome subject: Look at Little Shop of Horrors, which both satirizes and honors the implications of its bloodthirsty…
"You are no Larry Kramer," the Academic shouts at his boyfriend, the Writer, a hothead on a tear about homophobic violence. "This isn't Boys in the Band," the Writer later snaps at the…
When asked in a recent interview what inspired him to write This Day Forward, the playwright Nicky Silver immediately answered, "other writers' successes." If only any line of the play itsel…
I met Andy at a party in 1995. Soon afterward, he phoned the host, a mutual friend, to get my number so he could invite me to a play. As it happened, the mutual friend, hearing the descripti…
Probably the strangest and least revivable Broadway genre is the midcentury hooker musical comedy. Shows like Irma La Douce (first produced in 1956), New Girl in Town (1957), and House of Fl…
Though he has no prior professional theater credits, Jason Sudeikis holds the stage with confidence and verve as the inspiring prep school teacher John Keating in the adaptation of Dead Poet…
Sometimes, with a good-enough playwright, it's good to have no idea what's going on. That was the case for me with Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire Worl…
How can it be that a show based on the most serious novel of all time is both the most gorgeous new musical in town and, for much of its length, the silliest? That may be a self-answering qu…
After the opening-night audience at Women of a Certain Age gave the cast a well-deserved standing ovation and started to file out of the Public Theater's LuEsther Hall, ushers could be heard…
Hally is a whiny, pretentious, self-involved, 17-year-old nerd. Sam and Willie are dignified workingmen in their mid-40s. Nevertheless, Hally is "Master Harold" and Sam and Willie are the "b…
Lynn Nottage's gripping but disappointing new play Sweat, which opens tonight at the Public, arrives in New York from its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival trailing hosannas …
"I always talk in stories; they really illustrate points," says Michael Tubbs, a councilman running for mayor of Stockton, California. Actually, it's Anna Deavere Smith who speaks these word…
Classically trained actors are naturally drawn to roles that show off their verbal fluency, but few contemporary plays give them the chance. No wonder Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dang…
The heartbreaking revival of the William Finn"James Lapine musical Falsettos that opens tonight on Broadway comes, by chance, just a day after scientists reported in Nature that the longstan…
Trying to avoid the third presidential debate, I decided to watch a press screener of Fox TV's version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show last night, thinking camp would be the perfect antidot…
It's probably not a coincidence that three of today's best multi-character monologists " to coin a paradoxical job title " are women of color: Anna Deavere Smith, Nilaja Sun, and Sarah Jones…
Part of what keeps great plays great, age after age, is that they have so much in them: so much psychology, amusement, conflict, philosophy, politics, emotion, and linguistic pleasure. What …
Perhaps it's the uncertainty principle at work, but one of last year's best dramas has somehow become one of this year's best comedies. I'm referring to Manhattan Theatre Club's production o…
When Broadway isn't busy being a temple of high art, it's more of a transient hotel, with the oddest characters showing up for short stays. The Lyceum seems to attract a lot of these margina…
In 1914, Irving Berlin, already world-famous for "Alexander's Ragtime Band," became a charter member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Arrangers and Publishers. Until then, holder…
In early 1987, the director Peter Brook and the BAM impresario Harvey Lichtenstein climbed a ladder and popped through a window of the derelict Majestic Theater on Fulton Street in Fort Gree…
In 1969, a National Geographic photographer named Loren McIntyre made what was supposed to be a three-day expedition to Brazil's Javari Valley in search of the Mayouruna, an indigenous, itin…
Judith Light can do no wrong onstage, which isn't to say she can save a play that gets so little right. Without her, All the Ways to Say I Love You, the hour-long monologue that opened MCC T…
Narratives don't get much more contested than that of Nat Turner, the leader of the infamous slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. To begin with, our knowledge of the events…
Like "humanistic Judaism," the term "investigative theater" proposes an invidious distinction. All theater investigates. What the Civilians do under that rubric is merely more literal than w…
