955 stories by "Jesse Green"
Even from the beginning, Edward Albee was rarely photographed smiling " or, rather, photo editors seldom chose to print any smiling portraits that might have been taken. The truth was that h…
Richard Nelson's Gabriel family plays, like the Apple family plays before them, are studded with topical political references; Nelson sets each installment on the day of its opening and adds…
When Taylor Mac first emerges through the power-chord fog of a 24-piece orchestra at St. Ann's Warehouse, he is dressed in an outfit that looks as if Marie Antoinette, having survived an exp…
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915"1973) was a gospel singer, pianist, and guitarist whose combination of holy rolling and louche swing made her one of the forgotten godparents of rock. ("Sister" w…
Near the end of the three-and-a-half-hour slog that is Phaedra(s) " just when you've given up hope for it and, indeed, all existence " something wonderful happens. Until then, the production…
A sensational concert performance of Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years at Town Hall last night, starring Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry, started the New York fall theater season off w…
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915"1973) was a gospel singer, pianist, and guitarist whose combination of holy rolling and louche swing made her one of the forgotten godparents of rock. ("Sister" w…
Before last night's Public Works performance of Twelfth Night at the Delacorte, Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater's artistic director, bounded onstage to thank donors and explain the idea beh…
In adapting Daphne du Maurier's dour novella The Birds for the movies, Alfred Hitchcock instructed his screenwriter to start the story with some screwball comedy in order to heighten the ter…
There are some things that the Public Theater " founded as the Shakespeare Workshop in 1954 and known for most of its life as the New York Shakespeare Festival " can't avoid. The occasional …
Whenever I'd hear critics describe musical theater as one of the few truly American art forms, I would think, well, at least one of those words is right. It's a form. I suppose it is also, a…
Abstract-noun titles are usually deceptive, or at least under-determined; Doubt, Democracy, and Plenty, good plays though they are, might each just as easily have been named s…
Aside from an occasional unicorn like The Humans, Off and Off"Off Broadway plays almost never dare transfer to Broadway anymore, which means that New Yorkers who miss them in their original …
It's not often I think a three-hour play could profitably be longer, but J. T. Rogers's gripping, big-boned Oslo, which opened tonight at Lincoln Center Theater, needs all the meat and muscl…
The Encores! Off-Center series, which opened its fourth season last night, is meant to do for Off Broadway in summer what the main Encores! season does for Broadway in spring: recall to our …
The theater is a hothouse; everything grown within it is exotic, demanding, and sensitive to minute fluctuations of environment. Even with only time as a variable, a show is always reaching …
How do you tame The Taming of the Shrew? It has the usual early-Shakespeare problems: clunky exposition, overwrought plotting, huge dropped stitches. (The framing device, laboriously introdu…
Even though it did not beat the record of The Producers " which swept 12 categories in a weak season in 2001 " Hamilton's scarfing up of 11 wins, out of 16 nominations, was obviously the big…
Late intelligence suggests that many of my Tony predictions, as analyzed over the past week in a series of deep dives"see installments one, two, three, four, and fiv…
The Tony Awards and the Tony Awards telecast are not the same thing. The former has flaws; the latter usually has little else. One prediction I feel confident in making is that this year's b…
In part due to Hamilton's dominance, the musical performance categories have been fairly straightforward; the Tony nominators hit their marks and the voters are likely to do so as well. Not …
Now that we've reached the performance categories " musicals today, plays tomorrow " the time has come to discuss snubs and splits, none of which exist. Snubs are nominations that didn't hap…
Twenty nonmusical plays " nine new ones and eleven revivals " were produced on Broadway this season. Only three in each group were complete duds: Misery, China Doll, and Our M…
As subversions go, you could hardly trump David Javerbaum's An Act of God, which plays like a lay-'em-in-the-aisles one-man comedy despite being (as I wrote in my review of its limited run l…
Twenty plays and 16 musicals opened during the 2015"2016 Broadway season. Most of the plays were pretty good or better; most of the musicals were not. Despite this, the musicals, as always, …
