Which would you rather experience in the theater: too many ideas or too few? The Total Bent, at the Public, is in the maximalist camp, offering in less than two hours a dense sociological hi…
When the very first lyric of a sung-through show like Hadestown attempts to rhyme "flames" with "hurricanes," you know you're in for a crossover experience. And though I doubt that the songw…
Many a Golden Age musical has grown musty with overfamiliarity and rote revival. And many a hit show, unable to maintain discipline or accommodate replacements, grows ragged during a long ru…
Unless cunnilingus is part of the late Victorian housekeeping routine, the studly footman and nubile maid seem to have seriously misinterpreted the task of straightening the bed. How daring …
Though Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim are arguably the two greatest writers of American musical theater, their one collaboration " Do I Hear a Waltz? " was a fizzle. Some of the reason…
In any Tony season, the idea of snubs is a little ridiculous; there's never been a conspiracy to deny Sutton Foster her next award. Among the nominators, who are generally not affiliated wit…
Does Hamilton have a chance to beat the record set by The Producers for the most Tony wins " 12? Mathematically, yes. But to do this it would have to sweep all 13 categories in which it…
Musicals are uniquely adept at telling large stories about individuals in conflict with society"so capable of doing so that we sometimes forget how smart they can be about individuals in con…
The first thing Blanche DuBois does when she arrives at her sister's "sort of messed up" flat in New Orleans is to locate the liquor and avail herself of a stiff one. Like many characters in…
The Broadway musical season that began with a Hamiltonian bang last August has now ended with another historical explosion, this one detonated by the playwright and director George C. Wolfe.…
Apparently, Jessica Lange had a path in mind. You might call it the Tandy Trajectory: that sequence of classic American roles, all memorably played by Jessica Tandy, from Blanche DuBois in A…
The age of a show's protagonist often provides a clue to the age of the audience the show is pitched to: Patrick in American Psycho is 27; Jenna in Waitress is "in her thirties"; the charact…
I don't know if it qualifies as part of Broadway's ongoing diversity initiative, but in Fully Committed, the one-man comedy opening tonight at the Lyceum, that Ginger-American Jesse Tyler Fe…
A lot of the preview press for the new Broadway musical Waitress, which opened tonight at the Brooks Atkinson, concerned its groundbreakingly all-female creative team: Sara Bareilles (songs)…
Possibly the most sickening thing about the new musical American Psycho, aside from the fact that it exists on Broadway, is its transparent splash curtain, which even at the beginning of the…
All stage stars seduce their audiences, but how? The winkers do it coyly, the vamps brazenly, the intensos while pretending not to notice you are there. The slightly kinky way Frank Langella…
According to one survey of high school lit teachers, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is the most widely taught play, outside of Shakespeare, in American classrooms. (A Raisin in the Sun and De…
Like the thirteen colonies awkwardly hammered into a union, the musical 1776, which is about that hammering, is a bizarre construction that should not work. The idea for the show was outr…
It's easy to understand why playwrights as diverse as Archibald MacLeish (in the verse epic J.B.) and Neil Simon (in the shticky God's Favorite) have been drawn to the Book of Job.…
At some point between its San Diego premiere in September 2014 and its pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center earlier this winter, the musical Bright Star, which bows at the Cort tonight,…
After the first week of a four-week Phase I trial for a dopamine stimulator called RLU37, the test subjects not only show signs of elevated mood and increased energy but have lost weight and…
Unless you're a fanatic with money to burn, you've most likely heard your favorite musicals more than you've seen them. Many a Cats fancier never made it to the Winter Garden to pet the kitt…
Clarence McCrane, better known as Strings, is "the third biggest crossover star in the history of country music." In Hold On to Me Darling, Kenneth Lonergan's lumpy and scattershot new play …
The first mistake writers of musicals usually make happens before they write: They choose too good or too bad a source. Too good is the more difficult case; the material, having given them d…
Danai Gurira's devastating Eclipsed, about four women enslaved as "wives" to a rebel commander during the Liberian civil war, opens this Sunday on Broadway after a sold-out run at the Public…