It's only fitting that Atlantic Records is releasing its recording of Hamilton in a variety of formats that, like the hit musical itself, rewind history. The download went on sale September …
Harold Pinter wrote Old Times (which opens tonight at the Roundabout) in 1971, only eight years before Caryl Churchill wrote Cloud Nine (which opened last night at the Atlantic). Though both…
As long as there have been wars, there have been dramatic stories about returning soldiers, wounded in body or spirit. From The Odyssey to Quiara Alegría Hudes's Elliot trilogy, with Th…
The drug-addict mother, the fictional son, the defective airplane parts: Secrets are at the core of many great American plays. Sometimes they are secrets kept by one character from the other…
Theater composers seem to have a thing for "beloved" novels about ambitious girls, usually orphaned, making their way in an unwelcoming world. There's a good reason for it, too: Such novels …
The voice of Marlo Thomas, so cavernously amplified it sounds as if it's coming from a secret vault at an undisclosed location outside of Marlo Thomas, expertly sets up a joke: "If you had t…
The first American production of Cloud Nine opened off Broadway on May 18, 1981, a few weeks before the Times ran its first account of what would later be known as AIDS. That's pure coincide…
The fall Broadway season unofficially begins tonight with the opening of Spring Awakening, the first of six revivals in a row. It's not surprising that with so many déjà vus, and m…
The Belgian director Ivo van Hove almost always has the term avant-garde attached to his name, but with four major New York productions this season, including two on Broadway, he probably ne…
Most plays about religion are really about politics or psychopathology. In Saint Joan, Agnes of God, and Doubt, for instance, it's not dogma that gets dramatized " how could it be? Theology …
Richard Maxwell's Isolde, opening the season at the Theatre for a New Audience, belongs to the Mad Libs school of dramaturgy, in which various more or less random elements are fitted togethe…
Art for art's sake is sometimes a diet too rich to maintain, yet art that sets out single-mindedly to feed a political agenda almost always fails to satisfy. The Public Theater, whose missio…
If you fished Whorl Inside a Loop out of a slush pile and read only its précis, you'd probably cringe: A Broadway actress, described as the whitest person at her own Whitey Mc…
What used to be called the straw-hat circuit is long gone, as is the customary summer haberdashery that gave it its name. Stars no longer caravan their Broadway hits, in stripped-down versio…
What interest could Annie Baker possibly have in kitsch? This was the question bothering me as I headed into her new play, John, which takes place in a Gettysburg bed and breakfast so encrus…
In the Shakespeare canon, Cymbeline is a late play and a long play: by line count, the third longest, with 3,753. (The Comedy of Errors has less than half as many.) Some of those lines are g…
A typical musical might list 18 numbers in its program; Hamilton, with 34, is more in the range of operatic works like Porgy and Bess. Ambition is part of it, no less for Lin-Manuel Miranda …
Dave Malloy has a thing for the Russian romantics. His recent electropop opera Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 " presented in a big tent fabulously tricked out as a Czarist nigh…
There's a scene in Fun Home " both the book and the musical " in which a 9-year-old girl shows her father a fanciful map she's drawn for school. As the father grows more agitated t…
Are you Team Lippa or Team LaChiusa? For theater types, the dueling musicals of The Wild Party " one by Andrew Lippa, one by Michael John LaChiusa, both somehow given their premieres in the …
You used to have to enter the Marquis Theatre, that abattoir of an auditorium inside the Marriott Marquis hotel, via a series of Plexiglas-encased escalators and cattle chutes that primed yo…
The mood was ecstatic last night for the first of three concert performances of Little Shop of Horrors, the nearly perfect 1982 musical that's the centerpiece of this summer's "Encores! Off-…
Douglas Carter Beane sure knows how to write for his stars. In 1997, As Bees in Honey Drown perfectly showcased the talents of J. Smith-Cameron, just as, more recently, The Little Dog Laughe…
A New Brain, the killer musical about a songwriter facing a life-threatening brain condition, could only have been written by William Finn. For one thing, it's highly autobiographical. When …
The only previous work the young playwright Joshua Harmon mentions in his current program bio is Bad Jews, a big hit for the Roundabout in 2012 and 2013. That terrific comedy, tight and…