958 stories by "Jesse Green"
"There are aspects of the play we kindly ask you not to reveal in your review of Gloria." So read the email from the press agents for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's new shocker at the Vineyard.…
The weather, that diva, is often a co-star at the Delacorte Theater, but rarely so aptly as at a recent preview performance of The Tempest, when the air seemed pregnant and thunderstorms wer…
Before a word is spoken in Bruce Norris's new play The Qualms, now at Playwrights Horizons, audiences hear the sound of nervous laughter onstage. It might as well have been my own, beca…
At some point in their writing lives, most playwrights turn from the world they can never finally fathom to one they already know too well. Recent New York seasons have brought us both fond …
Time moves slowly in Tonyland; from one year to the next you can pretty much expect the same turnout of stars, the same proportion of gold to cheese. In that regard, the 2015 edition did not…
The 51 Tony Award nominators typically get a lot of grief from theater types, but they did a good job this Broadway season. Sure, I would have enjoyed seeing Jason Robert Brown's score for H…
With a title like Heisenberg, and a plot that begins with a smooch between an old man and a much younger woman, Simon Stephens's terrific new play might seem to be a cross between Nick Payne…
His first line is "Namaste, motherfuckers," and the fact that he says it as a kind of greeting to his Nepalese roommate and the roommate's Indian-American girlfriend does not make him seem a…
You might not think that a man whose crimes against humanity during South Africa's apartheid regime had earned him the nickname "Prime Evil" would want to be interviewed, in the prison where…
For all its celebration of personal liberty and countercultural fabulousness, Broadway is actually a fairly God-positive place. Producers are not, after all, in the business of alienating po…
Pee-wee Herman comes to Broadway, and Paul Reubens moves (cautiously) back into the spotlight.
Tony Kushner is one of the last public intellectuals left standing in the theater—or America. Heavy is the head that wears that crown.
This week, the world will finally get its first look at Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. But the most expensive musical in Broadway history has already had an epic run—battling bankruptc…
From the outside, the "theater" looks like a shipping crate, the kind roadies roll around, except that it's customized with various lights and bump-outs and a door that says AUDIENCE. Ushere…
After attending a preview of Robert Askins's new play Permission the other night, I can report that the cast's padded undergarments, which got their own feature in the Times last week, are i…
In a Pottery Barned New York apartment, a postcoital couple awakens in the wee hours and stumbles through a discussion about their future. Have we not seen this before? Doug (an unrecognizab…
Note: Sam Gold's production of Annie Baker's play The Flick, produced at Playwrights Horizons in 2013 and subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize, returns tonight at the Barrow Street Theate…
A playwright is really asking for it when he creates, in a semiautobiographical work, a conflict whose glorious resolution is the writing of the play itself. This is what A.R. Gurney has don…
On a farm in South Africa, a large boulder stares down a local painter like a blank canvas. The painter " someone we would categorize today as an outsider artist " is Nukain Mabusa, an old b…
Should a critic recuse himself from reviewing a show because he loves it too much? I grew up wearing down the grooves of the 1968 cast album of the original Broadway production of Zorba, whi…
The question of how to make Americans listen to things they may not want to hear, especially from the stage, is smartly answered by the Public Theater's production of George Brant's Grounded…
Sixteen-year-old Zoe has come to New Orleans with her mother's boyfriend, Greg, to visit the Hummingbird Motel. When Greg lived there, before he cleaned up his image and moved to Atlanta, he…
Whatever their nominal subjects, musical comedies today are usually about musical comedies. Consider three of the funniest of the last ten years: Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone, and The Book…
Can we please get this straight, Broadway? Sprawling European novels do not make great musicals. Sorry, Les Miz partisans and Phantomaniacs, but whatever the virtues of those shows " and the…
It's not fair to judge a play by its bloopers; almost everything that has ever appeared onstage has had its share of dropped lines, missed entrances, Parkinsonian sets, or plummeting Spider-…
