958 stories by "Jesse Green"
I already thought that Fun Home was the best new musical of the year in 2013, when it opened at the Public Theater. It's hard to imagine that its Broadway transfer, and transformation, will …
There really was a King and there really was an I. The King was Phra Bat Somdet Phra Poramenthra Maha Mongkut Phra Chom Klao Chao Yu Hua, more generally known as Mongkut. The "I" was Anna Le…
Provenance is a concept usually associated with art, not theater. Who, after all, owns a plot " or the history on which it is based? Still, the problem rears up in several ways in Finding Ne…
With its title reminiscent of that very old standard "It Had to Be You," the new musical It Shoulda Been You sounds like a retread even before it starts. The impression does not abate once y…
The curtain is already up at the Palace as you make your way to your seats for An American In Paris; the stage is empty except for a piano dead center. There's no overture, and, when the sho…
With more than 1,500 seats, the Winter Garden is generally considered too large for plays: too lacking in intimacy and too hard to fill. In any case, it hasn't housed a nonmusical since 1982…
What kingdoms were to Elizabethan drama, co-ops are today. In contemporary plays as diverse as Skylight, Belleville, and Between Riverside and Crazy, domestic real estate is not just a setti…
A note in the Playbill for the new production of Gigi explains that the title character "first burst upon the world" in a novella by "French authoress" Colette. Authoress? It says everything…
For centuries, theatrical antiheroes have vied for attention by going to extremes, but Tyrone, in Robert Askins's Hand to God, may be the first, onstage at least, to bite off an ear. He's as…
It may not at first make sense that two such fundamentally different acting styles as Bill Nighy's and Carey Mulligan's should coexist in " and mutually enhance " one play. And yet here they…
The largest Broadway houses have fewer than 2,000 seats; Radio City Music Hall has almost 6,000. So you might expect Radio City's New York Spring Spectacular, a sticky amalgam of musical the…
You cannot look at Heidi Holland, the heroine of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles, without seeing, dimly and slightly out of phase behind her, Wasserstein herself. It's not just the …
The ick factor is high in Lerner and Loewe's Paint Your Wagon, the second of this season's three Encores! presentations. I'm referring to the story, a mortifying one even by the standards of…
The flat lives and flatter affects of the below-40 set have been the subject of enough recent plays to warrant a collective name; how about Theater of the Becalmed? These are generally sour …
There are a million big reasons that On the Twentieth Century, the 1978 musical by Cy Coleman and Comden and Green, shouldn't work today: It's profoundly silly, tonally tricky, too big for t…
There are few plays I disliked last year as much as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Appropriate, the story of a nasty white Arkansas family discovering in the ancestral plantation a collection of l…
Peggy Lee and Lena Horne lived long enough to star in their own bio-musicals; Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, and Dinah Washington became theatrical subjects only after their deaths. Either wa…
Seldom do costumes provide the bulk of a play's drama, but in Peter Morgan's The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, the greatest surprises and transformations are all in …
In the first episode of season five of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the character of Larry David, played by Larry David, is reduced to the cosmic indignity of buying tickets for High Holiday servic…
A new play that reads very well on the page risks getting staged above its station. Sad to say, The Mystery of Love & Sex, by Bathsheba Doran, is that kind: engrossing in theory, a botch…
In a funny-awkward meeting that takes place near the beginning Verité, a pair of Norwegian publishers tells Jo Darum, our heroine, that she has a captivating authorial voice but the wro…
I don't mean to suggest that you're unpatriotic if you aren't moved by Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's sensational new hip-hop biomusical at the Public. But in order to dislike it you'd prett…
People who love stage musicals have learned to dread their movie adaptations; infidelity leading to disaster is pretty much in the contract. So those of us who treasure The Last Five Years, …
Though The Iceman Cometh is generally considered one of Eugene O'Neill's greatest plays, it did not win (as four of his others did) the Pulitzer Prize; the Pulitzer is not, after all, awarde…
The Civilians call the work they do "investigative theater," which sounds very high-minded; their name, too, suggests engagement in the real life of society as opposed to the artificial life…
