958 stories by "Jesse Green"
Sometimes " and I mean this in a good way " the Encores! series at City Center seems like the musical equivalent of A Night at the Museum, making the dinosaurs dance. That's certainly the ca…
A brief pause in the drumbeat of new openings left me time last week to catch up with two Off Broadway plays I'd missed earlier in January. Both had gotten mixed reviews " not just varied bu…
It's said that Chekhov was always trying to get the Moscow Art Theater to produce Ivan Turgenev's neglected classic A Month in the Country instead of his own new plays. Was this homage, self…
The frequent collaborators John Tiffany and Steven Hoggett seem to be everywhere these days, not just geographically but narratively. Whether the tale they're telling is psychological (as in…
By the standards of the Golden Age, when musicals with a cast of 60 and an orchestra of 40 were common, Into the Woods is not a huge show. Its 1987 Broadway premiere featured just 19 actors …
Like "humanistic Judaism," the term "imaginative theater" ought to be a redundancy. (Shouldn't all theater be imaginative?) Still, some troupes seek to differentiate themselves from the main…
The new musical Honeymoon in Vegas is a throwback, and not just because it's based on a 1992 movie that was, even then, somewhat retrograde in its humor. Cancel the "somewhat": The plot hing…
Would you like to see a two-hander in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a hunky but bashful British beekeeper, hemming and half-smiling, while Ruth Wilson, so recently embaubled with a Golden Glob…
The Suicide, Nikolai Erdman's biting 1928 satire of Soviet thought control, so overflows with ironies that they seem to slosh into real life. To begin with, the play died by its own hand: Er…
It would not ordinarily be newsworthy that a performer named Gordon Sumner took over a secondary role in a struggling Broadway musical. You do not hear much about cast changes at On the…
A famous agent used to instruct clients never to set a scene in a bus: Americans don't mind stories that are sad, he said, but they draw the line at downmarket depressing. Apparently Samuel …
Aside from "Frank Wildhorn," the two words I least want to hear in conjunction with a show I'm about to attend are "audience participation." The prospect of being dragooned into awkward dial…
This week, Vulture will be publishing our critics' year-end lists. Enjoy. 1. Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & GrillBroadwayNot many New York productions this year were …
When you enter the East 4th Street home of New York Theatre Workshop, you can never be sure what you're going to find. The blank-slate interior has been turned into an amphitheater for Caryl…
As Peter Pan is traditionally portrayed by a gamine actress, and Hairspray's Edna Turnblad by a chunky actor, theatrical tradition dictates that John Merrick, the grotesquely deformed title …
Some 17 Sally Bowleses painted their nails green and sang "Maybe This Time" for the Sam Mendes revisal of Cabaret that ran on Broadway from March 1998 (Natasha Richardson) through January 20…
A Cornish knight, an Irish princess, and the king they both betray by falling in love: For centuries the tale circulated Europe in various forms. But after Wagner's monumental Tristan und Is…
To begin with, A Delicate Balance is a masterpiece. I'm not sure that anything in Edward Albee's daunting catalog " some 30 plays " surpasses it. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is sadder; T…
If Mike Nichols ever produced anything as banal as a résumé, it would have looked highly suspicious, the humblebrag of a con man. He did too many things, they were too far-flung, a…
With all the larks praying and bird-pairs bursting in song, it's sometimes hard to hear the real voice of Oscar Hammerstein in his lyrics. But his "poetic," not to say ornithological, flight…
Despite what seemed like weeks of buzz about its radical transformations, the revival of Side Show that opened on Broadway tonight is not as meaningfully different from the 1997 or…
In 2003, when she was not yet 30, Young Jean Lee founded a theater company for the purpose of producing her own work. Call it savvy or call it hubris, the move was bold, especially for an ar…
What with The Last Ship, Disgraced, and seminude Bradley Cooper all on the boards this fall, Broadway is more testosterony than usual, full of scruff and blowtorches, beefcake and wife-beati…
It's surprising how much you can remove from a play and still have a play " hell, Beckett lets a pair of disembodied lips yak at you for 15 minutes and it's riveting theater. But David Aubur…
The Band Wagon has been a lot of things. First it was a groundbreaking musical revue, with sketches by George S. Kaufman and songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, including the classic …
