On a recent evening at the Delacorte in Central Park, a raccoon stopped by unticketed to watch a moment of the Public Theater's new production of King Lear, starring John Lithgow. Following …
Even on the rare occasions when they're legible, the notes I take in the theater are generally useless " except in those cases where boredom causes them to mutate into to-do lists. I make no…
If you were trying to devise a light comedy for overheated August audiences (and theaters closing out their subscription seasons) you might do worse than a two-hander with a clickbait title …
Jersey Boys, which should have been a cautionary tale, has become instead a how-to guide. (Half a billion in Broadway receipts will do that.) It has not only spawned an infestation of jukebo…
Elaine Stritch wasn't the star of Company, but she sure as hell made herself the star of its making-of documentary. Dean Jones and the rest of the actors be damned; the drama of her failure …
Can friendliness be baked into a song, the way peaches are in a pie? On the evidence of Pump Boys and Dinettes, the final presentation of the Encores! Off-Center series this summer, the answ…
For all the glibness of his image-crafting, James Franco appears to be sincere in his regard for actual artistic production. And I say this not just in hopes of avoiding the title of Li…
"It's not the length," a friend said after seeing Randy Newman's Faust last night, "it's the Goethe." Indeed, the Encores! Off-Center concert of the 1995 musical was plenty swift, its book (…
The Shrek with braces was adorable. Actually, so were the other two Shreks. All three had played the chartreuse ogre in high-school productions of the 2008 musical: one at Calvary Chapel Chr…
The plight of promising young artists is a subject that's infinitely fascinating to promising young artists. If they fulfill that promise, the rest of us may retrospectively find the plight …
One character, his torso already relieved of arms and legs, is tossed onto the barbecue. Another's hands and tongue are severed to keep her from reporting a crime. (She's then stabbed to dea…
As opening lines of musicals go, it's a long road from "There's a bright golden haze on the meadow" to "They got a nigga / Shedding tears, reminiscing on my past fears / Cause shit was hecti…
Every playwriting student sooner or later learns Chekhov's dictum: A gun introduced in the first half of a play must be discharged in the second. Usually the gun is literal, but Ayad Akhtar,…
It's no spoiler to report that the final stage direction of Penelope Skinner's play The Village Bike, brought over from London by MCC Theater and starring Greta Gerwig, is "Mike wanks." The …
Last night's Tony Awards presentation capped off, or at least put to rest, the 2013-2014 Broadway season, which featured very strong if not record ticket-sales of about $1.27 billion. Yay, m…
By 6 p.m. tonight, the 800-some Tony voters who want to be counted must get their ballots to the accountants' office. I'll have just made the deadline with mine; even though most of the 26 c…
Sometimes it seems that all the nutty superstitions surrounding Macbeth " pardon me, "the Scottish Play" " come not from its association with Elizabethan witchcraft or backstage mish…
Arrivals and Departures is Alan Ayckbourn's 78th play, which means (if I have my math right) he's written one each year since birth and three before it. (He's 75.) This may explain or at lea…
Unable to get much attention amid pre-Tony hysteria and post-Tony exhaustion, some Off Broadway companies seem to take advantage of the blackout to dump inventory. Be warned: June is therefo…
The woe of hard work " the conflict between the dignity of labor and the indignity of actual laboring " has long been a favorite theatrical theme, with only the particulars changing to suit …
Euripides wasn't much of a yock-meister, but his Medea is getting most of the laughs in Nicky Silver's new supposed-to-be-a-comedy, Too Much Sun. Now at the Vineyard in a grim production dir…
Whores are so jolly. At least in France. Take Irma la Douce, that charming poule: What won't she get into! First, she falls in love with a law student who figures out a way to get her off th…
Find your theatrical match.
If the recently dead Funny Girl revival ever gets resurrected, producers should look no further than the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theatre for their Fanny Brice.
Fun Home, The Glass Menagerie, and more.