74 stories by "LINDA WINER"
With "Billy Elliot," Lee Hall, born in the mine country of northeast England, became the inspirational scribe for its hardscrabble people. In both his screenplay for the movie and his book f…
Yes, the play is shamelessly manipulative. But it is supremely elegant manipulation, magnificently staged and performed.
It is hard to talk about a runaway hit in an off-off-Broadway black-box theater with just 65 seats. But ...
I know things that you don't know, and I'm not bragging.
The Angel has landed again, at long last, and all's right with the world.
Will Eno's "Middletown," the first winner of the new Horton Foote Prize for Promising American Play, is a dizzying modern spin on life, death and the bruised underbelly of the sort of hamlet…
Jeffrey Wright puts on a zesty performance in "A Free Man of Color."
The political and the personal are the equally bright and anguished obsessions in this ambitious but derailed comedy/drama by Lisa Kron, author and star of such multileveled treasures as "We…
Are some subjects just too serious, or too sensitive, or too unpleasant to be appropriate material for a musical?
Broadway history spills over with colorful and/or agonizing stories about shows in their out-of-town tryouts. Now come the stories about staying in town.
"Lost in the Stars" is a stately, nobly intentioned, peculiar mess of a musical from 1950.
Don't be lulled - OK, disappointed - by the nice chatty girl with the inspirational anecdotes who figures in the first half of Patti LuPone's memoir. She eventually does get to the juicy stu…
Before the tapping of big Broadway feet drowns out all other theater noise for the foreseeable future, it seems fair to steal the spotlight for these Off-Broadway enticements.
There's a sign outside the Booth Theatre that had me confused for weeks. Above a glass door in front of the all-star revival of Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" is one of those critic quo…
Theaters are so much more than just rooms and buildings. Theaters have walls that know endless stories. Even if these walls could talk, I'd like to believe they would not.
Hey, there's Lena Dunham on the cover of the new Rolling Stone. And there she is filling backpacks with awards for creating and starring in "Girls," the habit-forming HBO series about 20-som…
Let's get this out of the way at the top. Philip Seymour Hoffman is too young and soft to be the standard-issue iconic Willy Loman chiseled on the Mount Rushmore of American drama. Andrew Ga…
It is hard to resist snappy, interesting theater people talking trash and emoting sincerely while trying to put together a new musical for Broadway. With Steven Spielberg, NBC and creators w…
A Midwest acquaintance, newly smitten with New York, proudly told me recently how much he loved seeing "Jersey Boys," his first Broadway adventure. I gave him what I hoped was an enthusiasti…
Word-association quiz: If I say "Hair," "Jesus Christ Superstar," "Godspell" and "Rent," your answers are likely to bubble up from a niche of particularly vivid memories. I'm guessing the im…
For months, I've been tempted to spend a night at the McKittrick Hotel, tantalized by tales of mysterious goings-on in the far-far west stretches of Chelsea, and piqued by reports of this or…
For a while in "As You Like It," it was hard not to fear for the rest of the Royal Shakespeare Company's ambitious five-play season at the Park Avenue Armory.
For most of the first half of …
Life is very good on Broadway these days. Grosses are up. Even more impressive, though less easily quantified, quality is up, too. What's more, just weeks after the Tony Awards marked the cl…
There was a time, before he refocused on writing books for musicals and opera in the late '90s, when the theater was deeply hooked on regular infusions of witty and timely, substantive yet c…
