311 stories by "Philip"
 On February 17, 1673, during a production of his final play, Le Malade Imaginaire ("The Imaginary Invalid"), Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, suffering from pulmonary tu…
 "Kung Fu," David Henry Hwang’s Bruce Lee bio-play at the Signature Theatre complex on West 42nd Street, traces Lee's emergence from a martial-arts teacher in Hollywood to a superst…
 "Bridges" in NYC:  It's 1965 in Winterset, Iowa. Italian war bride Francesca Johnson is home alone while her husband and teen-aged children are showing their prize pig at the Stat…
         THE PLAY: My liberal social and political values are firm, but even I was taken aback to see, in the "Pinkolandia" montage of purported "fascists" Nixon,…
          Anyone who doubts Two River Theater Company's commitment to the Red Bank community should try to get a ticket to one of the "As You Like It" student …
        Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is like the little girl with the curl. When it's good it's very good and when it falters it's…well, not so good. The dif…
          It's all too common for inept directors and/or actors to turn a really good play into a disappointing theater experience. Think about some of the Sha…
         It's still January, right? So…not too late to re-cap last year’s theater-going. In all, I attended 121 productions in 2013, broken down as follow…
          In the words of a Phoenix Productions insider, Irving Berlin's White Christmas (its official title) is "the kind of show you rush through the book to…
          Once in a while, I’d rather pass on writing about a play I'd intended to review. Sometimes because it’s really bad, which has precluded s…
          Broadway's After Midnight ends with "Freeze and Melt," an ensemble number that mimics that title's postures. It's amusing; it's electric; it's sensat…
          Until last week, I'd never attended Holmdel Theatre Company while a football game was in progress on the field adjacent to the theater, with the PA a…
          "A Map of the Soul" is comprised of two 80-minute segments, written and performed by Martin Moran. "The Tricky Part" and "All the Rage" are programme…
Playwright Thornton Wilder did not offer "Our Town" as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village. Rather, he wrote, "it is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest even…
                If the new musical Honeymoon in Vegas, premiering at Paper Mill Playhouse, doesn't please everybody, it's not Rob McClure's f…
           Jack Canfora's play Jericho premiered in October 2011 at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, New Jersey. With some minor edits an…
The woman who performs 25 songs in Lady Day, the off-Broadway portrait of legendary jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday, is a terrific singer and, within those songs, a consummate ac…
            It's not quite Halloween and the spooky house on the New Jersey Repertory Company stage isn't made of gingerbread, but the old crone w…
Reading On Borrowed Time left me feeling that the play creaks, that this representative of the "golden age of the American theatre" is, after 75 years, more than a little stale. Could…
           First Avenue Playhouse has had a certain amount of success with female-ensemble plays. Four women put their hearts into Crimes of the Hear…
          Marathon '33, one of Julie Harris's ten Best Actress Tony-nominations, opened on Broadway on December 22, 1963. Produced by Actors Studio and written…
         The lessons to be taken away from the delightful new Broadway musical First Date, which centers on one of those perilous encounters, include not d…
          Because of its literary allusions and contemporary (Elizabethan) poetic forms, Love's Labour's Lost has never been among Shakespeare's most popular p…
          The New Jersey Repertory Company press blurb for Marisa Smith's Saving Kitty poses the question "What happens when a daughter brings a young …
            In his book "A Lifetime with Shakespeare," Paul Barry, the moving force behind and co-founder (with me) of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festiva…
