682 stories by "Wendy Caster"
It takes a lot of ambition to decide to do A Chorus Line at a small Off-Off-Broadway theatre. And it takes a lot of skill to pull it off. Luckily, the Gallery Players in Brooklyn have t…
Is it ungrateful of me to wish that Sharr White's play, The True, presented by The New Group, had more to offer? Perhaps. After all, there is already much to like here: solid writi…
Craig Lucas's new play, I Was Most Alive With You, is impressively ambitious. Performed simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ASL), with some use of supertitles, it is an ext…
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is not one of Tennessee Williams's masterpieces, but it still deserves a better production than the one currently being presented by La Femme Theatre Pro…
More like a magazine story brought to life than an actual play, The Emperor still has much going for it, the main things being the performances of the protean and ever-fascinating Kathr…
In the acknowledgements at the end of Playing to the Gods: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and the Rivalry That Changed Acting Forever, author Peter Rader explains that he (with a …
It was 1996. I was visiting from California and only had time for two shows. One, of course, had to be the new Sondheim, Passion. I had heard raves about Donna Murphy, who was, of …
George Bernard Shaw's play Heartbreak House has been compared to the works of Chekhov. He himself hinted at the connection via the play's subtitle: A Fantasia in the Rus…
Is any theatre company in New York more consistently satisfying than The Mint? IMHO, the answer is a great big "No!"Larry Bull, Janie Brookshire, Ted Deasy, and Mary BaconPhoto: Todd Cerveri…
Last night I went to see The Band's Visit for the second time, with five other people. One had seen it before, the other four hadn't. When the show was over, we were all glowing.We sat …
I get invited to a lot of shows, and it's not always easy to decide which ones to see. Often I rely on a familiar name: if person A is directing or person B is acting or person C wrote the m…
My latest Art Times essay is up:In some ways, it's exciting news: Director Ivo van Hove will stage a production of West Side Story, with new choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmae…
No theatre is offering more bang for your buck--or return on your time--than PTP/NYC with their evening of one acts: The Possibilities, by Howard Barker, and The After-Dinner Joke,…
It comes as no surprise that Bertolt Brecht's most incisive and cynical writings are painfully timely, right here, right now. The PTP/NYC production of Brecht on Brecht knows this fact …
The 2018 Innovative Theatre Awards Ceremony is September 24, 2018. The nominees are as follows:OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLEDanielle Amendola, Jessica Banegas, Ryan Hunt, Kelsey Martin, Joe…
My latest essay is up at Art Times:When I was in college, one of my fellow students was Broadway producer David Merrick's assistant/gofer, which made him a big deal in the Queens C…
Six women play Mary Page Marlowe, the titular protagonist of Tracy Letts's 90-minute one act at Second Stage Theater. I imagine that developing the show was a fascinating experience for the …
Jordan Harrison's annoyingly didactic Log Cabin presents characters who come across as op-ed essays rather than humans. There's a gay couple and a lesbian couple who have done well in t…
The Elevator Repair Service's production of Everyone's Fine With Virginia Woolf, written by Kate Scelsa and directed by John Collins, is a rollicking feminist take down of/tribute to Ed…
The wonderful people at The Mint have done it yet again. They have gifted us with a beautiful production of a lost gem of a play, complete with smart and clear direction, wonderful performan…
Akin Babatundé, with the outstanding support of guitarist David Weiss, is giving a heck of a concert in Lonesome Blues at the York Theatre Company. Babatundé's voice travels from…
Presented as either a lecture nestled in a drama or a drama nestled in a lecture, Secret Life of Humans focuses on whether evolution is an unbroken line of progress, with each living it…
Well, we didn't do too badly this year, although we're not going to win any prizes for theatrical prescience. It was very nice to be wrong about Ari'el Stachel and Lindsay Mendez! They …
I love meaningful musical theatre. I adore Sondheim. Caroline, Or Change is one of my favorite shows. But sometimes an old-fashioned, well-done, energetic, deeply silly musical is the perfec…
As a reviewer, I get invited to dozens of shows each month, and it can be difficult to decide which to see. Sometimes the choice is almost random. I picked This Is Modern Art becau…
