Composer/lyricist Adam Guettel is not exactly known for writing hum-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mable melodies, but that doesn't mean he doesn't write beautiful, emotionally gripping musical numbers t…
Although largely forgotten today, disc jockey and performance promoter Alan Freed is an important figure in popular music history. He is credited with standardizing the term "rock and roll,"…
"Great American"not great president." This is how a poll of 75 historians damningly characterized Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1962, not even two years after he left office. Richard Hellesen's on…
Reviews of newly released albums: Eleri Ward; Legends of Broadway and Vaudeville; Chet Baker Blue Room.
et's open our minds and ears to alternate versions of classic musicals as presented in cast recordings: Camelot's recently opened revival and a complete South Pacific with a studio cast from…
Dysfunctional families rarely emerge as dysfunctional as the one portrayed in Wet Brain, John J. Caswell, Jr.'s high-decibel whatsit of a comedy-drama on Playwrights Horizons' mainstage in a…
A dream of "sammen i himmelen" (together in heaven) turns into "sammen i helvete" (together in hell) for two alcoholics who bring out the best and the worst in each other in Days of Wine and…
On the narrow porch of the same D.C.-area house where they once took their prom photos, a self-proclaimed Multi-Ethnic Reject Group (MERG(E)..."it's a soft G") reconvenes to "pre-game" for t…
The narrator and main character of Tori Sampson's This Land Was Made, now running at the Vineyard Theatre, identifies herself as a griot. Simultaneously storytellers, poets, and living archi…
Well, it's one way to kick off Pride Month. Love + Science, David J. Glass's drama now at City Center Stage II, recalls the whole horrible 1980s mishandling of the emerging AIDS crisis, as s…
There are lots of appropriate adjectives to describe Levi Holloway's ghostly play Grey House, opening tonight at the Lyceum Theatre. Among these are "eerie," "mysterious," and sometimes even…
Primary Trust, to begin with, is the name of a bank. Its columned exterior dominates the streetscape of Cranberry, New York"the town of 15,000 is fictitious, but it could be any of a couple …
As a playwright, Charles Cissel is an experimentalist, more concerned with digging deeply into what lies underneath the surface than with using conventional storytelling techniques. He is li…
In lieu of a playbill or the increasingly more ubiquitous fliers containing a digital QR code, audiences attending Bernarda's Daughters, Diane Exavier's elegiac play currently running at the…
Construction noise, profanity-shouting pedestrians, non-stop emergency-vehicle sirens, and the booming music of pedicabs can certainly pose an obstacle for individuals hoping to find quiet s…
Rob reviews the new OBC cast recordings for "Shucked" and "KPOP."
Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams's Greatest Creation, by Nancy Schoenberger, is an odd little book. Saying that it runs some 193 pages of actual content is generous, as that…
How much you know about basketball, it seems fair to say, will go a long way toward determining how much you will like Rajiv Joseph's King James, at Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage 1. I don't…
"For never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." Thus concludes one of Shakespeare's best-known and most-performed plays. In the boisterous, gag-filled production pres…
"You think things are one way, but they can be another way." This reversal of expectations is a recurring theme throughout Michael Cruz Kayne's Sorry for Your Loss, the new one-person show p…
There have been numerous hit Hollywood animated family films that include serious or dramatic content and some that even feature death. In the Walt Disney classic Bambi, the young deer must …
An offhand wisecrack reference to filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's movie Rashomon in Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window might serve well to explain the many different possib…
The press materials for Erika Dickerson-Despenza's new play at the Public Theater request that the title, shadow/land, be documented using lowercase letters. In the first thirty minutes or s…
She's a legend. She has been nominated for a Tony 10 times, winning for The Rink and Kiss of the Spider Woman. She has a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, plus at least 10 other lifetime …
Red Bull Theater, in association with Fiasco Theater, is presenting a playful, relevant production of Francis Beaumont's riotously comic, fourth-wall-shattering metaplay The Knight of the Bu…