1,085 stories from Show Showdown
My latest essay is up at Art Times:What accounts for the rise of the intermissionless 90-minute play? A prevalent theory points to the shrinking attention spans of a population inundated 24/…
It's almost impossible to discuss James Graham's new play Privacy without saying too much. So here's what I will say:Privacy is a frequently entertaining, sometimes horrifying exam…
Have you ever not completely connected with a show when you first sat through it, only to fall head over heels in love with it in retrospect? It's happened to me on only a few occasions that…
My latest essay is up at Art Times. Here's a taste.A recent cover of Entertainment Weekly achieved a new low in spoilers. It blared out a big, juicy piece of information about a po…
It's not atypical for me to see more than one play or musical over the course of the week, but it is rare that I see two shows back-to-back that are as different as Long Day's Journey Into N…
Our correct predictions are highlighted. Wendy Sandra Cameron Liz Best play: The Humans The Humans The Humans The Humans King Charles III Best musica…
The Color Purple has been well-reviewed all over the place, and I generally agree that it is a strong production of a moving show. But I have a serious ax to grind.In Alice Walker's nov…
If you are a reader of this blog, then we probably don't have to tell you that early June means the annual Tony awards. Even if you are not a reader of this blog, we also probably don't have…
Stephen Hawking: The real risk with AI isn't malice but competence. A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we'r…
The setting is familiar: a 12-step-program-type support group. A woman stands, says, "Hello, my name is Mica, and I'm Z-positive," and everyone else says, "Hi, Mica." Does "Z-positive" perha…
The Father, Florian Zeller's very good play (in very good translation by Christopher Hampton) is worth seeing both for the tricks it plays on the audience and for Frank Langella's rivet…
The...um....reconception? reconstruction? reconsideration?...of the 1921 hit show Shuffle Along, currently at the Music Box Theater (which, by the way, also opened in 1921), has some of the …
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School For Scandal, first performed in 1777, reveals that humans have changed little over the centuries, clothing and…
From April 2015 to March 2016, I served as a judge on the Lortel Awards, which recognize excellence in the Off Broadway theater. The term was a little daunting--I was told to expect (and ult…
There's good news, and bad news, and good news again. The good news is that the Master Voices (formerly The Collegiate Chorale) production of Dido and Aeneas was lovely. The bad news is that…
The earnest and well-acted Echoes takes place in two times and places: Victorian England and Afghanistan, and present-day England and Syria. In both situations, a young woman has&n…
There must be something in the water ... at least, in Padua. The first of two productions of The Taming of the Shrew featuring an all-female cast opened on April 16 at the Wild Pro…
It's been a hellishly busy couple of weeks, but I've managed to see a few shows nonetheless. In the interest of time, I'll spare you my typically long-winded reviews in favor of terser…
From Art Times:Once upon a time, boys played the women's roles in Shakespeare's plays. Once upon a different time, Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor performed in blackface to great acclaim, and som…
Perhaps the single most salient fact about theater is that it is ephemeral, evanescent. Even if you get to see a production 10 times, it eventually closes, and it's gone. Poof. But in some i…
2016 LUCILLE LORTEL AWARDS NOMINATIONSOutstanding PlayThe ChristiansProduced by Playwrights Horizons and Center Theatre GroupWritten by Lucas HnathEclipsedProduced by The Public TheaterWritt…
The Pearl Theater's production of Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner's 21st-century riff/recreation of The Seagull, is well-directed, well-acted, well-designed, and a great deal of fun. …
Here's what I liked about Dry Power, Sarah Burgess's predictable, unimaginative, and lame incitement of high finance, currently playing at the Public Theater: the women in the crew wore blac…
The Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, New York, has just finished scattering the ashes of Thomas, one of its men, on the shores of the Hudson. Now that the simple ceremony has ended, they have re…
A few seats were empty in the Mitzi Newhouse Theater the evening I saw Marco Ramirez's The Royale, and that struck me as kind of a bummer, because man, oh man, The Royale is a play…
