392 stories from The Wicked Stage
So the Times just had me contemplate the tradition of the Broadway musical's "11 o'clock number," and specifically, whether the great new musical Fun Home has one in the stunning "…
A striking number of people involved in the May 2006 production of columbinus at New York Theatre Workshop went on to have careers I've followed, and/or I've gotten to know: actors Anna …
Ed Sobel at Philly's Arden Theatre saw a similar flaw with Terry Teachout's recent "Top 10" article, but he lays it out much more clearly than I did...
From his new position at the LA Stage Blog--resuming, one hopes, the essential coverage he once did for the LA Times' Stage Beat--Don Shirley takes on his old employer's New York-besotted th…
You've got to hand it to Elisabeth Vincentelli: Of New York's daily critics, she's the only one out there truly blogging. I do admire the Times' Theater Talkback idea, which forces Ben and C…
Dakin Matthews and Helen Mirren in "The Audience." (Photo by Joan Marcus)The Broadway season has come to an end, and while much of the exciting work this past year was Off-Broadway (and ther…
My review of the Disney film of Into the Woods is in the current issue of The Sondheim Review, and the editors have graciously allowed me to publish it in full here; it should be said that t…
The last thing I wrote about the controversy over L.A.'s Equity 99-Seat Plan, for American Theatre magazine, was more personal than the typical news report; I felt I couldn't help but inject…
The rest of 2015 will have a lot to live up to: In quick succession, I've already seen/written about/considered two of the best productions I'll probably see in years, let alone this calenda…
Mercedes Reuhl and Bill Pullman in The Goat(photo by Sara Krulwich/NY Times)Bill Pullman said something really interesting in this interview--and it wasn't the fact that he's playing Othello…
From left, Daveed Diggs, Christopher Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom Jr. from the cast of "Hamilton." CreditDamon Winter/The New York TimesOne of the most infectious sentime…
Stephen Ouimette and cast in an "Iceman" rehearsal. (Photo by Liz Lauren)I had the great privilege recently of sitting in a Chicago rehearsal room and watching the 18-person cast of the Good…
It's been a spotty year of blogging here, got to admit, and only partly due to the October debut of this. And it's hard not to find it sobering that my two most-read post were essentially ob…
Most of the theater I've seen in my lifetime, and much of the best of it, has been in Los Angeles. And the great majority of that great theater was produced under what's now called the 99-Se…
When I wrote this cover story for American Theatre, about how the presence of composer/musicians within their own theater pieces showed hope of changing and revivifying musical theater, I wa…
You may have been wondering what happened to the review-aggregating site I created with Isaac Butler in 2010. I can spell out the saga in relatively simple terms, with links to help you conn…
I'm not a big fan of the current Broadway revival of Stoppard's Coward-esque romcom, but I had seen and, to my recollection, somewhat enjoyed a production of it about a decade ago in L.A., a…
Jay Armstrong Johnson, Tony Yazbeck, Clyde AlvesIf I were "officially" reviewing the new Broadway revival of On the Town for hire, I would probably be required to note some of its flaws…
As I learned in my reporting on the new musical of Jonathan Lethem's novel The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem made a two-CD "mixtape" for supplementary listening when the book was published in…
The cast of The Fortress of Solitude at Dallas Theater Center (photo by Karen Almond)I've been hearing about this Fortress of Solitude musical for nearly as long as it's been in de…
I've heard from colleagues that sometimes they don't really know what they think until someone asks them--whether in the context of teaching a course explicating what they do, or just in the…
Today my employer American Theatre joins the 21st century and debuts a fully functioning, up-to-the-minute website, Americantheatre.org (apparently "americantheater.org" also takes you there…
The New York Philharmonic's live concert staging of Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd will be broadcast on PBS stations on Sept. 26. I had the privilege of covering the show for curre…
I felt pretty lonely back in 2005, when as the critic for Broadway.com I raved about the musical version of The Color Purple. My colleagues were largely unimpressed, as you can see here. So …
There's been a fair amount of rumbling from L.A. theater folks I know and/or follow via the indispensable site Bitter Lemons about a coming "war" over the long-contested Equity 99-Seat Plan.…
