8,501 stories from Backstage
Julie Gilbert and Frank Evans' new play about the lifelong love affair between Marlene Dietrich and German writer Eric Maria Remarque is diverting, but it needs a greater purpose.
In theater, a revival is the bringing back to life of a play that has not been performed recently. "Touch," the 41-year-old musical, strains the definition of revival, because it is in no …
Budding playwright Michael Henry Harris doesn't give birth to a champion in this play about pregnancy and other marital pressures, but the product has promise.
Paul Taylor Dance Company proffered an uneven triple bill that sandwiched off-putting "Brief Encounters" between enchanting "Black Tuesday" and uncomfortable "Arden Court."
"Finally, a 'bromance' for the stage," reads the press release describing "Fucking Girls," as if the idiotic genre that has invaded feature films was a desirable element for the theater.
Strong performances help this trilogy of plays set in the hallway of a Lower East Side tenement over 150 years, but playwright Adam Rapp takes on too many themes and characters.
In "White People," playwright Neil Cuthbert turns the clock back to 1975 to take a peek at a comfortably middle-class New Jersey family as its façade of respectability crumbles.
The Wooster Group's phantasmagorical production of this autobiographical Tennessee Williams work has arresting moments but doesn't really tell us anything new.
Caridad Svich's stage adaptation of Julie Alvarez's poetic and sorrowful novel chronicling the real-life story of the murder of the revolutionary Mirabal sisters of the Dominican Republic do…
Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri's witty satire plays with common perceptions of the Arabic male and has theatrical and political ideas bouncing off each other like pinballs.
This multilayered riff on Act 3, Scene 6 of "King Lear" wants to be anarchic fun, but its core is just a collection of donnish theater-geek in-jokes.
Target Margin's newest devised play captures the frustrations of learning a new language in a new culture, but it feels more like a series of exercises than a theatrical event.
In time for the 80th anniversary of the iconic structure, a friendly, finely tuned family musical fashioned of equal parts history and humanity celebrates the Empire State Building as metaph…
Richard Abrons and Margarett Perry's new political comedy-drama reduces its characters to simplistic talking heads that never go beyond stereotypes.
Austin Pendleton's one-step-above-a-stage-reading production of Tennessee Williams' play, short on poetry and atmosphere, never resonates.
Kyoung H. Park's new play about the trials of the Korean immigrant in America is too heavy-handed, with dialogue awash in soapy clichés, to sustain interest.
Walk like an Egyptian straight past this comically bad revival of Clarinda Karpov's 1989 play.
This is a rare chance to see Francis Beaumont's groundbreaking Jacobean comedy about the theater, but Richard Mazda's production is spoiled by strained contemporary pop-culture references.
Playwright Chuck Mee and the companies Witness Relocation and Ildi ! Eldi combine to offer a refreshing anecdote to apocalypticism: So what if the world's over? Let's dance.
Geoffrey Rush astonishes as he shifts from Chaplinesque clown to heartbroken lover to raving lunatic in this circuslike adaptation of the Gogol masterpiece.
This modest, somewhat clichéd play with a few Latin songs takes place in a barbershop in Washington Heights and is told almost entirely in Spanish and from a Dominican perspective.
David Hay's new comedy-drama is thin but reasonably entertaining for an act and a half, then goes spectacularly off the rails, over the cliff, and smashes to bits on the rocks below.
Mandy Patinkin's insufficiently shaded, over-the-top performance undercuts Rinne Groff's intriguing new play about author Meyer Levin and his obsession with "The Diary of Anne Frank."
Actor-playwright Rob Benson's overly studied three-hander, about two brothers clearing the rubbish-strewn flat of their long-estranged, recently deceased father, feels awfully insular.
Melissa Ross' tailor-made vehicle for LAByrinth Theater Company embraces the company's edgy aesthetic but fails to supply the depth necessary to let it breathe.
