8,501 stories from Backstage
92nd Street Y's Lyrics and Lyricists series serves up the songs of this classic film and stage composer with wit and style.
This American premiere of a dark and dense Finnish play feels botched, too shoddily stage for the script's impact to register fully.
Employing Spalding Gray's basic template, Zach Helm uses the recollections and observations of audience members to create a rewarding and memorable experience.
Except for one hokey device, Nathan Louis Jackson avoids death row clichés in this simple, powerful play featuring strong performances from Chris Chalk and David Patrick Kelly.
Though hardly a musical for the ages, this dated but dizzy satire of President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal still scores points.
Wryly witty and warmly embracing of its characters' eccentricities and foibles, A.R. Gurney's generation-gap tale is a charmer—funny, observant, and altogether winning.
In Lake Simons' solo clown piece "Etiquette Unraveled," the artist conjures a plethora of wistful scenarios using only a few props.
There are spectacular stunts and imaginative stage pictures in Julie Taymor's gargantuan comic book of a show, but overall this is an incomprehensible web with a thin plot and a generic scor…
Thomas Kilroy's absorbing picture of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover, is a must for Wilde fans, even if Oscar remains offstage much of the time.
Lynn Rosen's new play is a confused portrayal of a woman's self-discovery that combines camp with convention to little effect.
Playwright Susan Mosakowski's imagination of a contemporary Abelard and Heloise story unfortunately strains credulity.
It's Aristophanes by way of "Avenue Q" in this entertainingly lewd but somewhat clunky puppet adaptation of the ancient Greek play.
Soldiers during World War II line up to visit a prostitute, and one eventually does, in this intermittently intriguing but underdeveloped exercise.
Susan Stroman's new work for New York City Ballet fails to captivate, though it features a beguiling performance from Sara Mearns.
Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's searing musical tragedy about apartheid in South Africa falls hopelessly flat in this uncomprehending concert version from Encores!
More than 20 years after its premiere, this examination of contemporary politics, media, and clashing cultures makes a vital case for the relevancy of modern opera.
Red Bull Theater's remarkable production of this obscure Jacobean tragedy is a rare treat, disproving the tired adage that the Brits do this kind of thing better.
Director Austin Pendleton makes more than a few odd staging choices but also elicits some heartbreaking performances in the CSC production of the Chekhov classic.
This shaggy-dog story about a musical written to premiere in a Middle Eastern soccer stadium is better suited for an anecdote than a full-fledged tuner.
Though Brooke Shields shows convincing proof that she can do this cabaret thing, nerves get in the way, and we don't see it often enough in this pleasant but undistinguished turn.
At first Matthew Lopez's new play resembles a horror film, but once the Stephen King theatrics are out of the way, Lopez offers an insightful examination of faith, race, and history.
Kiran Rikhye's "Stage Kiss," a gender-bending "love letter to Charles Ludlam" inspired by John Lyly's 1588 play "Gallathea," was apparently a hit for Stolen Chair in its premiere production …
Trista Baldwin's new play "American Sexy," now in the tiny downstairs space at the Flea Theater, is rarely surprising in its look at four randy college students on a joyride to Vegas.
Pablo Schreiber and Jennifer Carpenter fill in the blanks in Rajiv Joseph's skimpy two-hander about two mismatched almost-lovers who seem to connect only in times of crisis.
If any production can undo the decades of unwarranted critical scorn heaped on this Tennessee Williams drama, director Michael Wilson's mesmerizing account is the one.
