In Nicky Silver's stingingly dark new comedy, The Lyons, which opened at the Vineyard Theatre last night, Ms. Lavin's yiddishe kop runneth over. Read More
"Jesus was at best a Nazarene folk singer with high metabolism, a velveteen D.J. voice, and pleasant, dilated pupils," says Sandra Cabot, a Wasp matron in Connecticut, holding a tumbler of s…
Theater, like most entertainment, requires suspension of disbelief. (Wait, why are these people living their lives in a three-walled, brightly lit room?) But tolerance for that suspension ex…
Our annual Foot-in-Mouth Award has always been won by Ben Brantley, chief drama critic of The Times.
Thanks to American Theater Web for the link.
I have played the part of a screaming fan girl only twice in my 54 years.
If you want to understand the nature of public hysteria, go to the last performance of a successful Broadway show.
All summer long, the question could be heard reverberating throughout the literary salons of the Hamptons: ‘What’s with Henry V’s chairs?’
Thanks to American Theater Web for the link!
Hal Luftig, who produced Annie Get Your Gun, Movin’ Out, Thoroughly Modern Millie and a slew of other happy Broadway shows, is planning to bring Legally Blonde, the spry tale about the fair-haired Harvard Law student from the Valley, to a stage near us. Like, seriously.
Plus an interview with Eliza Jane Schneider of "Freedom of Speech" (fourth item).
[Thanks to Wendy for the link!]
"Queen needs makeup!" Harvey Fierstein said. It was late afternoon on Monday, August 5, and Mr. Fierstein, primed to return to Broadway in heels upon a hot pink, giddy steamroller—the musical version of John Waters’ Hairspray—sat before a mirror in a windowless white studio in the West Village, his face under construction for yet another magazine photo shoot. Dressed in a flowered orange smock and sandals, his skin rosy and deprived of eyebrows, chest hair, armpit hair and leg hair, he resembled a pretty pot roast.
Thanks to davei2000 on TB for the link.
I've seen HAIRSPRAY twice and I LOVE this show. It's fun, makes you feel good, and puts a smile on your face all night long. Mailing the CD sampler out earlier this summer was a great idea. It worked for me, I listened to it way before seeing the show and liked the songs immediately. Since I happen to be the one who orders group tickets for my real job, it also worked, I ordered them and after seeing the show called back and ordered even more.
The first time Nina Arianda walked on the stage at the Cort Theatre, she broke into tears. "I was having a conversation with somebody, and I got onto the stage, and I looked out, and it w…
"Why has our government given money to the families of 9/11?" Barbara Apple asks her family this question near the end of a long, late lunch in Richard Nelson's Sweet and Sad, the second …
Mr. Calarco doesn't succeed in giving the book sufficient shape to truly work. The interesting parts of Burnt Part don't make sense, and the parts that make sense are trite.
It's a devastating and somewhat shocking portrait of a wealthy British family in meltdown, and it arrived in New York last night, at Manhattan Theatre Club's Off Broadway space in City Cente…
Mr. Demme has taken a mediocre script-Family Week is a slight and slightly irritating play that the Times reviewer called "tedious" when it debuted in New York a decade ago-and both misdirected and miscast it.
Enron, the hit London import that opened last night at the Broadhurst Theatre, is a surprising and remarkable creation: It's a two-and-a-half-hour lecture on business history, and it's utterly thrilling.
I wish I could tell you I loved American Idiot. It looks good; it sounds good; it features a talented and hardworking cast; and, most excitingly and unusually, it appears to be drawing an enthusiastic crowd decades away from Social Security to West 44th Street night after night. But I can't. American Idiot--the rock opera version of Green Day's 2004 pop-punk album, which opened at the St. James Theatre yesterday--is an energetic and entertaining 95 minutes. It's fun. But it's also, amid all the booming rock, a little dull. You're diverted, but you're not moved. There are archetypes and themes, but there aren't really characters or a plot. American Idiot is a concert; it's not a play.
Contrary to what you may have read, The Addams Family, the new musical at the Lunt-Fontanne, is not the worst thing to come to Broadway this season. It's not even the worst thing to come to Broadway last week. (More, later, on what was.)
Mr. Logan was inspired to write Red after seeing several of the Seagram-commissioned works in London.