23,018 stories from Variety
While it's frustrating at times and too unhurried, this melancholy, resolutely non-judgmental mid-life crisis drama creeps up on you. It smartly refuses forced epiphanies in favor of quiet c…
Bill T. Jones' wildly loose-limbed journey into the throbbing heart of Afrobeat breaks bold new ground in musical theater.
DreamWorks greenlights sci-fi movie
Signature Theater specializes in right-sizing hefty musicals for today's budgets, as with Les Miserables last season and earlier with Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro. Its latest undertaking is Hammerstein and Kern's 1927 staple Show Boat, reduced from 48-plus performers to a manageable 25 and staged on a modest set without a paddlewheel in sight. While the resulting production offers an appealing display of the musical's timeless melodies, it sorely misses the colorful trappings and can't hide an antiquated book that will appear ever so distant to 21st-century auds.
"Everything is less than zero," sang Elvis Costello in 1977, and if anyone would have wholeheartedly agreed, it was Zero Mostel. Jim Brochu paints a remarkably sympathetic portrait of the famously egomaniacal performer in his solo show Zero Hour, about the life and times of a guy who survived everything from the blacklist to a disagreement with an out-of-control bus and still managed to thrive. Writer-performer Brochu, who's been doing the show for years, nicely mimics Mostel's blustery style and tosses off an assortment of the actor's best Borscht-belt gags into the bargain.
There's bad news and good about the much-anticipated revival of Dreamgirls, kicking off, like the action of the show itself, on the storied stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater before a national tour. Cultists of the 1981 musical about an African-American girl group's rise to success might have been hoping for a Broadway-caliber production that would demand a midtown New York return. In most ways that count, this staging falls short of that wish. But as a road property, it's top-tier, packaged to travel and stuffed with vocal talent that does justice to Henry Krieger's sensational songs and helps compensate for stiff acting and a shortage of emotional clout.
Krieger has a history with the Apollo
Cabaret queen Andrea Marcovicci kicks off the festivities with "Skylark: Marcovicci Sings Mercer" at the Algonquin, a fine 80-minute tour through two dozen titles.
Neither the poet W.H. Auden nor composer Benjamin Britten were exactly famous for knockabout comedy. The surprise of Alan Bennett's new fictionalized bio-drama about their tussles between re…
Alvarado's show eventually drowns in schmaltz, but it fails interestingly enough to make for an encouraging look at his future.
No need to equivocate: Bill Cain's "Equivocation" at the Geffen Playhouse is one of the most bracingly intelligent, sizzlingly theatrical American plays in a decade. Stuffed -- some will say…
This breezy song-and-dance show from 1930 aims only to deliver its saddle-bag full of song hits.
Even flops make money in amateur, stock productions
Victorian repression gets a rude poke in Sarah Ruhl's typically idiosyncratic rumination on women's struggle to understand and explore their sexual selves, In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play. While the signature 19th century ailment being treated is "hysteria," the chief weakness is the bipolar disorder of the inconsistent second act, which shifts uncertainly between serious developments and the more farcical business of romantic cross-currents. But there are so many lingering moments of emotional truth, and even more of daring comedy, that the play amuses and charms even if it doesn't quite satisfy.
List will be whittled to five nominations
Are all 8-year-olds as terrifyingly alert to their elders' childish behavior as the little girl in Alan Ayckbourn's achingly funny new play, "My Wonderful Day?" Possibly. But it's hard to im…
Broadway leads Ashley Brown and Gavin Lee deliver pert, perfectly tuned perfs, and every element that surrounds them -- the ensemble, Bob Crowley's tone-shifting sets and costumes, the power…
"Baby It's You" has the legs to potentially make a successful trip to the Big Apple once it achieves a more symbiotic balance between music and storyline. The onstage talent is certainly in …
With an appealing cast directed by Bill Berry and choreographed by Patti Colombo, the Golden Age musical hums with bounding energy and soars with Leonard Bernstein's exhilarating score in a …
If there's an heir to the legacy of August Wilson, the gifted 29-year-old McCraney may be on his way to claiming that title.
Thesp to play former wife of Nelson Mandela
Custom-made arrangements key to success
Veteran composer returns for Soderbergh film
'God of Carnage' cast exits to stellar sales
Starred in '60s, '70s TV shows
