It's bizarre. It's disgusting. It's borderline psychopathic. That's how one of the characters describes an actual who-could-possibly-believe-it scheme of World War II British Intelligence in…
Muchas gracias to everyone who brought the gift of the Buena Vista Social Club to Broadway, where it opened tonight at the Schoenfeld Theatre in a perfect blend of music, dance and story.
Some playwrights we appreciate because we don't know what they're going to come up with next, and some we appreciate because we do. Joshua Harmon surely belongs in the latter category, for a…
Sharpsburg, Maryland, a small town of well under 1,000 souls, is best known as the site of the Civil War's Battle of Antietam (or, if you are a Confederacy devotee, the Battle of Sharpsburg)…
The Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' sharp-as-a-tack new play, Purpose, brilliantly directed by Phylicia Rashad and opening tonight on Broadway at the Helen …
"I make something where there was nothing," says the world famous American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein to the equally world famous Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan in Pete…
If you stay still for a moment in the fictional town serving as the setting for Julián Mesri's mystical adventure, The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics, you may hear the soothing sound …
How do we define identity when science offers to rewrite the foundations of who we are? D.A. Mindell's On the Evolutionary Function of Shame explores this existential question by blending bi…
Curse of the Starving Class, which was first produced in New York in 1978, is the second play in what playwright Sam Shepard called his Family Trilogy. Along with Buried Child and True West,…
Samuel D. Hunter's stunning and deeply affecting Grangeville, currently running at New York's Signature Center, begins in complete darkness. The disembodied phone voices of two men discussin…
Conversations with Mother, Matthew Lombardo's semi-autobiographical comedy currently running at Theater 555, is a crowd-pleasing show that traces the relationship of a mother and son over fi…
British playwright Harold Brighouse's legacy rests largely on Hobson's Choice, his well-crafted comedy from 1915 that satirizes class hypocrisies and gender roles. Though best known for its …
[at the Goodman Theatre] Directed by Susan V. Booth, the production is a curious (albeit mostly successful) juxtaposition of artful staging that conjures up a warm nostalgia for the past an…
Idina Menzel, Wicked's original Elphaba, is back on Broadway, and once again she is defying gravity. No, she hasn't returned to the Gershwin Theatre and the land of Oz. Instead, she is starr…
"This is the part of my story I really don't want to talk about," says rebelliously queer and creatively anti-patriarchal music artist Bitch about two-thirds into her funny, touching, and ag…
Charlie Chaplin's appreciation for Japanese culture has been well documented. He visited Japan several times, and he had a deep admiration for the physicality of both Kabuki and kengeki (sam…
When Urinetown opened on Broadway back in 2001, by way of the New York International Fringe Festival and a follow-up Off Broadway run, it was a decided hit, picking up ten Tony nominations a…
A decade back, Jordan Harrison got us thinking about artificial intelligence, man-machine relationships, and the dangers of rapidly advancing technologies in his Pulitzer finalist Marjorie P…
When you walk into the cell theatre for a performance of Cate Wiley's exploration of the day to day lives of women in America experiencing homelessness, Sheltered, and I thoroughly recommend…
A beach house in a state of disrepair, not unlike its primary inhabitant, is the setting for Gregg Ostrin's Kowalski, a tangle of truth, truthiness, and fanciful speculation opening tonight …
The house at Irish Repertory Theatre is less than full, and the end-of-evening applause, at best, polite. There's my argument: Do less Samuel Beckett! But Irish Rep is on something of a Beck…
True story: I once attempted to show off my linguistic prowess at a French restaurant by ordering a salad with Roquefort dressing. I wound up with a dish of horseradish ("raifort") instead. …
George Bernard Shaw famously dubbed Shakespeare's Cymbeline "stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order." Appalled by the ludicrous coincidences and tangled plot lines, Shaw rewrote the l…
When the Duke of York refers to Queen Margaret of Anjou as the She-Wolf of France in William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part III, it isn't exactly a compliment. "How ill-beseeming is it in thy …
In the new book Women Writing Musicals, Jennifer Ashley Tepper and Applause Theatre & Cinema Books rescue one important part of theatre history: women writing musicals. And it is full of jui…