198 stories from onandoffbroadwaytheaterreviews.com
The lights come up on a total wreck of a basement room in which a lifetime of junk has been accumulated. It's under the house in which Irene and Jerry are living out their marriage; and at t…
Ten talented actor-singer-musicians are filling the jam packed tiny stage in Theatre A at 59 East 59th Street. They are five men and five women who play the essential bi-lingual telephon…
Take three playwrights, each making his Broadway debut, to write a play. Have them base it on a published book and essay by two other writers which described a real event. Mix thoroughly; th…
Shout it from the rooftops, "Musical Comedy is back on Broadway!" I mean a NEW musical, not a revival or an adaptation. One that’s all about putting "Your Best Foot Forward" (a 1941 mu…
In this bountiful Broadway season there is the phenomenon known as the one-man play. Most recently, on November 11th, two of them arrived on the same night. Will Eno's "Thom Pain (based on n…
My suggestion is that the Tony Awards committee should place King Kong as a nominee for best leading actor in a musical. He doesn't sing very well, but I think he would win by beating out al…
Christopher Demos-Brown, the author of this new play, was unknown to me, although his more than a dozen earlier works for the stage have been recognized by the Laurents/Hatcher Award and mul…
Michael Urie is lighting up the stage of the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway eight times a week with his virtuoso performance in Harvey Fierstein's play. It's an adaptation of his earlier wo…
It begins with an explosion of angry rock music that lets us know the play is not misnamed. When the music fades we find ourselves inside the living quarters of a ramshackle old house in ups…
The New York theater season has barely begun and already we have several marvelous plays on which theater fans can feast. Some are revivals; some are newly minted; but all have impeccable cr…
Kenneth Lonergan has been writing important and nourishing plays since The New Group presented his "This Is Our Youth" in 1997. That Drama Desk Award nominee was revived in 2015 and won the …
On the cover of the Playbill, it says quite clearly that the title means "vindication, justification, explanation." It is not, in other words, an apology. Alexi Kaye Campbell has written a p…
Out of the simplest and most available tools, composer/lyricist Adam Gwon has created an eloquent and moving small musical that does indeed deal with ordinary things. With just four chara…
How good of La Femme Theatre Productions to mount the little known Tennessee Williams play at Theatre St. Clements, for anything Williams wrote should be of interest to anyone who loves thea…
For starters, I had expected this oddly titled play to offer information on what went on in someone's mind during an afternoon siesta. Once the play started I found that no, it deals with th…
The first of two acts of this new play by Theresa Rebeck invites us all into a rehearsal for "Hamlet" with a company of actors working hard to support Sarah Bernhardt, as played by Janet McT…
Once upon a time, circa 1977, there was a woman with a powerful voice and a caring mind who had intimate access to the long term mayor of Albany, New York. Her name was Dorothea "Polly" Noon…
Every now and then, Bernard Shaw's "Heartbreak House" returns to us in times of national stress to request that we (or the folks in Britain) examine our present life styles and attitudes and…
Lillian Hellman first conceived the idea for this play in 1930 but did not complete it and only went back to it five years later following her first production, the successful "The Children'…
Composers and lyricists have long been attracted to successful films as source material for adaptation into Broadway musicals. "Saturday Night Fever," "Groundhog Day," “Rocky,” e…
I admit that forty years ago, when the Go-Go's female rock stardom was in full bloom, when their punk scene was all the rage amongst the hip, I was very happy with musical theatre as it was …
I was confused when I entered the small Helen Hayes Theater for I thought I'd entered the wrong building. I was ushered into the small foyer, and from the auditorium I could hear ear splitti…
Once again, we have a new production of an old success from the school of "And Then I Wrote…" musicals. This time out the writers are Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who, over the course of …
"The family comedy" has been around forever, but I only caught up with it at the very end of the 1930s when I was taken to "What A Life," my first play which dealt with a teenager in high sc…
It was such a joy to be reunited with Oscar Hammerstein II's adaptation of Bizet's opera "Carmen" at its current production by the Classic Stage Company. Tucked away on the far east side of …
