Wither the American musical? I know that sounds pretentious but it also seems to be the question everyone is now asking. Even the current issue of The New Yorker magazine has jumped into t…
One of the theatrical genres I most admire is the state of the nation play that wrestles with contemporary political and social issues. The Brits have a long tradition of this dating back to…
The fall theater season has already begun and it’s more jam-packed than it has been in years. No matter what kind of show you like, there is bound to be something that you'll want to see. …
Toward the beginning of his solo show How Shakespeare Saved My Life, Jacob Ming-Trent talks movingly about how his father, a drug addict, left the family and his son adrift until the 12-year…
Toward the beginning of his solo show How Shakespeare Saved My Life, Jacob Ming-Trent talks movingly about how his father, a drug addict, left the family and his son adrift until the 12-year…
All art is a conversation between the people who make the thing and the people seeing, reading or listening to it. And the first time I saw Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, it didn’…
“You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” that’s what the strippers in the musical Gypsy told young Louise when she and her mama Rose were looking for a way to survive in show business. And that see…
The summer of 2026 has been a strange one for me. Nothing truly dire but my husband K and I experienced some challenges, some disappointments and a few losses. So I’m regarding this Labor …
It is such a relief to have discovered that the young playwright Bubba Weiler is not a one-show wonder. I was knocked out by his debut Well, I'll Let You Go when I saw it last year (click he…
The love-hate relationship so many of us have with technology in general and AI in particular purports to be the main subject of Andrew Stein’s Disruption, which opened this week at the Pe…
Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, the new musical now playing downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, is a patchwork quilt of other musicals: one swatch a revenge plot like the…
To celebrate the 20(!) summer reading lists I’ve posted over the years, I’m highlighting what I’ve most enjoyed about putting them together: finding, reading and sharing novels and sho…
Happy Semiquincentennial Weekend! Or at least I hope it is being so for you. This is a stranger summer than usual for me. My building has scheduled work to be done on our terraces and so…
Maybe it’s because I live with a musician but ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll, the new play with music by Eisa Davis that opened this week at the Vineyard Theatre, struck a deeper cho…
Shows get revived for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they were under appreciated in the past. Or they may have something particularly relevant to say about current events. A director may have…
One of the things we theater obsessives love to do is argue about which is the greatest American play. I'm a Tennessee Williams stan and so I always try to get A Streetcar Named Desire into …
Just about everyone"and here I mean most of the critics"seems to have something bad to say about Dog Day Afternoon, the new Stephen Adly Guirgis adaptation of the 1975 movie about a bank …
Most of the reviews for Cold War Choir Practice devote most of their word count to laying out its multi-pronged plot which includes Soviet spies, former Black Panthers, Regan-era conserva…
Ever since Sophocles put the fall of the House of Oedipus onstage, the theatrical canon has been chock-a-block with unhappy families. And that makes sense because they make for good drama. B…
Maybe it's the current dystopic state of the world but I had a hard time with Bug, the revival of Tracy Letts' 1996 play that opened this month at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Fried…
As usual, I'm late with a list of the shows I most enjoyed in 2025 but I'm going to share it anyway and since I am late, I'm also going to cut right to the chase. There were musicals I liked…
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 ...from me and some of our mutual friends:
Getting others to see the world in a certain way and then convincing them to do almost anything to preserve that point of view requires a toolbox of skills that include charisma and a ferven…
Happy Thanksgiving! It's been a crazy month. An avalanche of shows have been opening both on and off Broadway. I've seen 20 of them over the past four weeks"some good, some just OK, a fe…