recent posts
- Audra McDonald and “Original Nepo Baby” Gwyneth Paltrow: Honorees at the NYWFT Muse Awards 23 March 2026
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
- William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz
- Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash
- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
Category: Theater
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“Did you have sex with that woman?” This is not a question from a bygone era’s congressional hearing, although the echo is unmistakable. Rather it comes from a wife, Leigh (Sarah Paulson) whose husband Tom (Garret Dillahunt), a dynamic theater teacher has been convicted of inappropriate behavior with a female student, and is just back…
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One line gets a big laugh at Guild Hall’s production of Red, the play screenwriter John Logan wrote about the painter Mark Rothko: in his studio, superbly created on the John Drew Theater stage, Rothko (Victor Slezak) pontificates to his new assistant (Christian Scheider) about the empty soul of commercial art. In a hundred years,…
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Even before I got to Schubert Alley, a tad late of course, the sounds were rocking Broadway. Audiences were treated to a free sampling of numbers from the best of the best accompanied by a terrific orchestra, before the performers, dressed in street clothes departed for their respective shows, just in time to gear up…
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Early on in this exuberant immersive dance extravaganza,the young Imelda Marcos in a tattered frock sings of a time when shehad no shoes. Of course, when she rose from local beauty queen to beThe Philippines’ first lady, shoes became her trademark of excess,only enhancing her epic myth. Now back at The Public Theater after aseveral…
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In the hilarious old-school tradition, Bullets Over Broadway at the St. James Theater, based on Woody Allen’s 1994 film of the same name, features a writer who makes a Faustian bargain with a mob boss, Nick Valenti (Vincent Pastore) who makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Of course, Woody wrote the book for this…
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Sprinkling his talk with the “F” word, Kevin Spacey recounted the wellworn story of how his idol Jack Lemmon encouraged him when Spacey was a 13 year old. “That was a touch of terrific,” Lemmon said to the aspiring actor, after seeing him perform at an acting seminar in Los Angeles, and 13 years later…
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The revival of Les Miserables comes weighted with history, and not just the French Revolution as Victor Hugo imagined it: a long running Broadway original, a more recent revival, an Oscar nominated movie just last year. Certainly producers are counting on a familiarity with the material, the show’s rich music covered by many pop vocalists.…
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“Are you ready for your history lesson,” asked the usher at a recent performance of All the Way at the Neil Simon Theater. Please! All the Way is way more than a history lesson, although it does dramatize a significant part of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency from his taking office after Kennedy’s assassination through the…
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Strident, a woman with whom to reckon, Tyne Daly’s Katharine Gerard is a force of nature. Encased in fur, she’s the refrigerator-sized iceberg in Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, a new play that opened at the Golden Theater on Monday. Well, never has a joke carried such heft: if it isn’t one thing, it’s your mother!…
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As a desperate widow in MTC’s new play, Tales from Red Vienna, Nina Arianda’s Helena Altman is demure in period weeds, even as the gentlemen she services rip her black lace. In her new movie, Rob the Mob, opening this week, Arianda’s Rosie is wily and saucy and naïve as befits a character in a modern “Bonnie & Clyde” story, about a…
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Looks like hell is a step up, as the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s mid century allegory step off the elevator into a swank upscale loft in the Pearl Theater Company’s stylish production of No Exit. A first New York revival since its award winning Broadway debut in 1946, the play, adapted from the French by…
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How is it possible: two incredibly good productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the same season? One of the bard’s bawdiest, the comedy inspired the recent Broadway hit featuring Mark Rylance as Olivia, in a brilliant stab at staying true to Elizabethan strictures: men play the women’s roles. Rylance makes a damned good woman, but…
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It would be impossible to imagine two more wrong-headed individuals than Anthony Reilly and Rosemary Muldoon, the next-door neighbors in John Patrick Shanley’s new play, Outside Mullingar. The idea that they would live side by side for their entire lives and not realize their desires for one another strains the imagination. But if the playwright…
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Onstage backstage, at the Pearl Theater’s production of “And Away We Go,” six actors celebrate theater history. Set in the detritus of years of costumes, props, deflated dolls, and chandeliers, this new play by the venerable Terrence McNally sits on the most cluttered set north of 14th Street. (Small Engine Repair’s garage at the Lucille Lortel…
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Ethan Hawke is a manly Macbeth in a leather skirt. The men in “the Scottish play” look good in skirts, even John Glover’s “weird sister,” with pendulous breasts. At this stylish “Macbeth” directed by Jack O’Brien, you pause wondering: Alexander McQueen? Gaultier? Marc Jacobs? Catherine Zuber’s costumes, like the regal sets by Scott Pask, lighting…
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In Amanda Peet’s fine playwriting debut for Manhattan Theater Club at City Center, “The Commons of Pensacola,” Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner are daughter and mother locked in a domestic dilemma: Judith (Danner) is forced to scale down as her husband has been jailed for a Madoff-mode crime. Becca (Parker) arrives for Thanksgiving with…
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Two benefits this week featured a back stage glimpse into how theater is made: on Sunday night, Stanley Tucci, along with Anne Tatlock, was honored at the Plaza Hotel, at the New York Stage and Film Winter Gala for his contribution to theater. Fitting, the presentation included performances: Li-Manuel Miranda and Anika Noni Rose sang from Miranda’s…
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If you could mate John Waters with Charles Ludlam, the offspring might be Mink Stole and Penny Arcade, lead performers in a new production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Mutilated.” First seen in 1966 as a one-acter on Broadway, coupled with “The Gnadiges Fraulein,” the program entitled “Slapstick Tragedy,” the play has been relegated to a…
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First to say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the newly built Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, is jaw-dropping great. When you tell its creator Julie Taymor, she shrugs and says, Well, it’s Shakespeare’s play. Uh, yes, but what Taymor has done with a work you know so well is utterly astounding, melding storytelling…
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In Sharr White’s new play The Snow Geese at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Mary-Louise Parker as Elizabeth wears black, in mourning for her dead husband, but really she is attired in Jane Greenwood’s circa 1917 period detail, eh weeds, for a lost way of life. Under Daniel Sullivan’s direction, a family who thinks it…
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