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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The Pearl Theatre Company revival of George Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderer had many in the audience wondering why this delightful and deliciously scandalous play is not produced more often. Of course the sex implied and on view between corseted women and waist-coated men is nothing to raise a contemporary eyebrow, but in its day, 1893,…
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The picture on the Richard III poster shows the actor Kevin Spacey, mangled like a piece of John Chamberlain’s chrome sculptures, his left leg in a brace turned inward, his epaulets woefully off kilter, his dark glasses barely grazing his nose, his crown cocked like a smartass cartoon. At BAM where the Bridge Project’s stunning…
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Deauville, 1930’s. The fine Private Lives revival directed by Richard Eyre at the Music Box Theater opens on a posh hotel terrace. The view must be amazing, you imagine as two couples on honeymoon in adjoining suites gaze over the audience to a yacht in the harbor. On the right, Elyot answers one jealous question…
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Who doesn't love a wedding? What little girl doesn't adore the Barbie decked in tiered white tulle? Or fetishize her. Who ever thought such beloved and at times tacky traditions would be so political? And also terrifying? Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays at the Minetta Lane Theater, features eight playlets by the playwrights Mo…
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With the writing talents of Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen, featuring performances by an ensemble that includes Marlo Thomas, Steve Guttenberg, and Julie Kavner, under the direction of John Turturro, the 3 one-acters that comprise Relatively Speaking at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre are exactly as you would expect, very funny. On Wednesday, my…
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In Katori Hall's play The Mountaintop, taking place on the fateful night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, a maid named Camae, delivering room service says, “Let me take you to the mountaintop.” And every way you can imagine to take that statement, a play off the speech the iconic Dr. King gave that afternoon,…
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Forget the red carpet. The drum beats on Fifth Avenue and 125th Street drew a select audience into the National Black Theatre for the eagerly awaited world premiere of Radha Blank's SEED. The 5-character drama involving a social worker, a family, and a prison inmate, against a back screen of the New York City subways…
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Anticipating great gusts and flooding, many Hamptonites chose the real-life drama of celebrity lives as read by celebrities over the real-life drama of storms at Guild Hall last Friday night. Matthew Broderick reading Tommy Lee's advice on what to do with a woman's “gummy bear” stole a show that also featured Mario Cantone revealing what…
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As we watch the Republicans plan their strategy for toppling the American president, the question of what makes a good leader, indeed, a good man (of either gender) is played out, not in our current political arena, but onstage at the Malcom X & Dr.Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center, at the Classical Theatre of…
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After the American writer Jack Kerouac's On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957, its characters were instantly immortalized, but not as fictional creations. Much to the author's horror, they became fodder for the needy mid-century Zeitgeist, heroes of an alternative lifestyle. You can read shy Kerouac's Big Sur, an account of his nervous…
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Making theater requires a lot of planning. In fact, it takes about five years to produce the average opera. Imagine only having 24 hours to write, compose, cast, direct, rehearse, and perform a show! In the documentary One Night Stand, which premiered last week at Newfest, filmmakers Elisabeth Sperling and Trish Dalton provide a behind-the-scenes…
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In an old fashioned shoemaker's shop, to the sounds of opera from an antique radio, Danny Aiello sits head in hands. A woman (Alma Cuervo) barges in to say, I need a new sole. The pun signals: this shop strewn with shoes and old photos on the walls including one of an iconic pile of…
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Hair is back! The quintessential Age of Aquarius rock musical with its antic tribe, tie-dye tees, frayed jeans, mega frizz and naked joy, seems only to perfect with age. Having had a triumphant, award filled revival at the Delacorte in Central Park and Al Hirschfeld Theater on Broadway in 2009, now the show's touring company…
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Spirits soar over snow capped mountains, a sword wielding hero, Wu Song, slays a man-eating tiger, a dance corps in Barbie pink clusters like plum blossoms, another twirls handkerchiefs, nymphs frolic in the waves. Heaven opens its gates. In spectacular color and gorgeous costumes, Shen Yun, a New York based arts group enacts the rich…
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The crowd outside the Bowlmor on West 44th Street swelled into a non-menacing mini-mob. Harry Belafonte, Spike Lee, and Cindy Crawford snaked their families through, avoiding the plastic champagne flutes in the congested vestibule leading to two elevators carrying the party-ready up to the third and fourth floors. Nowhere to be seen: Spiderman: Turn Off…
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The Hammerstein Ballroom was packed for the Drama Desk Awards on Monday night. Broadway, off Broadway and off off Broadway casts and crews rubbed more than elbows, just getting to the stage at the announcements of their names. Rushing to receive his outstanding actor award for The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Bobby Cannavale locked Sutton…
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Congratulations to Tony Kushner on the occasion of receiving an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York after a challenge from groups who miss the point of Kushner's impressive contribution to American arts and letters. His views on Middle East politics, however they reflect on what is good for the Jews, should be…
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Bananas may be bananas in the revival of John Guare's play The House of Blue Leaves directed by David Cromer at the Walter Kerr Theater, but in the scheme of this wry drama, set in 1965 Sunnyside, Queens, she looks appropriately far gone. As performed by Edie Falco in a fright wig, whose work was…
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April 11. It was Joel Grey's birthday and what a celebration: an opening of an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York featuring a chronology of his life in the theater and his own photographs with an essay by playwright Jon Robin Baitz. Explaining Grey's particular eye, Baitz calls Grey a magician,…
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Mark Rylance, after a second standing ovation following the evening performance of Jerusalem at the Music Box Theater, wanted to let the audience know that we had seen this epic length British play on the day of its action, St. George's Day, April 23. The Irish have St. Patrick's, he said, when they get drunk.…
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In The Motherf**ker With the Hat, the “f” word, along with a panoply of shocking verbiage is deployed, an arsenal of language that makes you titter until the words themselves stop meaning what they mean, becoming pause, punctuation, and, at times, punishment. You are dumbstruck by Stephen Adly Guirgis's script, getting into its poetry.
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Catch Me If You Can: The Musical is a con man's story, and the biggest con is the show itself. Like seeing a superbly performed magic trick, we're going to buy it, and happily revel in being duped, or that is what is promised: a conceit that separates this traditional Broadway vehicle from the 2002…
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Laurie Metcalf, perhaps best known for her part in the television series Rosanne, is, in New York theater circles, actor's actor supreme. That accolade was well-deserved Monday night at the world premiere of the MCC production of The Other Place at the Lucille Lortel theater. There, in that venerable West Village venue, paired with Dennis…
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