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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Behold the brilliance of Tom Stoppard! His genius is reason enough to see the Broadway revival of Arcadia at the Barrymore, a civilizing relief ably directed by David Leveaux, just as the culture at large focuses on another kind of theater: the wild ravings of Charlie Sheen. Set in the stately Derbyshire estate in two…
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On a particular Saturday afternoon at the Manhattan Theater Club production of his new play Good People, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire revealed to an exuberant matinee crowd that the compelling characters he created for this play were known to him from his upbringing in South Boston–even down to the detail of the bingo games his mother enjoyed, as well as the…
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Co-host with Anne Hathaway at the Academy Awards show in Los Angeles, James Franco picks up his cell phone, a prop for peering into the dreams of the show's prior beloved M.C., Alec Baldwin. The Inception parody is played for laughs, but those in the know were poised to honor Baldwin's career the next night,…
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As everyone is glued to media, watching a real-life revolution disrupt and otherwise transform Egypt, revolutions of a quieter, less violent but powerful sort erupt off-Broadway in two plays in limited run that I would not miss. Chekhov is surely the poet of thwarted dreams, of aristocratic manners mutating to modernity. As staged at Classic…
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With a minimum of Neil LaBute's provocative, poetic potty mouth, his new play, “The Break of Noon,” opens with the sole survivor of an office massacre wrapped in a blanket, his ankle sheathed in a blood soaked cloth. Going over the gory details, this man-aptly named John Smith– is stunned at how the gunman made…
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The subject of equal pay for skilled workers is of course a serious subject, but in “Made in Dagenham,” a little known but true story about a strike at a Ford plant in mid-century England is told with such heart and humor, many will call it a comedy. On Monday Rouge Tomate was bustling for…
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The centerpiece of the New York Film Festival, "The Tempest" is state of the art Julie Taymor, that is, a study in the spectacular. The ashen spirit Ariel darts behind trees in the barren terrain of the Shakespearean island forest in multiples, to say nothing of the heavens conjured and riled by the tap of…
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Lawrence Wright, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” is also a performer/ playwright. Wanting to tell the backstory of writing his book, he created “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” a one man stage play performed at The Culture Project. The film version directed…
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If you are a cook, there is a nail-biting sequence in the new movie, Jack Goes Boating, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman under his own direction, adapted from the stage play by Bob Glaudini that was such a hit at the Public Theater last year. In this astonishingly tender movie, wanting to impress Connie (Amy Ryan)…
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You know you are in David Mamet's world when the expletives fly rapid fire, one distasteful zinger after another, breaking every taboo. You laugh, and hearing the rhythms, you call it poetry. The title Romance may suggest a candlelit evening, but here that candle may be a stick of dynamite up our cultural ass. Four…
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Merchant of Venice is always a bitter pill for us Jews, even when the production is as good as the one at the Delacorte Theater featuring a cast led by Lily Rabe as the beautiful-as-she-is-wise Portia and Al Pacino. Well, if the payis and tsissis fit the droopy, beaked visage of Shylock, I say,…
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The true love story of music legends Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck is the stuff of 19th century sturm und drang: forbidden love, lofty language, melancholy, and early death. Portraying this passionate couple on Wednesday evening, Sting in waistcoat, with his wife, actor, producer, political activist, Trudie Styler, begowned in a splendid black Roland Mouret…
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While we grapple with such problems as whether or not the recently out but obviously gay Sean Hayes is believable as a heterosexual in love with Kristen Chenowith in the delightful Broadway revival of Promises Promises, it is good to remember this privileged debate is hard won. Going back to a time when same sex…
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What happened in that proverbial stable? That is the mystery at the heart of Equus, a 1973 drama by Peter Schaffer now revived to stunning effect at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Memorable for the previous 2008 revival on Broadway starring Daniel Radcliffe, the bespectacled Harry Potter of film, this time the “known” actor is…
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Tony nominees Linda Lavin, Chad Kimball, Montego Glover, Valeria Harper, Jan Maxwell, Stephen Kunkel, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Katie Finneran were among those walking the red carpet at Cipriani 42nd Street Monday night along with others of the theater community: Harry Connick, Jr., Tommy Tune, Liz Smith, Phyllis Newman, Pia Lindstrom, Jimmy Nederlander. The occasion:…
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A 20 year old Neil LaBute! play, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times was revived in a staged reading to benefit MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theater on Thursday night. You know you are in this playwright's libidinous world when the word penis is used in the first few lines.–and by Julia Stiles no less, as…
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Puh-leeze! Comedy icon Joan Rivers may be best known for dishing on the red carpet, or hawking her wares on QVC, her porcelain face, pressed to perfection, stretched over cheekbones, eyes frozen catlike, but from the first frame of this fine documentary by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, showing glaring close-ups of makeup applied to…
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Bespectacled Donald Marguiles looks like a writer out of central casting. And as a playwright, he is indeed pleased. When you write for theater, he said the morning after the Tony Award nominations were announced, as opposed to film or television, where the hope is the writer will recede into the woodwork, everyone works to…
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The passion of Christ as played out in iconography and theater since the beginnings of Christendom is terrifying, controlling, inflammatory, think of the dreary, racist 2004 Mel Gibson movie, but in Sarah Ruhl's poetic and sly vision, the Passion is also hilarious. It's still the story of Christ, for God's sake, nailed to the cross,…
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In 2008, a performer named Runaround Sue told me she made the call to the 150 burlesque artists in NYC and got Jonny Porkpie, Legs Malone, and Nasty Canasta to join her for a raunchy romp: tassels spinning from every body part, stripping down past the bikini line, peek-a-boo fan dancing, and serious body contorting…
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A farce in the manner of Feydeau, Ken Ludwig's 1986 Lend Me a Tenor revived at the Music Box Theater and directed by Stanley Tucci, has laughs aplenty as doors -and bodies– slam in a 1934 Cleveland hotel suite. In anticipation of a production of Verdi's Otello, the opera's impresario, Saunders, sweats the arrival of…
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