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- 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!
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- Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash
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Category: Theater
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Dame Edna Everage and Michael Feinstein make a fine couple, if you enjoy a visual oxymoron: the former is the alter ego of the Australian Barry Humphries, known for his large outsized glamour. The latter is the charming song man of The Regency, diminutive, understated, elegant. Each a consummate performer, together they make for an…
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Today Tallulah is synonymous with drama queen. In “Looped” on Broadway, you learn why: the first glimpse of Valerie Harper, television's soft, Mary Tyler Moore sidekick Rhoda, as screen legend Tallulah Bankhead, wearing a full length mink, blue satin dress, diamond brooch, and crocodile bag screams it, as she enters a recording studio late for…
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One powerful message of the play Next Fall is contained in its title. Simply, don't put things off: life may not wait till next fall. Or, as one character Holly (Maddie Corman) says, “One minute you are doing the crossword puzzle, and the next you are here.” Here is a hospital waiting room where Luke,…
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Actor, writer, director Bob Balaban paced about the cavernous Cipriani 42nd Street, a wad of papers clenched in his hands, as only an accomplished professional with a speech to make could. One of the artists to receive Guild Hall's annual award for Lifetime Achievement, the bespectacled Balaban, who as a teen appeared in the classic…
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“No one expects you to perform miracles,” says the head of the Perkins Institute for the Blind sending his prized pupil Anne Sullivan south from Boston to Tuscumbia, Alabama, to a family where she is to become governess to an unruly blind and deaf girl named Helen Keller. The line gets a big laugh at the…
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The Golden Globe winning actress for her role in the CBS series The Good Wife, Julianna Marguiles, was honored at the MCC gala on Monday night. M.C. Mo Rocca quipped, she was playing Silda Spitzer, Elizabeth Edwards, and other political wives scandalized by their husband's bad behavior. By the time I got to the Hammerstein…
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The distressed walls at BAM's Harvey Theater form a perfect backdrop for the deconstructed world of this excellent production of “The Tempest,” performed in a well-paced, intermission-less two hours and 15 minutes, in repertoire with “As You Like It.” According to the BAM notes, director Sam Mendes paired these plays for the Bridge Project's second…
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“He's the best young actor around,” said Julie Taymor of Ben Whishaw at the Lucille Lortel Theater opening of a new play, Alexi Kaye Campbell's The Pride, a recent hit in London. Taymor knows, having directed the young actor as Ariel in The Tempest, to be released by Disney in December. “That's why I'm…
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In my house, we can recite lines from Clueless at whim, so to see Alicia Silverstone all grown up among the formidable theater talents in Donald Margulies' new play, Time Stands Still, is an Occasion. This fine Manhattan Theatre Club production, superbly directed by Daniel Sullivan at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre opens with Sarah…
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As You Like It is a natural crowd-pleaser and the production at BAM rises to the traditional Shakespearean hilarity: red-nosed clowning, ribaldry, girl talk as bawdy as that in Sex & the City. As directed by Sam Mendes for The Bridge Project's second season–he also directs The Tempest to open at BAM in February–the play…
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To be enshrined at Sardi's, the famed West 44 Street restaurant in the heart of the theater district with its trademark caricatures of thespians and drama queens is such an honor, one actress I know sups proudly at the table beneath her portrait in the first floor dining room. Last Wednesday, a new face was…
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The wit and wisdom of Nora Ephron so deliciously displayed in the movies Julie & Julia, the classics Heartburn, and You've Got Mail, is served up warm and wonderful at the Westside Theater in the play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore. Five characters bond, bicker, and betray in a girl fest that extends to the actors…
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At 94, the irrepressible Eli Wallach tells a good story. Of the film clips shown in the “Tennessee Williams on Screen and Stage” evening at the Times Center, part of the Museum of the Moving Image Series, the one of Baby Doll was the most provocative. A young sly Eli Wallach seduces a naive Carroll…
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David Mamet does not so much explore the title topic of his new play as eviscerate it. Despite the brevity, an hour and 47 minutes with intermission, I was exhausted/ exhilarated by his familiar tropes: the rapid-fire dialogue, the non-PC conceits. We are in the era when blacks can do anything whites can do, achieve…
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Jazz or improv is one part of the international dance style featured in Burn the Floor, the thrilling show choreographed by Jason Gilkison at the Longacre Theater, running since last August. An ensemble of 24, ballroom competition winners that have been touring since 1999, from Latvia, Russia, Italy, Latin America, Australia, as well as the…
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They had me with Houdini! About a minute into the Prologue of this monumental musical, the bound escape artist upended is lowered over this sweeping tableau in three tiers: immigrants living in squalor, rich whites in suburban splendor, blacks in subterranean piano joints plunking a fresh, transgressive sound. Originally on Broadway in 1998, with…
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During intermission at a recent performance of Finian's Rainbow, I looked into the orchestra pit to find a musician, Wayne Goodman, anticipating Act II as much as I was. Marvelling at Burton Lane's great songs including such classics as “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” “Look to the Rainbow,” and “Old Devil Moon,” the trombonist…
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Snow falls, the Chicago wind whistles when the door opens at Superior Donuts, a cozy, if down and out mom & pop shop run by Arthur Przybyszewski (Michael McKean) with a counter and homey stools in Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts' new play. You know what time period you are in when Starbucks vies for…
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Playwright John Patrick Shanley referring to Tennessee Williams as a “gorgeous unstoppable beast,” recounted an incident in a restaurant when he, a budding writer, maybe thirty feet away from the master dramatist, could not bring himself to say hello. Such is the power of “influence” that any person in theater would stand in awe of…
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It's a fact: folks will flock to see Idiot Savant, Richard Foreman's new play at the Public Theater just to see its star Willem Dafoe in a billowy blouse and skirt. Indeed, what a sight that is. Not to mention his hair in a top tail like a suma wrestler. There is no quirkier actor…
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The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman play based on Joan Didion's 2005 memoir of the same name, was a hit on Broadway in 2007, directed by David Hare. On Monday, the play was reprised for a farewell performance by the premiere actress of her generation Vanessa Redgrave, who as fate would have it inhabits…
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If the view from under the Brighton Beach el is not quite today's world vision, it offers a nostalgia trip to the late1930's that is worth glimpsing, especially through Neil Simon's round lenses. The subject of Brighton Beach Memoirs, directed by David Cromer, is a budding writer's coming of age. Eugene Morris Jerome, a stand-in…
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The revival of David Mamet's 1992 Oleanna in current production at the Golden Theater stars one of my favorite actors Bill Pullman whose elastic face and frenetic movements are on full display in this theatrical pas de deux with the patrician, cool Julia Stiles. They play John, a professor on the verge of tenure and…
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