recent posts
- 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
- Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza
Category: Theater
-
A highly experimental Scottish play bloodies the Longacre Theater on Broadway. As the audience takes seats, cooks brew in pots (cauldrons) on a set that resembles a downtown city loft. Smoke blowers create a dreamy, sinister atmosphere. One actor, Michael Patrick Thornton, takes center stage, greeting the crowd, asking them to whisper the name of…
-
Ewwww! That’s not my critique of Paula Vogel’s tight memory play, How I Learned to Drive– rather the play, now having a Broadway debut after 25 years– is brilliant. It’s the people: the family. At center, Uncle Peck and Li’l Bit (the sublime actors David Morse and Mary-Louise Parker) who originated these roles Off Broadway.…
-
If you love Michael Jackson, you will love MJ—it’s that simple. The musical limns the controversial performer’s rise to “King of Pop,” avoiding the more difficult challenges of his personality in favor of music and dance—it’s that simple. Not that the star’s dependence on pain killers is not a significant plot issue—it’s that plot is…
-
Many revelers at this week’s Guild Hall winter gala remembered that before Covid locked everyone down, they were celebrating the premiere East Hampton cultural institution at its 2020 annual gala. And while much has changed in these two years—the venue was now the cavernous Cipriani 42nd Street—and, the 2022 honorees were Board Chair Marty Cohen…
-
Harold Hill, a talented conman, who wants to swindle the Midwest town of River City, Iowa, had me at hello. That may owe to the fact that “The Music Man” is played by Hugh Jackman. Arriving on a train, bumping along with salesmen grousing about Hill’s wiles, Hill pays them no mind, singing and dancing…
-
A new “The New Group” production, Black No More, a musical adaptation of George S. Schuyler’s Afrofuturist 1931 Harlem Renaissance novel, has the feel of something special, theater that may go off the charts in the manner of Hamilton. Black No More opened this week at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Featuring a stellar Broadway…
-
The Tyrones in lockdown look a lot like you and me. Amazon boxes, Chinese takeout, Starbucks, not to mention the Purell. Never mind that Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the classic 1912 American play by Eugene O’Neill, features another kind of affliction than the one we are experiencing. The scaled down version of O’Neill’s play,…
-
A homeless woman who communicates with aliens, “Trudy” opens the show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, created by Jane Wagner in 1985 for her then partner, now wife, Lily Tomlin. Revived at The Shed, under Leigh Silverman’s astute direction, the baton for dispensing planetary consciousness is passed to Saturday Night…
-
The night before the HBO series she spawned reincarnated as And Just Like That at MoMA, Candace Bushnell signals, she has moved on. At the Daryl Roth Theater, she struts across a stage fitted with a hot pink couch and shelves lined with Manolos, recounting a stellar career as columnist, coming from Connecticut, modest suitcase…
-
That voice. I’d know it anywhere, and so would you if you’ve been attuned to NPR. You could say I’m a junkie for talk radio, and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” is a particular addiction. A news quiz cum comedy revue, the show has gotten me from here to there, as I drive in traffic…
-
The epic length evolution of three brothers from Bavaria becoming Americans, immigrants in the 19th century coming by boat, would be one kind of story, maybe a sequel to “Fiddler,” picking up when the family leaves the shtetl. That this is the Lehman family, who go from textile merchants in the south to the Lehman…
-
Starved for Broadway’s reopening, a happy crowd packed Guild Hall for an evening of clips and anecdotes about The Producers, the winner of the most Tony awards of any musical in history. On a panel introduced by choreographer Susan Stroman, a winner of 5 Tonys herself, the show’s stars Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and Brad…
-
Legends of King Arthur and his court are having a moment: The Green Knight in theaters, and out east, Bay Street Theater’s production of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot –under the stars! Now a classic, its signature song “If Ever I Would Leave You” sends a particular nostalgic chill—ah love—especially for the musical theater genre that…
-
Begging the question: is it too soon to laugh about the pandemic year, 2020, a collection of short plays by masterful playwrights, did just that in a one-nighter at Guild Hall.‘Some of the actors are serious,” warned Bob Balaban, a tad nervous as he greeted giggle-ready well-wishers. “I hope you like this experiment.” Under his…
-
After a year and a half of sussing out a pandemic, surge-no surge, vax-no vax, mask-open face, it was refreshing to actually hear that cancer kills more Americans per year than Covid did in its tragic scourge. Not that anybody wants to hear about a deadly disease of any kind—or killing. In fact, it was…
-
Celebrity sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer turned 93 last weekend, and after decades on television and in the public eye, it is still a thrill to hear her, in her German /Swiss /Hebrew/ French/ American accented English, telling men to love their penises, even if the voice is that of the actress Tovah Feldshuh, now…
-
If I have to ease into live theater, Blindness is a great conduit, and an event. At the Daryl Roth Theater, temperature taken, health form complete, viewers file into the cavernous space fitted with lighting fixtures, a neon of color; seats, 2 together, are distanced. Headsets in place like bunny ears, you are ordered to…
-
“All families are the same, but like snowflakes, they are different,” said actor Bob Balaban recently by phone, explaining the rich detail of the play Squeaky, he’s to direct this week for a March 28 Guild Hall Zoom reading. The story attracted not only Balaban to direct, but a dream cast, all noted stage and…
-
As I write, Joy Behar asks Kamala Harris tasteful if anxious questions about the election/ COVID/ and Joe Biden’s plans on her daytime show The View. Her respect is through the roof, though you know, after years of experience, she has her doubts about the role of government on the planet. Wearing a blue sweater…
gossipcentral.com 