In 1949 Clifford Odets, after years of cashing in on his early successes with the Group Theatre, returned to Broadway with The Big Knife, which was to be his bitter comment on the price he paid for leaving the theatre to take Hollywood money for turning material into screenplays for the masses. [Read more...]

Cicely Tyson now joins Laurette Taylor in the small pantheon of actresses who have given us  monumental performances onstage; Ms. Taylor  of course, for her Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, the memory of which is still vividly alive for all of us who were fortunate enough to experience it. Judith Anderson might join the ladies, for her Medea. And I’ve heard that Jeanne Eagels created quite a stir with her Sadie Thompson in Rain.  [Read more...]

I feel I’ve had to do almost as much research as the actors who perform in the Lincoln Center Theatre’s production of Richard Nelson’s Nikolai and the Others. That’s because so many of the 18 characters who inhabit it are major figures in the world of music and ballet in the America of the late 1940s. I had heard of all, or nearly all, but I knew virtually nothing about their offstage lives. [Read more...]

Playwright Jonathan Tolins has managed to take material that could have inspired a campy gay play limited in its appeal to those whose idea of first class entertainment is a Saturday night sendup on Fire Island, and extracted from it a fully rounded one-man play that adds genuine wit, a generous helping of insight, and a warm heart to the brew. [Read more...]

Lyle Kessler’s career has been pretty well defined by an early play of his, Orphans. There have been other plays, but nothing that created the stir that this one did.  It’s been 30 years since its first production off-Broadway enjoyed a run of 285 performances with a cast featuring John Mahoney, Terry Kinney, and Kevin Anderson. It offers 3 actors very juicy roles, and Anderson and Mahoney received Obies for their efforts. [Read more...]

The Divine Miss M has finally, after forty years, found her way to a Broadway stage in a legit play which could  be called The Divine Miss M, but isn’t, because that title was already taken. This Miss M would be Sue Mengers, and the play is I’ll Eat You Later, a chat by Hollywood super agent of the 70s and 80s who presided over her movie star clients’  every professional move and many of their personal ones as well,  all the while collecting 10% of their astronomical fees. [Read more...]

Douglas Carter Beane, prolific playwright with a comic twist, brought Broadway  a revised book to Cinderella just weeks ago, and here he is again with an original play about another kind of title character. This one is The Nance. The term has virtually disappeared from use, but it once referred to actors who played effeminate men with mincing accents that made fun of homosexuals, which was fine with the general public because these characters were laughing at themselves and forcing us to laugh along with them. [Read more...]

Richard Greenberg is a prolific playwright whose Take Me Out established him some years ago as a welcome new voice. That play about the locker room aspects of a baseball team and the coming out of one its major players won about every award going including the Tony as Best Play. [Read more...]

You may well have heard that Matilda, the musical based on Roald Dahl’s popular novel, is now on Broadway, following a smashing first year run in London, where it continues to sell out nightly. The advance hype has been tremendous, and I understand it pulled  in about $10,000,000 in advance sale even before its first preview at the Shubert Theatre in New York. Something about the show appears in the gossip columns almost daily, so it well may duplicate its London success on our great white way. [Read more...]

The Golden Age of musicals on Broadway has been over for several years now. I think on that we are all agreed (by “all” I mean those of us who were around to revel in it, to appreciate it). Little by little, the standards for what makes a great musical have slipslid to the point where melody is out, the beat is in, where lyrics getting laughs is out, whereas now they can’t possibly be heard because the microphones distort them. Wit has left the room, to be replaced by scatalogical humor. Deft is out, crude is in. It’s no longer “less is more”, now it’s “more is better.”  [Read more...]