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...]

Anita Loos, the charming and talented screenplay writer and novelist, was having a sort of mid life crisis in her career and in her personal life in 1946.  Ms. Loos was 58 years old at the time, and had finally left her husband, John Emerson, an abusive hypochondriac who stole money and credit from her. He dragged out their divorce settlement for years, yet he was in many respects the love of her life.

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I knew Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster were featured in this musical, but the rest of the cast were not familiar to me.  I knew Neil Pepe,  the artistic head of the off Broadway Atlantic Theatre, to be a director of range.  Sergio Trujillo has done fine work on several shows, and is one of the creators of the long running Jersey Boys.  [Read more...]

For reasons of his own, Jonathan Bank, the artistic director of the very useful Mint Theatre, seems determined to single-handedly deliver the playwright Teresa Deevy from oblivion to renewed prominence on the theatre scene. [Read more...]

Picture yourself stuck in a run down 100 seat movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts in the summer of 2012. You are hidden from view, and you cannot speak, so for 3 hours you must listen to the talk between two cleaning men whose job it is to sweep the floors and toss out popcorn boxes and soda bottles after each show. [Read more...]

Twenty years ago, the writer David Ives arrived on the New York theatre scene with a bang when his evening of short comic plays opened off Broadway, where they remained for some 600 plus performances.  Since then, he has adapted 32 musical books for the City Center Encores! series, and his original  full length play Venus in Fur was a hit on Broadway last season. Now, Primary Stages launches their 28th season with a revival of All in the Timing, Ives’ evening of six short plays that established him as a comedy writer of imagination and skill, with this 20th Anniversary production at 59 East 59th Street. [Read more...]

This musical pastiche, put together with bits and pieces of a dozen old musical comedies, opened 9 months ago at the Imperial on Broadway, and it’s very much still there, doing business that defies the mostly negative reviews that first greeted it. [Read more...]

It was interesting to see William Inge’s Picnic and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on successive nights.  Both first arrived on Broadway in the mid-fifties, both received the Pulitzer Prize, were great hits on stage and later on film. Both have major female characters at the center, each with unsatisfied yearnings. Both plays are engaging but I found it interesting to note the differences in tone, language, the handling of painful personal issues in very different ways. [Read more...]