I caught a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying this week, and as I watched young Nick Jonas prancing about as J. Pierrepont Finch in the current Broadway revival of  the Frank Loesser-Abe Burrows master work, I suddenly had a revelation about the recent and current  Broadway scene. [Read more...]

Margaret Edson is that rare bird, a playwright whose first play, Wit, earned a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  That alone makes her unique, but she becomes more so when we realize that she has never had another play produced and is “committed to teaching, now”, but unlike the heroine of her play, who as teacher specializes in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne,  she confines her work to exposing  kindergarten children to the joys of  reading and the written word.

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The battle has begun.

I’ve been reading followup columns from the critics of the New York Times and other prominent commentators admitting that some of their nitpicking reviews of the current revival of Porgy and Bess are not consistent with the reaction they have been receiving from their readers.  [Read more...]

Athol Fugard, South African playwright, had been writing plays for 20 years when The Road to Mecca was first mounted in 1988. Clearly a personal diatribe against the platitudes inherent in so much of organized religion, he should have known by the time he wrote this play that a debate between two opponents a play does not make. [Read more...]

I don’t usually take you along with me when I go trouping off/off Broadway, but I’m making an exception because last evening I stumbled on a special treat and as it will run through January 7th, you might just catch it if you plan to be in New York during this next week. [Read more...]

David Hyde Pierce clearly likes to keep working, for which we are grateful. Ever since his long run as Frasier’s brother Niles on the sitcom “Frasier,”  he has returned to his stage roots by appearing seasonally, showing us the range of his talents. For though the basic Pierce shines through in each of his characterizations, there is just enough bonus material to make a new visit with him fun and very worth while. [Read more...]

Back in what now seems like the “not so good old days,” each Broadway season seemed to offer at least one fun filled show about athletes (all male then)  and the ladies in their lives.  The package included  melodic scores, topical lyrics and ebullient dancing. The genre slipped away in the post-WWII evolution of musicals, beginning with the more book-oriented Oklahoma! in 1943, the more dance-oriented musicals that  were hinted at in On Your Toes in 1936, developed in On The Town in 1944, established in West Side Story in 1956.  [Read more...]

Here we have a comedy, a first, dealing with meeting the needs of the USA and China when doing business together. In Chinglish,  David Henry Hwang’s play, a smalltime American business man is visiting a small company in Guiyang,China in an attempt to get a contract for his sign company to produce signs in English that are accurate translations of their Chinese originals. [Read more...]

The closet is, at last, wide open. No more need for gay characters to parade around pretending to be women, which was the game played up through the mid-twentieth century.  When even a hint of the love that dare not speak its name was offered onstage (The Captive, The Green Bay Tree) whispers were heard among the ‘carriage trade’  audiences, and not too many of the general public bothered to show up at all. [Read more...]

David Ives’ contribution to our Broadway season, courtesy of the Manhattan Theatre Club is, as the King of Siam used to say, “a puzzlement.”  Starting as a hilarious backstage comedy involving a playwright/director and an aspiring actress who, though late for her audition, is desperate to be allowed to read, and through all sorts of chicanery, allure and chutzpah, gets her chance. [Read more...]