There’s a joke Maggie and her son Joe like to tell on their tours of the local mine in Samuel D. Hunter’s latest play: “Guy falls down into the mine. His boss yells at him, ‘did you break anything?’ Guy shouts back, “only rocks down here, sir, not much to break.” But as Greater Clements […]
Complete Guide to Holiday shows on and off Broadway
This holiday season in New York means at least ten Christmas Carols, including one this year on Broadway, and 15 Nutcracker Suites. Holiday shows in the city range from family fare to offbeat satires and even off-color burlesque, many of which return year after year. But any guide must begin with the two oldest and […]
The Inheritance Broadway Review: Gay Life Then and Now
The Inheritance, a long, ambitious play about three generations of gay men in New York, pays homage to two masterpieces, without being one itself. Yet the play by Matthew Lopez, making his Broadway debut, is both sweeping and intimate, sophisticated and raw, a weepy that is often funny. Several performances are transporting, including two actors […]
Evita Review at New York City Center: A Feminist Spin with Two Evas
It’s surely pointless, four decades and two billion dollars after its debut, to rant about Evita, and silly to blame Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatrical canonization of the amoral historical figure Eva Perón as paving the way for the elevation of another media personality remade into a dictator-loving populist. Still, this core problem I have with the […]
Cyrano Review: Peter Dinklage Sings, Without a Fake Nose or Much Panache
Peter Dinklage’s singing voice would not normally qualify him for a role in a musical, unless in a Disney animated movie as a singing rhinoceros. But Rex Harrison couldn’t really sing either, and he was just right for My Fair Lady. In several ways, the star of Game of Thrones is an inspired hire for […]
Bella Bella Review: Harvey Fierstein As Rep. Bella Abzug, Gutsy and Adorable
Bella Abzug spoke at my junior high school graduation, until Donna Florio’s mother told her to shut up. “This is my daughter’s graduation, not a political rally.” Abzug paused, apologized….and kept on talking for ten more minutes, caught up in the vehemence of her argument against the latest political outrage. That’s my most vivid memory […]
Freestyle Love Supreme Review: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s improv rappers on Broadway
Freestyle Love Supreme is not so much Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway follow-up to Hamilton as it is a subsidiary of Lin-Manuel Inc. The hip-hop improv group that Miranda co-founded 16 years ago with fellow Wesleyan University alumni would certainly not be performing its spontaneous raps on Broadway at up to $199 a ticket were it not […]
The Rose Tattoo Review: Marisa Tomei in Tennessee Williams’ comedy about a love-struck Sicilian widow
There are many cues to what’s wrong with this overly broad third Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ dated play, starring Marisa Tomei as Serafina Delle Rose, a Sicilian immigrant seamstress who turns from besotted wife to grieving widow to betrayed widow (because her husband had a mistress) to hopeful new lover. There are the dozens […]
Broadway Review: Slave Play. Interracial Role-playing on the Great White Way
I first saw Slave Play Off-Broadway, long before Rihanna made headlines for texting during the show (playwright Jeremy O. Harris publicly defended her; he was the one she was texting); and shortly before it became a cause célèbre among theater people for having been attacked by some black people who hadn’t actually seen it. Recently, […]
Broadway review: Tracy Letts is back on Broadway with Linda Vista
Can an underemployed middle-aged jerk be a babe magnet? That’s a question theatergoers are likely to ask about Wheeler, the central character in Linda Vista, Tracy Letts’ latest play on Broadway. Some women will surely ask the question rhetorically and in disgust; some men, full of hope. Indeed, your ability to get past that question […]
The Great Society Review: LBJ Back on Broadway
“I feel strongly that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” President Lyndon Johnson made this announcement in 1968, and the […]
Broadway Review: The Height of the Storm. Tricky plotting, or just a trick?
The same playwright who gave us The Father with a demented Frank Langella and The Mother with a depressed and possibly deranged Isabelle Huppert now offers us…dead Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins? Or maybe just one of them is dead? Or maybe neither? “You think people are dead, but it’s not always the case,” Andre (Pryce) says […]
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