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, […]
Chinglish
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 […]
Standing on Ceremony, the Gay Marriage Plays
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 […]
Venus in Fur
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 […]
Children
In 1974, A.R.Gurney’s Children was produced by Lynne Meadow at the Manhattan Theatre Club. It was Gurney’s first full length play and it arrived on our shores following a successful London run at the Mermaid Theatre which starred Constance Cummings. Here, its four person cast included Nancy Marchand, Swoozie Kurtz, Holland Taylor and Dennis Howard; under […]
The Lyons
The various Manhattan not-for-profit theatres have done us all a great service by offering a home to a dozen talented playwrights. Theatres like Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center Theatre, the Vineyard, Atlantic Theatre Company, 2nd Stage, Playwrights’ Horizons and others have presented dozens of plays by the likes of Terrence McNally, John Robin Baitz, Tom […]
Man and Boy
Frank Langella’s performance is spell-weaving In late 1963, Terrence Rattigan’s play Man and Boy opened on Broadway with a cast headed by film star Charles Boyer, where it limped along for 54 performances. It followed the London run, which was also brief.
Mike Daisey urges a deeper look at the legacy of Steve Jobs
In the end, Steve Jobs failed to “think different,” in the deepest way In his brilliant monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, seen here at Woolly Mammoth last March, Mike Daisey laid out both his obsession with Steve Jobs and Apple’s technology, and the shocking truths he discovered in a visit to […]
The Submission
Say thanks to whomever you say thanks to, for we have a new playwright among us. His name? Jeff Talbott, and he is the recipient of the first ever Arthur Laurents-Tom Hatcher Award, which honored him with $50,000 plus $100,000 for production costs for his prize winning play The Submission.
With Baltimore Connections, a New York address, and Moscow Art Theater training, Studio Six Theatre puts the Alpha back into Acting
This column is about Baltimore theater, and, admittedly, the connection between Studio Six (in New York City) and Baltimore is a little tenuous.
Temporal Powers
Jonathan Bank runs a pretty tight ship over there at the Mint Theater Company, one of our off-Broadway treasures. In the most unpretentious of black box theatres on the third floor of a 43rd Street office building, he has given us productions of long forgotten or little known works by playwrights who were, in their […]
Michael Feinstein and Linda Eder at The Regency
I don’t usually cover the Cabaret world, but as Michael Feinstein and Linda Eder have both graced Broadway stages on their career trajectories, I thought you might like to know how they’re doing when they are up there just inches away from you, on their own without benefit of plot, full orchestra or an audience […]