It’s interesting and informative (and fun) to revisit some of the classical musicals. A new director, new stars, even a new scenic design can alter our memory of it, or allow us to share it with a friend who wasn’t around when it was last in the vicinity. I’ve seen La Cage aux Folles, the […]
Good People
A perfect cast in a fine play under the direction of a seasoned professional and usually all will be well. Actually it’s better than “well” at the Samuel J.Friedman Theatre where the Manhattan Theatre Club is offering us an engrossing new family dramedy called Good People.
Patrick Page, Spider-Man’s Green Goblin, talks with DCTS
When he’s not busy playing the Green Goblin, out to destroy the world, in Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark, Patrick Page is very much in demand as a Shakespearean actor, a playwright, director, and acting teacher. The multi-talented Patrick Page, well known to DC audiences, tells us what it’s like being in a show that has become a national obsession, and […]
The Divine Sister
Charles Busch as playwright has a most distinctive voice. It is somewhere between Kaufman and Hart, George Abbott, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Mel Brooks, Charles Ludlam and S.N.Behrman.
West Side Story on tour
Richard Seff, on vacation, leaves the beach to see the West Side Story touring company The Broward Center of the Performing Arts in Ft. Lauderdale is currently presenting the recent revival of West Side Story, following its two year run at the Winter Garden on Broadway. When it closes here on February 27th, it will […]
Dancer Ryan Watkinson tells us how to succeed on Broadway
When a local talent makes it to the Big White Way – and is about to open in the new revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying starring Daniel Radcliffe (“Harry Potter” and Equus) – you can’t help but smile and applaud his efforts.
The Whipping Man
Not a very appetizing title, this. Matthew Lopez, the playwright, was unknown to me. “Men of a Certain Age” is the TNT hit TV series in which André Braugher co-stars, yet I didn’t know his work. The remainder of the cast, André Holland and Jay Wilkison, were new to me too.
Black Tie
A.R. Gurney has written over 40 plays and I’ll wager he’s had more use of perhaps 6 characters than any playwright in history. This prolific playwright is in the Alan Ayckbourn/Neil Simon class of writers who continue to find gold as they probe the same mines, those that exist in their own private worlds. Mr.Ayckbourn […]
The Road to Qatar!
This is a tough review to write because this 90 minute one-act musical comes to the York Theatre from a successful run in Texas. It is in the form of a Crosby-Hope “Road” movie, which is a fine idea because it details the fun its authors Stephen Cole (book and lyrics) and David Krane (music) enjoyed […]
What the Public Wants
As the 21st Century enters its second decade, the plays of a hundred years earlier are attracting the eyes of the artistic directors of a number of New York theatres. Last week we had a hit from the 1906 season, Langdon Mitchell’s The New York Idea, the week before we had Oscar Wilde’s The Importance […]
The New York Idea
The Atlantic Theater Company has enriched us with productions of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and Spring Awakening, both of which moved on to acclaim on Broadway. For these and other productions like Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, the company has been recipient of Lucille Lortel and Tony Awards, and it is among our city’s […]
Other Desert Cities
2011 struggled to its feet and came up with a winner courtesy of Lincoln Center Theater’s André Bishop and Bernard Gersten, who’d stumbled themselves in recent weeks with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and A Free Man of Color.