I’VE BEEN TO A MARVELOUS PARTY .. Each year, in early May, the Drama League hosts the gala social event of the New York theatre season. It’s a splashy affair set this May 21st in the ballroom at the Marquis Hotel in the heart of Times Square. Everybody who was anybody on and off Broadway […]

The Atlantic Theatre Company has borrowed from the past and come up with a British play circa 1997 called Gabriel by Moira Buffini.  It’s a play set in a dimly remembered moment in British history when the Nazis occupied the British Channel Islands, one of which, Guernsey, is the play’s setting.

Here is one oldie but goodie that is rarely seen. Dr. Knock or The Triumph of Medicine was, in its native France, a smash hit opening late in 1923, when it caused a sensation in a production starring Louis Jouvet. It was revived six times between 1923 and 1933, and seven more times between 1935 […]

Well, it certainly isn’t the movie of the same title, the one that starred Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan way back when. No, it’s one of a plethora of plays and musicals with gay themes  that have landed on New York stages  this season, many of them excellent, all of them timely and relevant.

If you’re looking for intelligent, well crafted, beautifully structured playwrighting, peppered with dialogue that rings totally true, the season should offer Donald Margulies regularly, and we’d all be nourished and satisfied.

Excellent cast, spectacular staging, but the story of Enron is best left to the documentarians, Richard Seff says of Londoner Lucy Prebble’s Broadway play.

Fences takes its place alongside Death of a Salesman, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Our Town and You Can’t Take It With You in the pantheon of great plays dealing with family life in our disparate America.

After a disappointing season of new musicals, capped by the recent arrival of The Addams Family, we turn now to another revival of the hits of the past, this time with Promises, Promises out of  Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Neil Simon in 1968.  It’s not exactly a classic, but it’s a fine adaptation of […]

Stephen Sondheim’s body of work is so vast, so varied, it’s only fitting that the tributes and galas and retrospectives should be sprouting up all over the place now that he’s entered his eighties and taken us along with him. Though there hasn’t been a new work (except for Road Show, née Bounce which hasn’t […]

This miracle musical from the pens of Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein, based on a French play by Jean Poiret, first landed on our shores in 1983 with a cast headed by George Hearn and Gene Barry. It returns now in a revival which was conceived and born in England at the Menier Chocolate Factory

Richard Seff reviews three Broadway productions: Next Fall, Come Fly Away and Lend Me a Tenor