Playwright Jonathan Tolins has managed to take material that could have inspired a campy gay play limited in its appeal to those whose idea of first class entertainment is a Saturday night sendup on Fire Island, and extracted from it a fully rounded one-man play that adds genuine wit, a generous helping of insight, and […]

Lyle Kessler’s career has been pretty well defined by an early play of his, Orphans. There have been other plays, but nothing that created the stir that this one did.  It’s been 30 years since its first production off-Broadway enjoyed a run of 285 performances with a cast featuring John Mahoney, Terry Kinney, and Kevin Anderson. […]

The Divine Miss M has finally, after forty years, found her way to a Broadway stage in a legit play which could  be called The Divine Miss M, but isn’t, because that title was already taken. This Miss M would be Sue Mengers, and the play is I’ll Eat You Later, a chat by Hollywood […]

Douglas Carter Beane, prolific playwright with a comic twist, brought Broadway  a revised book to Cinderella just weeks ago, and here he is again with an original play about another kind of title character. This one is The Nance. The term has virtually disappeared from use, but it once referred to actors who played effeminate […]

Richard Greenberg is a prolific playwright whose Take Me Out established him some years ago as a welcome new voice. That play about the locker room aspects of a baseball team and the coming out of one its major players won about every award going including the Tony as Best Play.

You may well have heard that Matilda, the musical based on Roald Dahl’s popular novel, is now on Broadway, following a smashing first year run in London, where it continues to sell out nightly. The advance hype has been tremendous, and I understand it pulled  in about $10,000,000 in advance sale even before its first […]

The Golden Age of musicals on Broadway has been over for several years now. I think on that we are all agreed (by “all” I mean those of us who were around to revel in it, to appreciate it). Little by little, the standards for what makes a great musical have slipslid to the point […]

Anita Loos, the charming and talented screenplay writer and novelist, was having a sort of mid life crisis in her career and in her personal life in 1946.  Ms. Loos was 58 years old at the time, and had finally left her husband, John Emerson, an abusive hypochondriac who stole money and credit from her. […]

I knew Keith Carradine and Hunter Foster were featured in this musical, but the rest of the cast were not familiar to me.  I knew Neil Pepe,  the artistic head of the off Broadway Atlantic Theatre, to be a director of range.  Sergio Trujillo has done fine work on several shows, and is one of the […]

For reasons of his own, Jonathan Bank, the artistic director of the very useful Mint Theatre, seems determined to single-handedly deliver the playwright Teresa Deevy from oblivion to renewed prominence on the theatre scene.

Picture yourself stuck in a run down 100 seat movie theatre in Worcester County, Massachusetts in the summer of 2012. You are hidden from view, and you cannot speak, so for 3 hours you must listen to the talk between two cleaning men whose job it is to sweep the floors and toss out popcorn […]