1,487 stories by "BEN BRANTLEY"
Our co-chief theater critics discuss the plays and musicals that reflected and predicted an unstable world.
Our chief theater critics have no nickel-plated medallions to hand out, but they find plenty to celebrate among shut-down Broadway offerings.
It's a tradition this drama critic would highly recommend to those looking for ways to find magic in empty hours.
Funny, scary and necessary, this series of taped soliloquies contemplate the way we live now, in isolation.
An opinionated take on the songwriter's major works, from a delayed debut to a Pulitzer Prize- winning classic.
Why did it take so long for the composer to be unambivalently embraced? Maybe because ambivalence is what he's embraced most of all.
This thoughtful, history-spanning portrait of elusive identities testifies to the versatility of its composer, Michael Friedman.
This ravishing and singular musical, written and directed by Conor McPherson, hears America singing " Dylan " during the Great Depression.
Katori Hall's genial play, built around a cooking contest in Memphis, uses a sitcom structure to explore black masculinity.
Lucas Hnath's brilliant, boundary-melting play, starring a marvelous Deirdre O'Connell, is a first-person account of the violent kidnapping of his mother.
Lauren Yee's ambitious, tonally mixed play uses bait-and-switch tactics to approach the dark heart of a genocidal regime.
She may seem self-effacing, but it takes skill and smarts to be Nora and Hillary and, next, Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Ivo van Hove's attention-splintering revival of the immortal 1957 musical features new choreography, a ravishing orchestra and smothering visual effects.
Compelling revivals make "Endgame" (with Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe) and "Far Away" feel more unsettlingly relevant than ever.
This murky and tedious reworking of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's dark fable of love and lucre is illuminated by Lesley Manville's dazzling star turn.
In what he says will probably be his last work, a master playwright finds urgent lessons for the present in the past of a Viennese family.
Yaël Farber's stunning, Dublin-born interpretation of this eternal classic finds the dizzying layers of performance that rule all our lives.
The New Group's musical adaptation of Paul Mazursky's 1969 movie, featuring Suzanne Vega, doesn't smirk but it doesn't soar, either.
Simon Stone's contemporary spin on the classic tale of marital vengeance feels more clinical than tragic.
John Bolton's new memoir is titled "The Room Where It Happened," nearly the same as a song from Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway hit.
This ingenious, bare-bones adaptation of Susan Hill's Gothic novel " a long-running hit in London " allows audiences to take charge of their fear.
Racism is a stealth force in Eboni Booth's astute study of the (mostly) quiet desperation of minimum-wage workers in Vermont.
The Public Theater's festival has included 12 featured offerings, four cabaret acts and six pieces of developmental work. Here's what our critics saw.
Ideally cast as a plain-spoken woman made of quiet steel, she acts the way Elizabeth Strout writes in this compelling adaptation of the 2016 novel.
A jazz memoirist, a Palestinian rocketeer and Mexican myths set to music kick off the Public Theater's annual festival of adventurous work from across the globe.
