1,487 stories by "Ben Brantley"
By transmitting his love of live performance, the "Just in Time" actor has completed his ascendance to full musical stardom.
Personal history emerges by painful degrees in "Oedipus," whose language and story, the actress Lesley Manville says, "wreck me every time."
The couple are gearing up for the Broadway opening of "Bug," about a descent into paranoia and psychosis in a squalid motel room.
In works like "Travesties" and "Arcadia," the playwright embraced the really big questions and wrestled words into coherent, exhilarating shape.
In shows like "Black Watch," "The Jungle" and "Oklahoma!," the institution has affirmed the theater's singular power to shock and illuminate our world.
Near the end of "Gypsy," the Tony-nominated actress sings a song that makes you rethink the show you've been watching. I talked to her about it.
Because Shakespeare gave his hero and antihero equal weight, the contest between the actors playing them has never been that easy to call.
Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk reflect on their decades of making daring theater together. Just don't call it a nostalgic exercise.
With a revival starring Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran in Brooklyn, a look at the carefully weighted balance that actors playing Blanche and Stanley need to strike.
New York theater's elder statesman of the avant-garde brings "Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey" to the stage, hist first new work in over a decade.
In her various incarnations, the "Gypsy" character is always loud, always scary, but so different. Ben Brantley reflects on all the onstage Roses he has known.
The longtime friends are appearing together in the new Broadway play "The Roommate." Everything you think you know about them may be wrong.
The actor conveyed the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, our critic writes.
Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe are the heart of the tear-streaked "Merrily We Roll Along" Broadway revival.
"Leading Lady," a mosaic of reminiscence and self-analysis, explores the ascent of a man who's really good at playing women.
"I had been prepared to be awed, intimidated, even terrified," Ben Brantley writes of meeting the actress in person five years ago.
Audiences were eager to humbly suffer the stinging quips tossed out by the towering figure that was Barry Humphries's creation.
Maria Friedman's productions of the show in London and Boston were hits. Now a starry cast is preparing to open her latest staging Off Broadway.
The actor, who died at the age of 72, was known for his commanding performances of Shakespeare's Richard III and the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi.
She was unforgettable onstage playing seemingly serene women who rippled with restlessness.
On a thrilling trip to New York, a 16-year-old budding critic learned that the insistent optimism of musical theater was a beautiful lie.
The New York Times theater critic, who stepped down after 27 years, recently responded to readers, including one hungry for a do-over on his review of a blockbuster musical.
After 27 years on the job, the writer Ben Brantley bids farewell with one last recommendation: Watch a show as if you were a reviewer.
After 27 years and more than 2,500 reviews, The Times's co-chief theater critic reviews his own tenure and talks about why he's (quietly) making an exit.
In a few minutes or a full show, these performers capture heartbreak, fury and laughs. For the words of Samuel Beckett, a disembodied mouth did the trick.
