How do you retain the feeling of rapport inherent in an intimate small theater setting when you move things to a much larger Broadway house? How do you manage to create a feeling of spontane…
Is "ripsnortin'" still a thing? In any event, the first Broadway revival in seventy years of Noël Coward's 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, opening tonight at the Todd Haimes Theatre, is a rips…
Calculus is "intuitively obvious." At least that's what they told me when I enrolled in a college calc course a gazillion years ago. In my case, it turned out not to be so true. But mathemat…
It is said that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. Fortunately, few of us can claim to have had first-hand experience in testing this adage, especially the "slowl…
Hi there, all you ignominious peons stuck in dead-end, soul-sucking jobs that you'd give anything to chuck yet are worried about losing to mechanization or AI or robots. You think this is a …
When Arthur Miller's seminal work Death of a Salesman was first produced in 1949, and indeed for some time after, it was viewed as an indictment of the evanescent nature of the "American Dre…
Full disclosure: I am a dog guy. If T. S. Eliot had come up with a book of poems about highly impractical dogs instead of one about "highly practical cats," I'd have been first in line to se…
Here's a bit of wisdom to cross-stitch on a throw pillow: "There are times when lying is the most humane thing you can do." Well, maybe. But in the case of Second Stage's glistening revival …
"The best things happen while you're dancing." So wrote Irving Berlin for the classic 1954 film White Christmas. Musical theatre fans might amend it slightly to "the best things happen while…
"We come in peace!" Comforting to know when the person who declaims these words is holding you at gunpoint during a poorly planned and even more poorly executed bank robbery that kickstarts …
Once upon a time, towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century, there was a Black man who served as U.S. President and a woman who served as his Secretary of State. Barriers were …
Genuinely disturbing or tempest in a teapot? That's the prompt for post-performance discussion after seeing Mark Rosenblatt's Olivier Award-winning play Giant, which opened tonight at the Mu…
Gin. Skin. Sin. Put them all together, and you're in for the hedonistic ride of your life in the flawlessly performed, few-holds-barred Encores! production of Michael John LaChiusa and Georg…
Primary Stages' production of Libby Carr's coming-of-age play Calf Scramble, opening today at 59E59 Theaters, offers up an intriguing premise and a well-executed series of set pieces about a…
The title of Anna Ziegler's explosive new play, having its world premiere at the Public Theater, is Antigone (This Play I Read In High School). It's catchy, and it may lead you to expect a v…
Early on in Elevator Repair Service's Ulysses, which opened tonight at the Public Theater in a co-production with the Under the Radar Festival, we are reminded by co-director and dramaturg S…
The "meaning" of Samuel Beckett's 1953 absurdist masterwork Waiting for Godot will be parsed forever and will never be fully discerned. Some theatregoers will be enthralled by the experience…
Many prize the state of Idaho as a go-to destination for outdoor recreational opportunities, white water rapids, hot springs, and majestic mountains. But playwright Samuel D. Hunter has a wa…
What does it mean to be human? And will our current and relatively unfettered deep dive into artificial intelligence help to clarify things, or will it further muddy the waters? These are th…
With the right word of mouth, the goofy, touching, and winningly performed rom-com musical Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), opening tonight at the Longacre Theatre, may just fin…
In the world of Broadway musicals, here's a question to ponder. When is a concept no longer just a concept but a full-out and successful marriage between book and music? Applied to the reviv…
The great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock described the art of suspense as providing the audience with foreknowledge of some terrible event that is about to unfold on unsuspecting characters. We …
The Seat of our Pants, opening tonight at the Public Theater and blessed with a first-rate cast of theatre stalwarts, is a new version of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Skin of…
Shakespeare's play Richard II is not a comedy. Nor was it meant to be. Yet you wouldn't know it judging from the random outbursts of titters and even the occasional guffaw from among audienc…
How can you sell your soul if you don't have one to begin with? That's just one of the many confounding aspects inherent in the flavorless new musical The Queen of Versailles that opened ton…