34 stories by "Jonathan Kalb"
Mark Rosenblatt's new play Giant is a sensational, admirable, and courageous effort to Make Anti-Semitism Despicable Again. MADA baseball caps coming soon. You read it here first. The play, …
The new stage adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon just opened on Broadway, directed by Rupert Goold, doesn't seem sure who its target audience is. If you went not knowing the source material (th…
Jake Brasch's The Reservoir tells the story of a charmingly self-deprecating, openly gay NYU theater student named Josh who is a chronically relapsing drunk. Josh wakes up after a blackout n…
Ngozi Anyanwu's The Monsters is a poignant and muscular two-hander about a Black brother and sister, estranged for 16 years, who reconcile over intensive training in MMA fighting. It's a swe…
At the risk of sounding smug, let me say: I have been yowling, since the early days of the internet, to anyone who would listen, about the dangers of relinquishing our personal data and priv…
The British directing star Robert Icke specializes in contemporary adaptations of classics. He writes and directs them, proudly insisting that they only deserve attention if they hold their …
The farcical premise of Rajiv Joseph's play Archduke"just opened at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre"is that the young men who sparked World War I by assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferd…
With a depressingly vacuous, celebrity-circus Waiting for Godot sucking up so much oxygen on Broadway, it's a delight and relief to see Samuel Beckett produced at the Irish Arts Center by gi…
I went to Caroline Guiela Nguyen's Lacrima at BAM with great eagerness and curiosity. This was a major new work by the only woman with serious clout in the French theater (she is artistic di…
The Terrence McNally/Stephen Flaherty/Lynn Ahrens musical Ragtime is not the subtlest theater contraption. Premiered on Broadway in 1998, it's a big, galumphing machine with very big things …
Absurd as it may seem, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a demanding play about existential despair and cosmic futility first performed in 1953, has just opened on Broadway for the fifth t…
Andrew Scott's Vanya"a solo show in which he plays all the roles in Anton Chekhov's classic play"is one of the most extraordinary acting performances I've seen. Certainly this year, maybe in…
With the United States now governed by swaggering, ignorant bigots spewing xenophobic venom, militarizing the border, and terrorizing any insufficiently White person hoping to come or stay, …
Beckett Briefs is a great title for a program of short plays by Ireland's most famously laconic writer. Those who take it literally can feel assured the evening won't be a slog (the whole th…
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, as anyone reading this knows, is a cornerstone of American drama. It's the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway (in 1959), the fir…
The opera Four Saints in Three Acts' astonishingly successful run on Broadway in 1934 was the most celebrated avant-garde theater triumph of its age. With a libretto by Gertrude Stein that t…
Skeleton Crew is Dominique Morisseau's best play so far. It's the most streamlined work in her celebrated Detroit trilogy, more tightly plotted, surprising, and moving than either Detroit '6…
If nothing else, you have to admire the chutzpah of Robert Icke's Oresteia, which tries to collapse the 8-hour, 3-play action of Aeschylus's monumental Oresteia"a founding work of Western dr…
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel The Kite Runner is a vividly descriptive and often gripping tale of guilt and expiation, class conflict, and wrenching refugee experience, set mostly in Afghanis…
On the way to a play one day in early 2019, I climbed out of the subway at 8th Avenue and 44th St. and was stunned to see a massive, multi-story billboard with no writing on it, just a black…
The first ten minutes of Robert Icke's 3 ¾-hour Hamlet had me worried. Icke is a British directing star, known for contemporized takes on the classics, but the only other production of hi…
Taylor Mac is one of those magi of pandemonium who knows how to breach the defenses of people like me who don't surrender easily to orgiastic theatricality. There's something about Mac's par…
I went to the new opera Intimate Apparel because the 2003 play it was made from is one of my favorites by Lynn Nottage. Cards on the table, I'm no opera fan in general but rather one of thos…
In my time as a critic I've noticed on numerous occasions that musicals rooted in political satire always have second-act problems. They come out of the gate identifying a specific breed of …
Dominique Morisseau is aware that most of her fans see her as a predominantly naturalistic playwright with a sharp comic tongue and a sharper social conscience. She says so in an intro note …
