5,757 stories by "Jonathan Mandell"
"The Baker's Wife" offers dual stories of redemption that make it feel designed for the holidays: There is the fable of all the villagers in a small French town setting aside their petty squ…
Once again, theater seems of little interest to the book review staff at the New York Times. Their Notable Books of 2025 features no published plays (although books of poetry are inclu…
Below are works of theater that I saw this year in New York for which I'm most grateful.  I have been posting such a list around Thanksgiving Day every year since 2013, which is my ann…
Fixings and pairings will be on the table later this week, and were on stage this past week, with the revival of a couple of old musicals that needed to be fixed (were they?), and some starr…
"Chess" is not a serious musical.  That's the key to appreciating this show, which is supposed to be about an American and a Russian grandmaster battling over both the game of chess an…
Below is the Broadway schedule for Thanksgiving Week 2025, which differs from the usual week's schedule: Only one show of the 34 currently playing has a performance on Thanksgiving Day, Thur…
Alice Brooks has an unusual way of talking about the difference between 'Wicked" and its sequel "Wicked: For Good.," which is opening nationwide today. The making of the two Wicked movies wa…
What I found most surprising about this modest, appealing two-person musical, whose title more or less sums up what happens, was the reaction to it on the night I attended " the ecstatic che…
Tom Hanks co-wrote this quaint, unremarkable time-traveling play adapted from his book of short stories, and stars as Bert Allenberry, a tech entrepreneur from the year 2089, who travels bac…
"The American Revolution" launched last night (You can binge all six episodes online now or wait for the nightly broadcast.)Revolution was also on stage last week in various ways. Series …
It's early on Election Day, and Oedipus, populist candidate confident that he'll be swept into office, makes two off-the-cuff public promises that will blow up in his face: He will release h…
William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays (10 tragedies, 10 histories, 17 comedies) and 154 Sonnets " 884,647 words in all.He is said to have invented 1,700 words in the English language, including…
PBS tonight broadcasts the production of "Twelfth Night" that reopened the Delacorte in Central Park this summer with a starry cast including  Peter Dinklage, Sandra Oh, Lupita Nyong'o, D…
Ken Burns' latest documentary "The American Revolution," launches this Sunday on PBS, ten years after he began work on it, which was just about the time that Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical "Ha…
'If I had to choose between being known while alive or being known while dead, I gotta go with dead," says Gavrilo, the teenager who will soon assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sta…
In honor of Veterans Day, below is a list of ten works of theater depicting military veterans, ranging from Ancient Greek tragedies and Shakespearean history plays to Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes…
NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani turns out to be polarizing in a way even he didn't realize: His Broadway favorites. In a post-election interview with CNN,  he said he used to belt ou…
"The Queen of Versailles," Stephen Schwartz's latest musical, which stars Kristin Chenoweth as the real-life billionaire's wife Jackie Siegel,  comes far closer to Jackie's favorite ch…
The casts of the Broadway shows Buena Vista Social Club, Just in Time, and Ragtime will perform at the 2025 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on November 27, 2025. The 99th edition of the…
Five albums have been nominated for the best musical theater album Grammy Award, all of them of current or recent Broadway shows (the fourth consecutive year that only Broadway cast recordin…
,There are puppets in long-running New York shows like "The Lion King" and "The Little Shop of Horrors," muppets are making their Broadway debut (albeit briefly) in "Rob Lake Magic with spec…
Before the start of this R&B musical comedy about Barack Obama's first term as president, Eli Bauman, its creator and director, bustled out on stage to urge us to ignore what's "out ther…
"This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt," Zohran Mamdani, j…
New Yorkers are electing our 111th mayor today, which seems a good day to look back at mayors who made it to Broadway. I mean as characters (or caricatures), but at least one actually wrote …
By the end of "Kyoto," a play about the effort it took to achieve the first international agreement to address the climate crisis, we come to understand  " perhaps too well " that it w…
