There's an eponymous and ominous presence onstage at New York City Center Stage I. You can't see him. But his evil, autocratic and tyrannical nature permeates every scene in Erika Sheffer's …
FORBIDDEN PLEASURES Even the most avid theatergoers may not realize how much about Broadway there is to have fun with until they see Forbidden Broadway, the decades-old Off-Broadway musical …
FOR THE ROOMMATE, IT'S ULTIMATELY ABOUT THE CASTMATES Take a big dose of Grace and Frankie, add a bit of Arsenic and Old Lace, and top it off with the magnificent Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone…
JULIE BENKO IS, AND IS ABOUT TO HAVE, A BROADWAY BABY Vocalists have found many fruitful ways of reaching their audiences, from celebrating other singers to paying tribute to composers and l…
IT MAY BE ABOUT A MOVEMENT MORE THAN ITS PEOPLE, BUT A POWERHOUSE SCORE AND WINNING PERFORMANCES EMPOWER SUFFS There are several major conflicts in Suffs, the new Broadway musical directed b…
JELLY'S JAM IS JAMMIN' THAT'S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW Jelly Roll Morton was born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe in New Orleans. Both his parents traced their Creole ancestry four generations back to …
YOUR GOLDEN TICKET TO HIGH ADVENTURE …AND HIGH TEA What could entice a typical New Yorker to get up fairly early on a Saturday or Sunday morning and make the trip to a narrow side street i…
A KINGDOM DIVIDED Sam (Uly Schlesinger) is a bright, articulate and sincere young man. But he is also nervous, sensitive and bitter. In fact, he has recently attempted suicide. Actress Ruby …
AZNAVOUR IS YOUNG AGAIN Charles Aznavour hoped to be still singing before audiences on his 100th birthday. Unfortunately, he died in 2018 at the age of 94. But Jules Grison is celebrating Az…
UNIQUE, DELICIOUS, ENTERTAINING, MAGICAL No matter how many times illusionists deceive our eyes and mentalists read our minds, we are always amazed by their feats. This is certainly true of …
A FRANK PORTRAYAL Perhaps the most famous quote from Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl is "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart." However, these words were writ…
A DOCTORED PLAY NURSED BY JULIET STEVENSON Robert Icke's adaptation of Viennese dramatist Arthur Schnitzler's 1912 play, Professor Bernhardi might have been an interesting, if somewhat confu…
I HAVE A HUNCH YOU'LL LOVE THIS Victor Hugo published The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Notre Dame de Paris in French, in 1831. Since that time the novel about Quasimodo, the hunchback and the…
YES, ONE MORE TIME IS ONE MORE TIME ONE MORE TIME, BUT YOU'LL HAVE A GREAT TIME It well may be that there are no new plots left in the world of theater. But does that mean we have to keep se…
HOORAY FOR HOORAY Most songs became standards because they were made famous by popular singers. So it's easy to forget how many of them were introduced on the silver screen. Hooray for Holly…
YOU GOTTA LOVE IT Spring is in the air and so is love at 54 Below, where Scott Siegel is presenting Love Song Saturday Night, a monthly show where couples are encouraged to "swoon, raise a g…
Creating a musical is not an easy task. Finding backers to produce it is even more difficult. When creative people have the fortitude and faith to take on such an endeavor, one wants to be a…
ARE WE EVER GOING TO SAY GOODBYE TO GOODBYE GIRL? The 1977 film The Goodbye Girl, written by Neil Simon and directed by Herbert Ross, was the first romantic comedy to earn over $100 million …
A WARM SUMMER From the moment we first see Diana (Laura Linney) and Alice (Jessica Hecht), the two friends whose story is told in David Auburn's new play, Summer, 1976, we know exactly who t…
A PUB CRAWL FROM FOLKLORE INTO FANTASY When a show is called The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, you can bet that it's going to be a bit surreal, somewhat disturbing and ultimately captiv…
NOT BAD, CINDERELLA These days Prince Charmings are not in style. Nor are Fairy Godmothers. So it's pretty hard to expect adults to take stories like Cinderella very seriously. Nevertheless,…
WOMAN BECOMES A HIT Betty Smith is best known for her 1946 bestselling novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But her first love was theater. When she was a child growing up in Brooklyn, she would…
WANDERING WRITING The Wanderers, the new play by Anna Ziegler (Boy, A Delicate Ship, The Last Match, Another Way Home) now making its New York premiere with The Roundabout Theatre Company, c…
THE ATHENAEUM THEATRE IS BACK THIS SUMMER WITH A WIDE VARIETY OF ENTERTAINMENT ON ITS HISTORIC STAGES Athenaeum Theatre, Chicago's oldest continuously operating Off-Loop theatre is back, wit…
Anyone who's ever been in a school office will immediately recognize the verisimilitude of the set created for The Mad Ones