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…
Rarely have I had to review a play whose meaning is as utterly elusive as that of Practice, Nazareth Hassan's comedy-drama-whatsit now being unveiled at Playwrights Horizons. Practice, the p…
"Can you explain simply please: what it is that makes a person a white person?" The question of who can claim whiteness is at the heart of Talene Monahon's thought-provoking new play, Meet t…
In 2005, when The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee opened Off-Broadway, the celestial bodies of the theatre world seemed to be in flawless alignment, and the production garnered rave r…
Back in 1928, Virginia Woolf chose to subtitle her fictional fantasy "Orlando" as a biography, chronicling the life of an Elizabethan boy who lives for hundreds of years and, somewhere along…
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…
Isn't it annoying when a pair of characters onstage start jabbering back and forth in a language you don't know, furthering the plot in ways you'll never understand? It happens at least twic…
Sandwiches. A strange commodity on which to hang a plotline, but they're a persistent leitmotif in Archduke, Rajiv Joseph's speculative history of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Jos…
You'd never know that things are amiss in the tiny village of Concorde in Provence, France. The denizens cheerfully toss metal balls in games of pétanque, rehash old grudges, and enjoy leis…
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…
Billy Collins's "Introduction to Poetry" describes an instructor's efforts to encourage students to engage with a poem both intuitively and emotionally. Instead, "All they want to do," the s…
When the announcement was made a few years ago that the Prince movie Purple Rain would be made into a stage musical, reactions ranged from euphoria among diehard Prince fans to boos from tho…
Bat Boy: The Musical, with a story and book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming and music and lyrics by Laurence O'Keefe (who, along with Kevin Murphy, also did the honors for Heathers: The …
Gloria Steinem famously stated, "We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach." As an academic who often leads courses in gender and sexuality s…
In 2021, Rick Pender finished work on The Stephen Sondheim Encyclopedia, a hefty labor of love that weighed in at 652 pages. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, it included detailed informati…
You have to suspend a lot of disbelief"really, shouldn't the phrase be "suspend belief?""to get the most out of Oh Happy Day!, Jordan E. Cooper's uncategorizable comedy-drama-musical-specula…
Wow! That's the interjection of the day and the singular way to describe the powerful and emotionally stirring revival of Ragtime that opened tonight at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Thea…
Missing the Ars Nova production of Oratorio for Living Things is one of my great theatre disappointments of the last several years. The production had performed only twice in 2019 before bei…
Though it tries hard to shock and amuse, Let's Love! never earns its exclamation point. Ethan Coen's dramatic experiment attempts a triptych on the theme of love but delivers vulgar irritati…
Mellow jazz is playing, and the Playwrights Horizons stage is plainly dressed: Emmie Finckel's set design consists of two folding chairs, a small table in between with two coffee cups and a …
1937 was a very good year for new shows in the West End. In addition to the smash hit Me and My Girl, London also saw premieres of Ivor Novello's The Crest of the Wave, the frothy musical co…
MCC Theater's world premiere of Caroline, written by Preston Max Allen and directed with measured intensity by David Cromer, may at first seem deceptively simple, but it gradually reveals a …