> Buzz has it that Jon Robin Baitz’s play OTHER DESERT CITIES is one of the frontrunners for this year’s Best Play Tony Award, and it’s easy to see why. (Let’s leave aside the fact that so few new plays open on Broadway these days, whatever manages to stay open for more than a couple […]
> There’s an inescapable irony in Theresa Rebeck’s play SEMINAR when the bilious novelist (Alan Rickman) who’s reluctantly teaching a group of aspiring young writers launches an attack on one of them by predicting that his “whorishness” will make him more suited for a life in Hollywood than one in the finer precincts of the […]
> Haven’t all the jokes been made? In the history of Broadway, there may never have been a show as relentlessly ridiculed as SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK. At this point, it may be that the only interesting thing that could be said about the show would be if it weren’t as bad as you’d […]
> Despite the comparably dismal length of their Broadway runs, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG is an entirely different species of flop from Carrie. The latter was an intruder on the Great White Way from the start, the implausible musical version of a Stephen King novel and hit horror flick that mixed high school, pigs’ blood […]
> Once there was a time when Broadway musicals didn’t have to say anything about society, politics, art, literature, or really much of anything. They were exercises in style, excuses for glamorous people to get up on stage in fancy costumes and sing tuneful, ingenious songs while dancing up a storm. That’s the world of […]
> Few things bring audiences as much joy as the sight of a well-known actor or actress revealing a side of their talent that’s never been seen before. (It’s not just general audiences, either–those roles become instant favorites for Oscar nominations and wins.) It can be as simple as Halle Berry, Julia Roberts or Nicole […]
> The Producers may have been both the best and worst thing ever to happen to Matthew Broderick. He started his career in the mid-1980s as a fairly smooth, smart-aleck teen mouthpiece for Neil Simon in Brighton Beach Memoirs and John Hughes in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but over the succeeding years, his persona for […]
> For a new play, WAR HORSE has strong movie connections. The play is adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford from the 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo, and that novel is also the basis of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film, which will be in theatres for Christmas (the script for which is by Lee Hall […]