> 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 […]

> 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 […]

> 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 […]

> 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 […]

> 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 […]

> FOLLIES may be the strangest of all Broadway masterpieces; after 40 years, it’s still the most avant-garde work of Stephen Sondheim’s career. It’s easy enough to make the show sound linear:  set in 1971 (which was present-day when the musical was written), it takes place at a theatre that had, for some decades, housed […]

> The Tony Awards aren’t quite like any other televised awards show.  They’re happily, unapologetically insular (and so are the ratings–thank god for CBS, where “young” audience is a relative term), and there’s hardly ever anything like an upset; this year the closest was probably Mark Rylance winning Best Actor In a Play for Jerusalem […]