The vista that opens “A Long Winter” is sublime, deep, and rugged as Mikey walks toward the top of the mountain, carrying a weight in his...
A curtain call used to feel like the beginning of the end. Now, sometimes, it is only the beginning of a show’s second life. More and...
A great farce always feels a little like watching someone carry an impossibly tall wedding cake across a crowded room. Every wobble makes you gasp. Every...
The most persistent conversations often happen inside our own heads. Medusa asks, or maybe demands, us to listen to them. Before the space ignites, audience members...
For the first several minutes of Sleuth, I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of game playwright Anthony Shaffer (“Death on the Nile“) wanted me to play....
Some overtures begin a musical. Others seem to unlock an entire lifetime of theatrical memories. Both are true as the first notes of Jule Styne’s unmistakable...
A musical flourish accompanies the parting of the red curtains, and a man stands, just to the right of the spotlight. He seems caught off guard,...
Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler perform in The Last Five Years at the Hollywood Bowl The first time I encountered The Last Five Years, I remember...
“She’s late, the girl.” The line lands like a flared warning before anything else has the chance to settle. It is tossed out with precision, edged...
Watching the Oscar-nominated film, “Marty Supreme“, I couldn’t help but think about how quickly momentum gathered around its charismatic star as the presumed frontrunner for Best...
Doireann Mac Mahon, Michael Hayden, Harrison Tipping, and Annabelle Zasowski in Irish Rep’s production of The Honey Trap. Photo by Carol Rosegg The lights shift in the...
As a gentle piano ushers us in, the dreamer and the dream disappear into the night. There’s a quiet but decisive shift in the final moments...
A grand piano and a pink feathered gown, worn by the unexpected, usher us into this unapologetically delightful romp. Women in black tie and tails and...
An old-fashioned clock is stationed over the stage like a warning, or a stopwatch, counting down the minutes until High Noon strikes and Marshal Will Kane...
Rain lashes the stage as John Millington Synge’s masterpiece comedy The Playboy of the Western World arrives at the National Theatre, with bodies moving through the...
It’s all delicious art deco inside Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, revived most brilliantly at the Menier Chocolate Factory under Christopher Luscombe’s immaculate direction. The revival arrives...
Bryan Cranston, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, and Paapa Essiedu in the West End production of All My Sons. Photo by Jan Versweyveld. The play opens in...
Assembled before our very eyes in the first few moments of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie at St. Ann’s Warehouse, the play barges in with an impressive,...
In one of its most radiant “preach to us” moments, Saturday Church rises up in a blast of light and love, urging us to feel the...
“Can’t you remember?” he asks his wife, who is reclined with ease and tension on the angular couch, referring to the female guest who is arriving...
I am not “wedded to calamity,” nor am I a purist by any means, especially when it comes to Shakespeare and the classics. Not to get...
“I have an idea…” she says brightly, and with that lightbulb moment, most of the mischief of this fabulous farce flies forward. It’s the lightest of...
Loneliness and love, two subtle but powerful constructs that rule the world and our senses, making us all act foolish and desperate at times, mostly because...
We went into each, hesitatingly, thinking these two shows would be strictly just ‘cute’. And probably well done, but not much more than that. I tend...
Three moonlit bodies motor out in an unexpected vehicle for a watery drop, hooded in wordless violence that sets the cinematic scene with a vengeance. It’s...
