Carmen Jones, currently playing at Classic Stage Company, is pretty much what you’d expect from a show directed by Tony Award winner John Doyle, choreographed by Tony Award winner Bill T. Jones, and starring two-time Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose …Read more

Nearly 30 years ago, Marlene Dietrich — a German actress who rose to stardom via the 1930 film Blue Angel — left Berlin for Hollywood. There, and later in Paris, she spent years charming moviegoers, making free love, and being an international icon …Read more

Two-Player Game, the new album from Joe Iconis and George Salazar, is the musical equivalent of solid gold. There’s no song that isn’t delightful, no moment that isn’t interesting. The album speaks not only to Joe Iconis’ and George Salazar’s mutual …Read more

Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of the greatest roles in the Western canon, and the true test of any Lear production is how convincingly (and how devastatingly) the lead actor can portray Lear’s fall from the first to final scene. So when I read in th …Read more

Exhibit A: William Shakespeare. Arguably the greatest playwright who ever lived, he gave us masterpieces of English literature like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar…or did he? Exhibit B: Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare’s literary rival, …Read more

Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is an incredibly dense play. And the production at New York Theatre Workshop, directed by the usually brilliant Rachel Chavkin, feels more like two and a half hours of drudgery than it does enjoyable …Read more

  Edith Piaf may have risen to stardom in the late 1930s, but she started out as a Parisian street singer, and that’s where Piaf! The Show (at FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall) begins. Or, to be strictly accurate, it begins with “L’accordeoniste” — t …Read more

“This is a true story, even the parts that never happened.” So we’re told at the beginning of The Lucky Ones – a musical by folk rock duo The Bengsons (and Sarah Gancher) produced by Ars Nova. Coming as it does before we really know what we’re gettin …Read more

“The Dream of the Rood” is an Old English poem about a talking cross – specifically, the cross on which Christ was crucified. Once a vehicle for administering punishment to the oppressed, the cross is now a symbol of salvation, encrusted with jewels …Read more

Arin Arbus doesn’t beat around the bush in her production of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy The Winter’s Tale (at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonksy Shakespeare Center). She knows many of us are going to be waiting for that bear to show up in Act III a …Read more