The last time I saw “Sweeney Todd,” it was as a barebones production of 10 performers, including Patty Lupone and Michael Cerveris. Each performer even played an instrument, and the show was wonderful. The most recent revival, featuring a 26 piece or …Read more

I had such high hopes for the revival of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot at Lincoln Center Theater this season. The music was a known quantity- glorious, lush and romantic. The title song had become a symbol of a young president JFK and the New Frontier h …Read more

Some of my favorite theater moments have come when something unexpectedly went wrong onstage. Alan Bates caught a picture falling off the wall and ad libbed about poor housekeeping. Faith Prince continued to type even as her typewriter table collapse …Read more

The real stars of the show “Life of Pi” are puppets: a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a 450 pound Royal Bengal tiger. Although animated by skilled puppeteers who make them move, purr, whine and growl, those creatures become so incredibly real, that …Read more

In the 1967 film version of Camelot (a movie I adore), there comes a moment when Arthur senses that the presence of his illegitimate son, Mordred, together with the forbidden passion shared by his beloved Queen Guenevere and his best friend Lancelot, …Read more

Émilie du Châtelet was playing around with physics more than a century before Einstein entered the scene. Her analysis of force and velocity, which she articulated as F = mv², would pave the way for Einstein’s much more famous equation. But her gende …Read more

photo by Julieta Cervantes Most musicals feature two or three impressive dance numbers, numbers that leave the audience breathless. However, often those dances are incidental to the story. Then there’s the revival of “Bob Fosse’s DANCIN” which begins …Read more

Most people today (myself included) have an absence of ritual in their lives, and never is this more apparent than at this time of year–when Catholics worship in specifically orchestrated ways almost every day of the week and Jews observes a 3000-ye …Read more

Dance can be a powerful vehicle for storytelling, for expressing emotion, and for conveying truths that are sometimes difficult to articulate in words. If you need proof, go see J. Chen Project’s AAPI Heroes: Myths and Legends, currently playing at T …Read more

photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman The good news about “Bad Cinderella,” the new musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by David Zippel is that it’s not all that bad. The costumes are frothy, colorful and delightfully gaudy, alt …Read more