I am a native New Yorker, and I honestly love NYC. Although I know the city has its many flaws, I will defend it against all comers. Yet I cringed at the rosy ‘melting-pot’ version of the city painted in the new musical “New York, New York” in the 19 …Read more

There’s a fine line between satire and silliness, and “The Thanksgiving Play” crosses that line too often. Playwright Larisa Fasthorse takes shots at well-meaning, naive white people trying to be ‘woke.’ When her aim is true, she makes her point, hol …Read more

Sometimes performers are so good at their roles that they become forever identified with that part. For many, Sean Hayes will always be Jack on television’s “Will and Grace,” kooky, egocentric, and outrageously flamboyant. Those people would be surpr …Read more

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

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