The comic backstager has a long, bright history. (Think of Bottom and the rest of Shakespeare’s hapless mechanicals rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe.) And—believe it—the genre is not going away anytime soon. (Consider Terrence McNally’s collection of ma …Read more

Can you ever really escape your past? This is the question posed by For the Last Time, a new jazz musical now playing at the Clurman Theatre. With music and lyrics by Nancy Harrow and direction by Will Pomerantz (who each additionally serve as co-lib …Read more

Syrian playwright and Applied Theatre practitioner Mohammad Al Attar launches a peaceful yet potent attack. His enemy is the world’s apathetic tendencies towards human suffering in the contentious Middle East.  His weapon is the theatre. In Could You …Read more

If Captain America had any musical talent and loved talking about sex, he would be in The Vaudevillians; like the famous superhero, the team of Dr. Dan Von Dandy (Major Scales) and his wife Ms. Kitty Witless (the terrific Jinkx Monsoon) were also cau …Read more

Theater has been pretty good to such biblical personae as Jesus (the superstar), Mary (who had her 2013 Testament), Joseph (of dreamcoat finery), Noah (who musicalized Two By Two), Adam and Eve (under The Apple Tree), and even Queen Esther (of The Ha …Read more

York Theatre Company’s production of the new musical Cagney, directed by Bill Castellino, is a wonderfully compelling biographical piece of theatre. Choreographer Joshua Bergasse works magic with the actors’ tap shoes, throwing the audience back to t …Read more

The Glass Menagerie, the semi-autobiographical “memory play” that launched the career of Tennessee Williams, takes place in a fragile space, presided over by an omniscient family photo and a narrator, Tom Wingfield (Richard Prioleau), who admits to t …Read more

Years ago, during a heated, college-theatre class debate on the subject of risk-taking in theatre, I, with the untamed and unearned arrogance of youth, scornfully declared, “You people have no idea what it means to take risks. All this talk of emotio …Read more

The Public Theater continues its long-standing commitment to present Shakespeare to as wide an audience as possible with its Mobile Shakespeare Unit. This company performs in prisons, shelters, and other venues in underserved communities. Now they’ve …Read more

I’ve been an ardent fan of the actor and writer Simon Callow since seeing his Orlando in As You Like It at the National Theatre years ago when I was a drama school student in London. Since then I’ve enjoyed his work in numerous films, his one man sho …Read more