The 65th annual Drama Desk Awards, which had been postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then rescheduled for Sunday, May 31, only to be postponed again due to the emerging protests and violence touched off by the notable deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, were finally announced on Saturday, June 13. The […]
By EDWARD RUBIN My Name Is Lucy Barton written by Elizabeth Stout and published to a chorus of Hosannas in 2016, is now a one-woman, two-character play – running through Saturday, February 29 – at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway. Adapted from the book by Rona Munro and directed by Richard […]
By AARON KRAUSE NEW YORK, N.Y. — Dorothy Michaels is unstoppable. We learned that much in the Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical adaptation of Tootsie. It is based on the popular Academy Award-nominated 1982 movie with the same title. So it comes as no surprise that, even though the musical will close on Jan. 5 after 293 performances […]
By AARON KRAUSE NEW YORK, N.Y. — If you want to hear current members of the famed musical group The Temptations perform live this year, you’re out of luck. According to https://www.songkick.com/artists/499703-temptations, they aren’t touring. Moreover, organizers have not planned concerts for what is left of 2019. But you can travel back in time to the […]
By AARON KRAUSE NEW YORK CITY, N.Y. — The wording on the Playbill at Circle in the Square Theatre does not deceive your eyes: It really does say Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Now, the sights and sounds onstage might make you think you need an appointment with your eye and/or ear doctor. But what’s transpiring on that […]
By EDWARD RUBIN I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did – Harold Pinter, taken from his 2005 Nobel Prize Lecture When I first […]
By EDWARD RUBIN Sea Wall/A Life, two extraordinarily powerful one-act plays, presented in monologue form, are holding court at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Fueled by strong reviews, and the star power of film and stage actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge, it is one of the most deeply moving productions currently gracing the stage […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Crtic (“Steppin’ Out“) From the moment of its opening “Changing Lives,” there is a feeling in The Prom that the audience is in store for a good, old-fashioned throwback musical with real toe-tapping numbers and brassy orchestrations. And they would be right. Nominated for seven Tony Awards including Best Musical […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV, Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) To movie lovers around the world, Dustin Hoffman’s depiction of Michael Dorsey pretending to be woman soap opera star Dorothy Michaels in “Tootsie” was a magical vehicle in 1982. It may well have ushered in some of the first acknowledgments of sexual harassment and unfair differences in […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) The Motown Sound served as the soundtrack of the generation of the Sixties and Seventies and to those of that certain age, the music that accompanied those turbulent times was never without a hit song from The Temptations. Broadway’s previous success Motown: The Musical told the story […]