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 Strurridge, 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 […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out”) With 14 Tony Award nominations to its credit, Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown is making its presence known in nearly every major category, the most for any show this season. Mitchell is making notable Broadway history, too, by being the first woman to join the scant handful of personages who […]
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“) There are times when the special effects in Beetlejuice, the latest musical to occupy the historic space at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, occur at such a dizzying pace, one can only compare them to serotonin and dopamine, the potent chemicals that douse the brain during […]
By AARON KRAUSE He is entering his 50th and final season as TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s Artistic Director and has garnered many awards for his work with the Bay Area company. And to top off Robert Kelley’s five decades at its helm, one of the longest of any professional regional theater, the founding artistic director recently […]
The nominees for the 2019 Antoinette Perry Awards (Tony Awards) were announced April 30. They were announced by Tony winner Bebe Neuwirth and Tony nominee Brandon Victor Dixon at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The 73rd annual ceremony will be broadcast by CBS from Radio City Music Hall […]
By ROY BERKO What do Rogers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter all have in common? Yes, they are all composers of American musicals, but they are also just some of those who attempted, and failed, to make George Bernard Shaw’s classical Pygmalion into a musical. At one point, Shaw had given permission […]
By EDWARD RUBIN There are few examples of jukebox musicals – a denigrating term if ever – that have blown me away. In fact, without overtaxing my brain, Jersey Boys, which dramatizes the formation, success and eventual breakup of the 1960s rock ‘n roll group The Four Seasons, is the only jukebox musical of import […]