By EDWIN RUBIN The very mention of the New York City’s own wildly popular actress and comedian Jackie Hoffman – she of 1000 facial expressions, bodily quirks, a score of well-placed ad libs, and a mesmerizing voice that takes you prisoner with a waterfall of precisely enunciated words – signals that somewhere lurking around a […]
By EDWARD RUBIN Of all the celebs channeled by drag queens and female impersonators, Bette Davis, like flies to honey, has always been at the top of every performers list. Her mannerisms, her clipped New England cadences, her famous lines like “Fasten your seatbelt; this is going to be a bumpy ride,” and the forever […]
By AARON KRAUSE What are some “gifts” that you’ve brought to dark, anxiety-inducing times, places, or situations? Perhaps you smiled brightly while visiting a lonely, scared person forced to spend quarantine alone because she has no family or friends. Maybe another gift was your warm, re-assuring voice. Or, perhaps your gift was as simple as […]
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 Surprise of all surprises, the 1969 movie “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” thanks to The New Group and Pershing Square Signature Center, is back in the news again—this time, not as a film but as a play with music. Cleverly directed by Scott Elliott, from a book by Jonathan Marc […]
By EDWARD RUBIN In or out of drag, whether on stage or page, the 65-year-old actor playwright Charles Busch, with some 40 years of show business under his belt, is a force to be reckoned with. His signature calling card is in his allover inventiveness, his humorous tongue-in-cheek playfulness, looking outrageously spectacular in a gown […]
By EDWARD RUBIN I cannot remember any play that unnerved me to such a degree as the Vineyard Theatre’s production of Tina Satter’s brilliantly conceived Is This A Room. Not only did this one hour and ten minute play keep me glued to my seat, it set me on tenterhooks, and scared the bejesus out […]
By EDWARD RUBIN First things first. Before I delve into the Irish Repertory Theater’s marvelous production of London Assurance by Dublin-born playwright Dion Boucicault (1820-1890) – extended now through Sunday, February 9 – I must say that the award-winning Irish Rep is a gift from heaven. Their choices of what to produce coupled with the […]
By EDWARD RUBIN Will Arbery’s latest play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, having been extended two times by popular demand, is now running Off-Broadway through Sunday, November 17, 2019 at Playwrights Horizons. With more religious, personal, and political exposition (read talk) than many a mind can absorb at one sitting, Heroes of the Fourth Turning […]
By EDWARD RUBIN There are probably greater painters than Noël. Greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars, and so on. If they are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combines […]