she loves me
The most recent revival of the 1987 Broadway musical “Into the Woods” featuring music and lyrics from the late, great Stephen Sondheim is now making its triumphant return, playing at the St. James Theatre. It is without a doubt a fitting tribute to this musical theatre giant. Director Lear deBessonet has assembled an unrivaled cast of astute actors, who are…
“Skipper and me had a clean, true thing between us!–had a clean friendship, practically all our lives, till Maggie got the idea you’re talking about. Normal? No!–It was too rare to be normal, any true thing between two people is too rare to be normal.” – Brick in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” It is Big Daddy’s (a scrappy…
Charlotte and Doug Walker’s son Kai will be home from prison in three months to begin his court remanded probation. Kai is a white university student athlete who was convicted of raping a black female student behind a dumpster at the school and is half-way through his six-month sentence. Kai’s transgression has shaken the Walker’s world and rent any sense…
By agreeing to carefully examine the sex-role stereotypes attributed to women, five disparate women named ‘Betty’ cautiously approach self-acceptance and self-understanding in Jen Silverman’s “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” at MCC Theater’s Lucille Lortel Theatre. Their collective rage about their loneliness, their fears, their submission, and their dismissions by men is a welcomed examination of gender and sexual…
“What I set out to do was make an experimental musical theater. Broadway is a museum that’s not moving forward, and musical theater should reflect what and how we are now — our pop culture, our political situation.” (Elizabeth Swados 1951 – 2016) Broadway is no longer a museum with the recent arrival of “School of Rock – The Musical”…
Walking into the Palace Theater to view the new musical extravaganza “SpongeBob SquarePants,” your senses are attacked by a barrage of Crayola colors, shimmering tinsel, happy music and an array of ornamental objects that appear as though Pee Wee Herman went overboard at Party City, shopping for a big beach bash. As you scrutinize the multifarious audience, there is a…
With their recent collaboration with Sarah Gancher and Anne Kauffman, Abigail and Shaun Bengson (“The Bengsons”) have redefined the meaning of the theatrical convention of the musical. Without elaborate sets, costumes, large ensembles of singers and dancers, and multi-million-dollar budgets, The Bengsons have successfully mounted a stunning musical with a believable story and a brilliantly executed score. “Hundred Days,” currently…
One of the territories occupied in Nancy Bannon and Mollye Maxner’s “Occupied Territories,” currently running at 59E59 Theaters, is the Jungle of Vietnam in 1967 during what seemed at the time to be an interminable and unpopular war. In the revival of the Theater Alliance’s 2015 play, that war appears as a haunting memory for Jude (Nancy Bannon) and her…
Some audience members attending the engaging “Prince of Broadway,” currently running at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, might find themselves caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: either they are unforgiving musical theatre aficionados and find themselves constantly comparing the iconic musical numbers with the original Broadway production of the shows from which they come, or they have…
“Forty years ago this place was a fabulously tacky gay bar with a life-sized cardboard cutout of nude Burt Reynolds hanging from the ceiling. It was a church. There was live music and dancing, hustlers, drag queens, even a mother who came with her son. It was a community of people who were funny, and brave, and full of life.”…