Richard Seff

News: A Farewell Letter from DCMTA Writer Richard Seff

I didn’t want to slink off into the night without saying so long to you very lovely DC fans at DC Theater Arts. It was time to go, and I’m grateful for the space in which to get sentimental for a...

Review: ‘Fire and Air’ at Classic Stage Company

Terrence McNally has been a steady contributor as a playwright ever since his first play, And Things That Go Bump In The Night landed on Broadway in 1963. It didn’t bump for long; it played a few...

Review: ‘Hey, Look Me Over!’ by Encores! at City Center

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the very successful Encores! series threw us a party by offering its seven audiences (February 7–11) a potpourri of book scenes and musical numbers from eight...

Review: ‘Hindle Wakes’ at Mint Theater Company

Long buried in a box marked “forgotten” was this remarkable play, now unearthed by Jonathan Banks’ Mint Theater Company, which has brought it back to shimmering life for a run at the Beckett Theatre...

Review: ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’ at Ensemble for the Romantic Century

Robert Fairchild, a lead dancer with the New York City Ballet Company, burst upon the Broadway scene two years ago by playing the lead in the stage version of An American In Paris. He was immediately...

Review: ‘Farinelli and the King’ at the Belasco Theatre

I believe there’s a reason the name of the countertenor Farinelli precedes that of King Philippe V of Spain in the title of the play running currently at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway. Unlike The...

Review: ‘The Children’ at Manhattan Theatre Club

The Manhattan Theatre Club has imported the London Royal Court Theatre’s production of The Children by Lucy Kirkwood, and with it have come the highly acclaimed original cast (Francesca Annis, Ron...

Review: ‘The Parisian Woman’ at Hudson Theater

Drawing room comedy is back for the moment, thanks to Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman. Genuine high wattage star Uma Thurman is riding in this vehicle which deals with the powerful people in...

Review: ‘Meteor Shower’ at the Booth Theatre

This 90-minute sketch by Steve Martin begins as a situation comedy. Until fairly recently there were always several lighting up Broadway; and they were usually written by the likes of Neil Simon, Jean...

Review: ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ at the Palace Theatre

At last, a musical version of the SpongeBob family of characters who first appeared in a film cartoon in 1999. The title character and his friends have always lived in the fictional underwater city of...

Review: ‘Brigadoon’ at New York City Center

I was about to resignedly sigh about another tired revival of a favorite musical from the Golden Age, when along came Brigadoon from the remarkable New York City Center “Encores!” series to force me...

Review: ‘Harry Clarke’ at The Vineyard Theatre

Only on rare occasion have I found a one-man (or woman) play rich enough for my blood. I do recall John Gielgud’s mesmerizing performance in Shakespeare’s Ages of Man, and there have been some plays...

Review: ‘Office Hour’ at The Public

The playwright Julia Cho now has Office Hour on at the Public Theatre, but she has been a steady and welcome contributor to the contemporary scene for some time. Works of hers have been produced at...

Review: ‘The Portuguese Kid’ at the Manhattan Theatre Club

Jason Alexander was a Broadway baby long before he achieved fame on Seinfeld, but he’s had trouble re-establishing himself even though he’d appeared in Merrily We Roll Along, The Rink, Jerome Robbins’...

Report: ‘The Mousetrap,’ ‘A Woman of No Importance,’ ’42nd Street,’ and ‘Ink’ in London

A few weeks ago I found myself hankering to have a look at the London theater season, so I spent a day in the friendly skies of United Airlines to spend a week in which our own NY scene was fairly...

Review: ‘Junk’ at Lincoln Center Theater

A junk bond is a high-yield, high-risk maturity in the financial markets, and a greedy group of investors bought them and enjoyed the 10-12 percent interest that was sent out semi-annually, in most...

Review: ‘M. Butterfly’ at The Cort Theatre

The characters Song Lilig and her consort René Gallinard are back on Broadway. Their play is M.Butterfly and its tale of a romance between a French diplomat (Gallinard, played by Clive Owen in the...

Review: ‘Follies’ at the National Theatre in London

I was most anxious to see Follies in its current production at the National Theatre in London. Somehow news of it had escaped me, but Imelda Staunton is a great favorite of mine, and she’s in it, so I...

Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre

David Yazbek has been one of the less publicized composer/lyricists from the generation of writers who followed those who wrote musicals in the “Golden Age” of Broadway. Yazbek has earned nominations...

Review: ‘Lonely Planet’ at Keen Company

The setting of Lonely Planet is a “map store on the oldest street in an American city.” I assume the playwright, Stephen Dietz, wrote that into the program to let us know that what we are about to...

Review: ‘The Home Place’ at Irish Repertory Theatre

Brian Friel’s play, The Home Place, has taken its time to find its way to New York, where it arrived in good hands at the newly renovated Irish Repertory Theatre off Broadway. The play premiered in...

Review: ‘Time and the Conways’ at The Roundabout Theatre Company

The Roundabout Theatre Company has delivered to Broadway an interesting revival of this J.B. Priestley play that intrigued Depression audiences in the mid 1930s when it opened in New York and London....

Review: ‘Desperate Measures’ at the York Theatre Company in NYC

A small, amiable musical, very loosely based on Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, has opened at the York Theatre Company on Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue. It’s called Desperate Measures and it offers...

Review: ‘Mary Jane’ at The New York Theatre Workshop

The New York Theatre Workshop on East 4th Street in the East Village is a small but potent force in the theater community. Its mandate is to offer production of new works which deal with issues of the...

Review: ‘For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday’ at Playwrights Horizons

Sarah Ruhl is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a Tony Award nominee. Playwrights Horizons has played host to two of her many play — Stage Kiss and Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Her other works have won...

Review: ‘If Only… a Love Story’ at The Cherry Lane Theatre

The Cherry Lane Theatre, in Greenwich Village, is offering a new play by a New York playwright, Thomas Klingenstein, whose earlier works have been seen at the Lark Theatre Lab, the Atlantic Theatre...

Review: ‘Prince of Broadway’ at the Manhattan Theatre Club

Hal Prince, producer/director extraordinaire is far too modest. His new offering at the Manhattan Theatre Club is so vastly entertaining that I hereby elevate him from PRINCE to KING OF BROADWAY for...

Review: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at The Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park

An awful lot goes on in William Shakespeare’s dream play, but here’s all you really have to know. It’s set in Athens at first, later moves into the woods, for that’s where all the dreaming goes on....

Review: ‘Curvy Widow’ at Westside Theatre Upstairs

Barbara Goldman was married to the Academy Award winning playwright/screenwriter/novelist James Goldman; she’s been called Bobby through their 23-year marriage, which ended when he died at 71 in 1998....

Review: ‘1984’ at the Hudson Theatre

One of the most fascinating items on the Broadway scene is the current production of a British import, 1984. Co-adapted from the 1949 novel of George Orwell by Duncan Macmillan and Robert Icke, it...

Review: ‘Marvin’s Room’ at Roundabout Theatre Company

Scott McPherson wrote Marvin’s Room, a play about illness, family ties, and death when he was just a lad of 30. As a gay man, he was of course aware of the AIDS epidemic that had been ravaging the gay...

Review: ‘Napoli, Brooklyn’ at Roundabout Theatre Company

In Napoli, Brooklyn, playing at Roundabout Theatre Company through September 3rd, Playwright Meghan Kennedy gets us started with a mimed prologue in which a family sits at the dining table, enjoying a...

Review: ‘Julius Caesar’ at The Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park

We are in the streets of Rome. The lights onstage bump up and immediately we are in the midst of controversy. Flavius and Marullus are admonishing the crowd to break up and get on with their business....

Review: ‘Cost of Living’ at The Manhattan Theatre Club

The Manhattan Theatre Club is presently offering a 4-character play set in “the urban east of America” in the “near present day.” That description in the Playbill is a bit cryptic, but that may be...

Review: ‘The Government Inspector’ at Red Bull Theater

The New York theatre scene continues to offer variety and great fun with this post-Tony production of Nikolai Gogol’s masterpiece, The Government Inspector, as adapted by American playwright Jeffrey...

Review: ‘Building the Wall’ at New World Stages

Out of his imaginative mind comes another powerful theatre piece by Robert Shenkkan, author of 15 plays including two dealing with LBJ (All the Way and The Great Society.) This time, he proposes what...

Review: ‘The Lucky One’ at Mint Theater Company

Every now and then it’s refreshing to turn on the time travel clock and return to what we then called “civilization” circa 1920. You know, after the war to end all wars, before the jazz babies really...

Review: ‘Marry Harry’ at The York Theatre Company

With apologies to James Morgan and the York Theatre Company (“York Theatre”) for this very late review of their current offering Marry Harry. I saw this new musical on April 30, but in the last-minute...

Review: ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ at the Golden Theatre

In 1982 a distinguished group of Broadway pros, including Hal Prince, Betty Comden and Aldolph Green, came up with what was then thought to be a misbegotten idea: what happened to Nora Helmer after...

Review: ‘Bandstand’ at the Bernard F. Jacobs Theatre

Eleven new musicals have opened since War Paint and here comes the last before the April 30th deadline for Tony Nomination. It’s called Bandstand and it didn’t offer us Bette Midler or Patti LuPone or...

Review: ‘Anastasia’ at the Broadhurst Theatre

As the theatre season races to the end of its nomination deadline for the Tony Awards, musical shows are exploding all over the place. We’ve had half a dozen in the last two weeks, and Anastasia...

Review: ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

The night I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the new musical based on Roald Dahl’s novel, the theatre was packed with moms and dads with little kids in tow. All of them seemed to know the story...

Review: ‘Groundhog Day’ at the August Wilson Theatre

Andy Karl is a delightful musical theatre leading man, but he’s been having a bit of bad luck lately. During a late preview of Groundhog Day, his latest outing on stage, he suffered severe damage to...

Review: ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ at the Barrymore Theatre

John Guare’s masterpiece from 1990 solidly launched his career, earning a run of 155 performances off-Broadway which extended to a run at the Beaumont Theatre on Broadway of 485 additional showings....

Review: ‘The Little Foxes’ at the Manhattan Theatre Club

I’ve seen this play so many times. As a youngster of 19 I played “Horace” at NYU in a production that helped me along in my burgeoning acting career. Someone saw me in it, and suddenly I was playing...

Review: ‘Hello, Dolly!’ at the Shubert Theatre

I’m going to tell you a short story before I get to my review of Hello, Dolly! which is now playing at the Shubert Theatre on Broadway. I do so to give what’s now called “transparency” to my words in...

Review: ‘Indecent’ at the Cort Theatre

Playwright Paula Vogel has been writing plays for almost forty years, in which she has dealt with issues that fueled her life. She’s been particularly interested in exploring the need for theatre to...

Review: ‘War Paint’ at the Nederlander Theatre

This project began with a fine title, one that conjurs up a fun musical once you know it’s about the battle for supremacy in the field of female skincare and beauty. It sounded like even more fun when...

Review: ‘Oslo’ at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center

I had only dim memories of the 1993 agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis, which had been secretly arranged by a Norwegian couple, who had spent from April 1992 until September of the...

Review: ‘Daniel’s Husband’ at The Cherry Lane Theatre

Family plays have changed so in the past few decades. They once concerned themselves with sibling rivalry for power and control (The Little Foxes), long held lies that are finally unearthed (All My...