New York Theater News

Photo Feature: ‘The Jonathan Larson Project’ at Feinstein’s/54 Below

The Jonathan Larson Project, performed at Feinstein’s /54 Below, was a fitting tribute to composer Jonathan Larson, who tragically passed away in 1996 just as his hit musical Rent arrived on Broadway....

Playwright Neil Simon Dies at 91

Neil Simon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, died last night at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. The cause was complications from pneumonia. He was 91 years old. His...

DC Playwright Patrick Flynn Finalist in Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival

Editor’s Update, August 26, 2018: At the 43rd Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival this week, Patrick Flynn’s The Ferberizing of Coral was one of six plays chosen for publication by Samuel French. 850...

Celebrating Broadway’s Biggest Season in History with ‘Stars in the Alley®’

The statistics are in for the 2017-18 Broadway season, and according to The Broadway League (Broadway.org) – the national trade association for the Broadway industry, founded in 1930 – it’s been a...

Review: ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ at Vineyard Theatre

An imaginative, lyrical, and bittersweet stage adaptation of Henry James’ heartbreaking novella of 1903, The Beast in the Jungle reunites the celebrated team of John Kander (music), David Thompson...

Review: ‘Woman and Scarecrow’ at Irish Repertory Theatre

Marking its first production of a work by the internationally-lauded Dublin-born playwright Marina Carr, Irish Repertory Theatre’s New York premiere of Woman and Scarecrow, potently directed by Ciaran...

Review: ‘Unexpected Joy’ at The York Theatre Company

Though gynocentric themes featuring lead roles for women are a welcome new trend in contemporary theater, there’s little new or unexpected in Unexpected Joy, an original musical by Bill Russell (book...

Interview: Actress Gayle Carney Discusses her Off-Broadway show ‘The Promised Land’

Gayle Carney has played a myriad of roles in her many years as an actress. She’s been seen most recently in The Dog Must Die at Highwood Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. That play is a dystopian...

Review: ‘It Came from Beyond’ at St. Luke’s Theatre

Mid-century aficionados and other interested earthlings can take a time-traveling trip back to the ‘50s at St. Luke’s Theatre with the Off-Broadway premiere of It Came from Beyond, a silly musical...

Review: ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ at the Lyric Theatre

Amazing bursts of magic that dazzle in the darkness, distinctive characterizations of a host of eccentric, endearing, and evil personalities by an enthralling cast, a complex and compelling tale of...

Review: ‘SUMMER: The Donna Summer Musical’ at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre

As with all of the shows in its genre, the latest offering in the surge of biographical jukebox musicals on Broadway, SUMMER: The Donna Summer Musical, holds appeal for a built-in audience of the...

Review: ‘The Seafarer’ at Irish Repertory Theatre

Mystic realism and metaphor meet the Irish gift of gab and a dire predilection for alcohol in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, a disturbingly dark and devilish comedy about lost souls, drunken...

Review: ‘Three Tall Women’ at the Golden Theatre

Brilliant. Extraordinary. Ingenious. Superb. The best. Yet all adjectives and superlatives pale in comparison with the truly unsurpassed quality of the script, performances, direction, design, and...

Previewing ‘Stepchild, A New Musical’ in the Rough Draft Festival at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center: An Interview with David James Boyd, Chad Kessler, and Kim Weild

As part of LaGuardia Performing Arts Center’s Rough Draft Festival, IRT Theater and TGF 12 Productions have teamed up for a workshop presentation of Stepchild, A New Musical, inspired by the popular...

Review: ‘Children of a Lesser God’ at Studio 54

When Mark Medoff‘s award-winning play Children of a Lesser God premiered on Broadway in 1980, followed by the highly-lauded film adaptation in 1986, it provided groundbreaking insights into the need...

Review: ‘Mean Girls’ at the August Wilson Theatre

If you’ve ever witnessed (or worse yet, experienced, encouraged, or participated in) the “girl-on-girl crime” of high-school cliques, malicious gossip, fierce competitiveness, and vicious...

Review: ‘Wicked Frozen’ at St. Luke’s Theatre

What do you get when you cross the super-popular hits Wicked and Frozen with a Boston accent? The laugh-out-loud musical parody Wicked Frozen, presented by John Lant and making its Off-Broadway debut...

Review: ‘Lobby Hero’ at Second Stage Theater

In the current American climate of daily accusations of “fake news,” public denials of misdeeds, not-so-secret cover-ups of illegal activities, and arbitrary job terminations of public officials at...

Review: ‘Rocktopia’ at The Broadway Theatre

A mash-up of classical music with classic rock, Rocktopia, co-created by vocalist Rob Evan (of New York stage and Trans-Siberian Orchestra fame) and Maestro Randall Craig Fleischer (a noted Conductor,...

Review: ‘Angels in America’ at the Neil Simon Theatre

London’s blockbuster National Theatre production of Angels in America – Tony Kushner’s sweeping two-part eight-hour epic about AIDS, politics, and gay life in America in the 1980s – has alighted on...

Review: ‘Dogs of Rwanda’ at Urban Stages

In Dogs of Rwanda, now making its Off-Broadway debut at Urban Stages, playwright Sean Christopher Lewis revisits the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and the scars they left – both physical and...

Review: ‘Escape to Margaritaville’ at the Marquis Theatre

If you’re in the mood for a fun-filled island vacation, look no further than Manhattan Island and the Broadway premiere of Escape to Margaritaville at the Marquis Theatre. With music and lyrics by the...

Review: ‘Admissions’ at Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

A new twist on the old adage attributed to former Philadelphia Police Chief and Mayor Frank Rizzo, “A liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet,” Lincoln Center Theater’s production of...

Review: ‘All the Ways to Say I Love You’ on Audible

If you love the New York stage and its stars, but can’t make it to the theater in person to see a live performance, Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon and the world’s largest purveyor of audiobooks,...

Review: ‘Rap Guide to Consciousness’ at SoHo Playhouse

Do you ever wonder about the nature of awareness and the mechanics of perception? Luckily for us, Baba Brinkman does, and returns to SoHo Playhouse with his well-conceived and brilliantly entertaining...

An Interview with Award-Winning Actor Dan Hodge: Making his Off-Broadway Debut in the New York Premiere of ‘Dogs of Rwanda’

Just concluding his comic roles in the Walnut Street Theatre’s national touring production of Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, with its final performances this week in California,...

Review: ‘The Amateurs’ at Vineyard Theatre

The latest work by Pulitzer Prize-finalist Jordan Harrison, The Amateurs, now making its world premiere at Vineyard Theatre, is a profound and witty meta-theatrical meditation on the purpose of art...

Review: ‘Brilliant Traces’ at The WorkShop Theater

Through the hand of fate, two lonely and damaged strangers have been brought together in an isolated cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, each suffering the effects of familial trauma, the devastation of...

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: ‘Frankenstein’ at St. Luke’s Theatre

Marking the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel of 1818, Frankenstein, a new musical with book, music, and lyrics by Eric B. Sirota, focuses less on the monster and more on the man...

Review: ‘The Chekhov Dreams’ at Theatre Row

Whether you love the works of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov or hate them, you can’t help but enjoy The Chekhov Dreams, a dark and witty world-premiere rom-com by John McKinney. Presented at Theatre...

Review: ‘[PORTO]’ at WP Theater

Now in its impressive Off-Broadway premiere at WP Theater in association with New Georges, following a critically-acclaimed run in the 2017 Exponential Festival at The Bushwick Starr (co-presenter of...

Fifteen Top Theater Picks for Valentine’s Day in NYC

If you’re in New York City for Valentine’s Day and planning to celebrate your love of the stage, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Nicole Hertvik and Senior Reviewer Deb Miller have some suggestions for a...

An Interview with John Guare: Previewing the ‘Lydie Breeze Trilogy’ at Philadelphia’s EgoPo Classic Theater

With an illustrious career spanning the past five decades, John Guare has been the recipient of Tony, Obie, and Olivier Awards, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and an Oscar nominee, among...

‘Women’s Voices Theater Festival’ and ‘Winterfest’ Present New Works in NYC from January through March

New York City is ringing in the New Year with a full slate of new works presented in January, February, and March, including a one-day event with the Dramatists Guild Foundation in support of the...

Review: ‘John Lithgow: Stories by Heart’ at Roundabout Theatre Company

In 2002, when his 86-year-old father was gravely ill, award-winning actor John Lithgow read stories to him at his bedside – the same stories his dad Arthur Lithgow, a regional theater artist to whom...

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...

‘Einstein!’ Returns to Under St. Marks Theatre

Sew and Sew Productions and the Horse Trade Theater Group present the return of Jack Fry’s highly-acclaimed Einstein! to New York City in January. Playing again at Under St. Marks Theatre, where it...

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 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: ‘Once On This Island’ at the Circle in the Square Theatre

The first Broadway revival of the 1990 Tony-nominated hit musical Once On This Island, with book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty, brings an innovative vision to an old...

Review: ‘Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?’ at The WorkShop Theater

One of the early, less-familiar works by Tony Award-winning playwright and librettist Terrence McNally (famed for his highly-acclaimed Love! Valour! Compassion!, Master Class, Kiss of the Spider...

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: ‘Who’s Holiday!’ at Westside Theatre

If your fond childhood memories include Dr. Seuss The Grinch, his dog Max, and a Ville filled with Whos You might like a sequel from 40 years hence Though if you’re a Grinch, too, you might take...

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’...

Review: ‘The Exterminating Angel’ at the Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera audiences, paying up to $393 for a ticket, can relate to the wealthy party guests in The Exterminating Angel. And so do some prestigious critics, who called this “the one opera to...