Entries from May 2008 ↓

The three men — one young, one middle-aged, one old — waiting in the antiseptic bus terminal barely acknowledge each other's existence. Yet each man's story evocatively echoes the others' in "Port Authority," the slender but affecting play by Conor McPherson that closes the Atlantic Theater Company's season. Written in 2001, a few years before Mr. McPherson's "Shining City" and "The Seafarer" (both recently produced on Broadway), "Port Authority" is steeped in loneliness. Even the format is...

The faux-naive ethos of the era found perhaps its most enduring stage ambassador in 1971 with Stephen Schwartz's pop-pastiche pageant "Godspell," which ran for most of the decade. A Broadway revival has been tentatively slated for August. That makes it the first major revival of Mr. Schwartz's work since he wowed a new generation of youngsters with "Wicked," which had its premiere in 2003. Also due in August is "Hair," a show that had an even larger impact on the musical-theater landscape when...

"Passing Strange" won the Best New Theater Piece category at the 53rd annual Village Voice Obie Awards on Monday night. Horton Foote, for "Dividing the Estate," and David Henry Hwang, for "Yellow Face," took playwriting honors, while Krzysztof Warlikowski, for "Krum," and David Cromer, for "Adding Machine," scored directing honors. Rob Ashford received the Fred & Adele Astaire Award for Best Choreography on Broadway for his work in "Cry-Baby," and Spencer Liff won an Astaire Award for Best Male...

In his few short years on the New York scene, the playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has proven to be a natural entertainer. Good actors like to sink their teeth into his dialogue, and his hard-charging stories proceed with the speed and verve of television. But he takes a leap forward with his latest drama, "Good Boys and True," displaying a new deftness in layering troubling moral questions under a smooth, entertaining surface. The play goes down easy, but its aftertaste is sharp. The story is...

Katie Holmes will make her Broadway debut this autumn in a revival of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," Reuters reported Monday. The actress, best known for her role on the WB melodrama "Dawson's Creek," and, more recently, for marrying Tom Cruise, will star alongside Oscar winner Dianne Wiest and Tony winner John Lithgow. Based on a true story, "All My Sons" details the life of a successful businessman who knowingly sold the government defective airplane parts during World War II, possibly...

A lineup of short plays demands the balance and momentum of a musician's set list. Segues have to be smooth, breaks need to feel natural, the peak shouldn't come too soon, and, of course, every piece on the list has to be good: no duds. In series A of its 30th annual marathon of one-act plays, the first of three programs in the festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre gets all of that just right. An upright piano plays as the lights go up on Willie Reale and Patrick Barnes's three-song musical, "A...

New-play commissioning and development are about to ramp up at Yale Repertory Theatre, which is establishing the Yale Center for New Theatre with a $2.85 million grant from the Minnesota-based Robina Foundation. With the center, which Yale Rep and the Yale School of Drama announced Wednesday, the theater will up the number of its commissions of plays and musicals, and host residencies, readings, workshops, and full productions of commissioned pieces. The center will also help to establish...

People have a habit of talking past one another in David Greig's plays. Willfully or with the best of intentions, they mishear and fail to hear each other; they misunderstand and fail to know each other. The longings of the human soul, laid bare for acknowledgment, go unnoticed or ignored. In "Damascus," a heart-bruising comedy that is the Scottish playwright's second entry in this year's Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters, Mr. Greig's subject is the failure of entire regions of the...

The banged-up hardcover perched invitingly on the stage of "John Lithgow: Stories by Heart" is a prop, but one with a history. Called "Tellers of Tales," it's a much-perused anthology of short stories published in 1939. No less than W. Somerset Maugham edited its 100 stories, which ranged from Edgar Allan Poe to Balzac to Dorothy Parker to Faulkner, and it was "kind of a Lithgow family bible" to the itinerant, close-knit, unapologetically Anglophile family that included an impressionable boy...

From the moment the curtain goes up on Walter Bobbie's whiz-bang production of "No, No, Nanette," you have the delicious sensation that you're going to get the full old-fashioned works. Chandeliers? Check. A magnificent 30-piece orchestra fanned out upstage, replete with twin pianos and a conductor in a dapper white dinner jacket, presiding from a fetching little terrace? Check. A lushly orchestrated, romantic score, spiced with Jazz Age riffs? Check. Never mind that the book of "No, No...