Entries from May 2008 ↓

How marvelous, at the end of the theater season, to find a gem like "Rafta, Rafta ..." lying in wait. The New Group's production of Ayub Khan-Din's Olivier Award-winner from last year is a near-perfect comedy of family life, where the belly laughs come from painfully honest observations about the trials and tribulations of living under the same roof. In "Rafta, Rafta," family togetherness is even more of a strain than usual, since one of the families's two sons has just brought his bride home...

Broadway has a reputation for clannishness, but a look at the last several years of Tony Award nominations paints a slightly different picture, at least as far as musicals are concerned. For the last seven years, the award for best original score (which includes lyrics) has gone to Broadway neophytes. Stephen Schwartz, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Kander-Ebb tandem, and Marvin Hamlisch are among the veterans who have come up short during that time. This year's nominations, which will be announced...

Caryl Churchill's "Top Girls" has been parsed, plumbed, and pondered so thoroughly — it's probably on more college syllabi than any play written in the 30 years between "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Angels in America" — that it sort of hides in plain sight. Its opening act alone, a surreal dinner party made up of centuries' worth of famous women, might as well be known as the Scene That Launched a Thousand Theses. Well, put down your crib sheets and forget all that background (although...

"Adding Machine," a dark and quirky import from Chicago's thriving theater scene, was the big winner Monday night at Off-Broadway's Lucille Lortel Awards at the Union Square Theatre, bagging four trophies, including Outstanding Musical. New Yorker magazine writer George Packer's Iraq war drama, "Betrayed," produced by the Culture Project, won Outstanding Play. "Adding Machine," composer-librettist Joshua Schmidt and librettist Jason Loewith's adaptation of Elmer Rice's 1923 play, also took the...

"Via Galactica." "Rockabye Hamlet." "Dude." These names ring any bells? There's no reason why they would, unless you're one of those obsessive collectors of flop-musical arcana, the sort of giddy masochists who cherish their "In My Life" and "Carrie" programs and who should be making a beeline for the tin-eared, thuddingly earnest "Glory Days." Those titles above were among the slew of rock musicals that opened on Broadway in the wake of 1968's "Hair," which threatened to completely upend the...

As he slouches into middle age, cigarette and drink in hand, Steve has just been dumped via e-mail by his boyfriend of eight years. His playwriting career is a dying echo of what it once was, and his Brooklyn apartment looks like he stopped decorating sometime in the mid-'90s. Depressed, intensely lonely, creatively and romantically desperate, Steve has approximately one thing going for him: a drop-dead view of the Manhattan Bridge out his living room window. Until, that is, Idi Amin bursts...

William Russo will be the New York Theatre Workshop's new managing director, effective May 12, the theater's artistic director, James Nicola, and the president of the board of trustees, Heather Randall, announced Monday. The former managing director, Fred Walker, was let go last month, when the theater's entire production staff was laid off due to budget cuts. Mr. Russo joins the theater from Playwrights Horizons, where he had served as general manager since 2000. He is a vice president of the...

Admit it: Who among us has not tried to alleviate boredom at some point by making funny voices or noises? When humming or whistling just won't do the job, when the laundry room or the long car ride or wherever requires a little extra company, sometimes only a little foolery will do, self-consciousness be damned. Now swap that extra-long spin cycle for eternity in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Those voices would get awfully animated, no? In Andrei Belgrader's respectable if occasionally overripe...

Off-Broadway may not have the clout of its older cousin, the Great White Way, but it's not exactly no man's land, especially to emerging playwrights. "Off-Broadway has changed in a similar way to the Sundance Film Festival," the playwright Anton Dudley remarked. "There are commercial considerations everywhere. There's less interest in the scrappy, unknown productions and more interest in the future of things." To pave the way for that future is a new theater company called the Playwrights Realm...

When was the last time so much physical prowess and comic savvy were brought to bear on material as undeserving as "Boeing-Boeing," a dismal 1960s sex farce receiving a dynamite revival? Actually, come to think of it, it was just five months ago, with Mark Twain's "Is He Dead?" Just as director Michael Blakemore and a terrific cast led by Norbert Leo Butz managed to pull off that creaky cross-dressing affair (with a lot of help from David Ives, who heavily adapted Twain's original script)...