NEW SEASON, NEW PLAYS: Broadway Bound Theatre Festival -2025 hosts 12 new plays and musicals this summer at AMT Theater in midtown NYC. These new works are by emerging playwrights from across the country, with three full productions. BBTF is a curated festival, founded in 2016, focused on empowering self-producing playwrights by offering a nurturing, supportive environment, professional staff and…
The Outer Critics Circle (OCC), the official organization of writers on New York theatre for out-of-town, national, and digital news publications, has announced the winners for the 2025 Outer Critics Circle Awards, honoring the 2024-2025 Broadway and Off-Broadway season. The complete list of winners is below. The awards ceremony will be held on Thursday, May 22, 2025 at Lincoln…
The somewhat recognizable journey from play, to film, and finally to musical delivers the new “Real Women have Curves” to the James Earl Jones Theatre on Broadway. It has morphed into a small musical with a big heart. The book by Lisa Loomer and Nell Benjamin is based on the play by Josefina Lopez and the screenplay by Ms. Lopez…
Two half-brothers half a world apart face the decline of their mother in Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville” currently on at The Pershing Square Signature Center’s Alice Griffen Jewel Box Theatre. The mood of the conversations between forty-something Arnold (Brian J. Smith) who lives in Rotterdam and his older half-brother Jerry (Paul Sparks) who still lives in Grangeville, Idaho range from…
The new play by Matthew Lombardo titled “Conversations with Mother” now playing Off-Broadway at Theatre 555, is a lighthearted and comical evening of entertainment, mostly due to the extremely talented cast. This eighty-five minute two-hander stars Caroline Aaron and Matt Doyle, who make use of their perfect timing and comedic skills to bring as many laughs as possible to the…
There is nothing about liberation, nor is there anything liberating in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” currently running at the Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre. There is gratuitous and unnecessary nudity on stage that requires patrons to relinquish their phones before entering the theater. That nudity is completely unnecessary: the questions raised about the characters’…
The new musical “Redwood,” which recently opened at the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway, certainly lives up to the title, featuring the magnificent giant redwood tree that seamlessly moves on and off-stage as needed. In fact, it may be one of the best characters, given the name Stella, in this long, tedious and banal musical which was conceived by its star…
It is important to pay attention to the title of a play, especially in the case of Leslye Headland’s well-crafted “Cult of Love” currently running at the Helen Hayes. The Dahl nuclear family cult began early in the lives of the Dahl children. Diana (Shailene Woodley), Evie (Rebecca Henderson), Johnny (Christopher Sears), and Mark (Zachary Quinto) experienced a sheltered childhood…
What could go wrong at a private school whose five-member board of directors makes all decisions based on consensus and has what benefitted the community at heart as their guiding principle. A board so committed to inclusion that The Eureka Day School in Berkeley, California’s cultural identity drop-down menu for prospective parents offers eleven choices. And if Eli (an oblivious…
Abby (Marisa Tomei) has co-produced records with Gus (Arliss Howard) for thirty-two years. She had been his right hand, but her name never appears on the album as co-producer. She finds talent. Gus takes the credit. Recognition is not the only problem. Gus is a misogynist and a prime example of toxic masculinity in the workplace and elsewhere. Abby colludes…