I am an LGBTQ+ able-bodied and hearing person walking into the lobby of one of my favorite venues: The Public Theater. There is a notice on the door to mask up before entering. I am early and after masking up and picking up my ticket, I lean up against one of the columns in the lobby and check out my…
You will get sick. It happens. You do not know why. Often you do not want to tell anyone you are sick. Perhaps you might even pay someone to talk to you about your illness. Yet after all that, you still might die. And you are not alone. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner wrote about “When Bad Things Happen to Good…
Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” debuted on Broadway in 1959 and appeared in London’s West End five months later. The musical adaptation “Raisin” won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1973 and the play had two Broadway revivals in 2004 and 2014. This powerful and ground-breaking story of a financially strapped Chicago South Side Black extended family’s…
Some may say that Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” may be the greatest play of the 20th century and there is evidence that supports that claim. It premiered on Broadway in 1949, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the TONY award for Best Play. The fifth Broadway revival is now playing at The Hudson Theatre starring Wendell…
Sometimes there is no reason to try and improve or change something which would adhere to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Adjusting, tweaking, or trying to improve things when they already work well, can spell disaster. By altering the original parts or embellishing the simplicity of the original, it may in fact complicate or confuse the…
There is too much noise on the set of Victor I. Cazares’s “american (tele)visions” currently running at New York Theatre Workshop (co-produced with Theatre Mitu). Although that noise comes from what is certainly a dynamic and innovative set design by Bretta Gerecke and a clever technical design by Theatre Mitu’s Justin Nestor, Alex Hawthorn, and Kelly Colburn, it unfortunately masks…
Things are going as well as they can as Juicy (a pensive, smart, and gay Marcel Spears who is thicc, beautiful, and lonely) and his cousin and oldest friend Tio (a relaxed and clever Chris Herbie Holland who is a stoner) set up for what appears to be his mother’s wedding reception at her house in North Carolina. Earlier in…
In “Exception to the Rule,” currently playing at the Black Box Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center, is playwright Dave Harris more concerned about what might be the exception to the rule in his play’s inner-city high school classroom or what is the rule that looms over classroom one eleven’s detainees on the last day of the week…
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” – “To A Mouse” by Robert Burns Despite his claim to be “quite content to keep [his] own counsel, as [he] sees fit, and leave the jibber-jabber to the riff-raff, the riff-raff,” former hangman Harry Wade (played with a menacing panache by David Threlfall) seems quite content to…
The revival of “Take Me Out” by Richard Greenberg which opened at The Helen Hayes Theater, in many ways does not feel as if it were written twenty years ago, given the current political climate and the conservative challenges of LGBTQ+ rights. The story about a major league baseball star surprisingly coming out in a public arena, deals with the…