The prologue to “The Lost Boys,” the new musical adaptation of the 1987 Warner Bros. film now at the Palace Theatre, immediately signals Michael Arden’s dark ambitions for this material. A police officer investigates the abandoned Coronado Ironworks factory by flashlight, interrupted by Ronald Reagan’s voice on a flickering television extolling “the strength and integrity of the family.” Before the…
It has been eleven years since the play “Every Brilliant Thing” penned by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, opened Off Broadway at the intimate 199 seat Barrow Street Theatre in New York. The relatively unknown British comedian, Mr. Donahoe, also performed the solo piece which was based on his experience dealing with his mother’s and his own depression. After several…
Twenty-nine years after its London premiere, Tracy Letts’ “Bug” has finally crawled onto Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, and the question that matters most isn’t whether this David Cromer-directed production succeeds or fails—it’s whether Cromer understood what play he was directing. “Bug” is a psychiatric horror about folie à deux, the clinical term for shared psychotic…
The recent revival of “Chess “on Broadway comes nearly forty years after its first opening on London’s West End in 1986, with a subsequent move to Broadway after major revisions, in 1988. The Broadway production directed by Trevor Nunn closed after two months recording good attendance, but unfavorable financial returns. This recent incarnation, deftly directed by Michael Mayer, confines the…
The recently opened new Broadway musical “Two Strangers Carry A Cake Across New York” leans towards the formula of a savvy rom com that is unassuming and charming, thanks to Christiani Pitts and Sam Tutty, who star in this two-hander. They are challenged by the superficial and at times rambling script penned by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan, who are…
It is very rare that a revival of a musical is imagined better than the original production and exceptional that its message is more relevant now than when it first opened on Broadway nearly thirty years ago in 1997, garnering four Tony Awards. That is the case for the glorious revival of “Ragtime” with a book penned by Terrence McNally,…
“You always step in,” Jacob Dunne (Will Harrison) tells us from the stage of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, explaining the code of the Meadows housing estate where loyalty means throwing fists without thinking. “Always. With a mate. No matter where, no matter what.” This philosophy—this toxic, tribal, inevitable logic—will cost James Hodgkinson his life in a single, unprovoked punch…
Everyone has been there: that moment when a close friend reveals something about their taste, their values, their inner life that makes you wonder if you ever really knew them at all. “ART” turns that uncomfortable recognition into ninety minutes of brilliant theatrical warfare. Under Scott Ellis’s direction, Bobby Cannavale (Marc), James Corden (Yvan), and Neil Patrick Harris (Serge) bring…
Only in America, where greed, fame, crime and capitalism reign and members of a civilized society aspire to become part of the materialistic regime, can you discover the story of Elmer J. McCurdy, a futile outlaw who was gunned down in 1911. The new musical, which opened at the Minetta Lane Theatre off-Broadway last season, is now playing at the…
The new musical “Smash,” opening on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre, creates more than one bombshell, strategically detonating a multitude of explosive twists, turns, and powerful production numbers, to create a good old-fashioned musical. Never having seen the popular television show of the same name, there were no comparisons or expectations to be fulfilled, so this production seemed fresh and…