One of the most interesting musicals to appear on Broadway this season brings a new look to an almost century-old story. Ninety-five years ago, Shuffle Along was an unprecedented sight on the Great White Way: a show written, produced, directed and performed by an African-American cast of characters. The not-quite-a-revival carries the unwieldy full title: Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, which New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood cal...
May 11, 2016•3 min•Ep. 217
The 2016 Tony nominees were announced on Tuesday, and Charles Isherwood, theater critic of The New York Times, joins WQXR morning host, Jeff Spurgeon, to gab about the big news. Most notably, the juggernaut known as Hamilton met lofty expectations with a record 16 nominations. The musical about founding father Alexander Hamilton headlines a diverse list of potential winners, in contrast to the pool of Academy Award nominees that begat the #OscarsSoWhite social-media movement. In addition to tryi...
May 04, 2016•3 min•Ep. 216
Broadway is home to another a new musical based on a movie. Waitress springs from the 2007 film of the same name and tells the story of a small-town girl, who dreams of an escape from her small-town existence. It stars Jessie Mueller, who makes an even stronger impression than in her Tony Award-winning portrayal of the songwriter Carole King in Beautiful, the Carole King Musical . Pop artist Sara Bareilles wrote the songs for the show with care toward the characters and attention to language. Ne...
Apr 27, 2016•2 min•Ep. 215
Tracy Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ( August: Osage County ) and Tony Award-winning actor ( Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ), has a new play running at his home company, Chicago-based Steppenwolf Theatre. The play, Mary Page Marlowe, tells the story of one woman at various points throughout her life. And to accomplish this, she is played by six talented actresses with a supporting cast of equal caliber. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood visited the Windy City to see ...
Apr 20, 2016•3 min•Ep. 214
Set at an urban public school on the brink of closure for the usual reasons — poor test scores and low graduation rates — playwright Ike Holter's Exit Strategy is an indictment of the state of public education but not a polemic. Much of the play takes place in a teacher's lounge, where faculty discuss their previous stints failing schools. When one enterprising student hacks into school's website, creating a Kickstarter campaign for last-ditch fund-raising, several teachers are inspired to act. ...
Apr 13, 2016•2 min•Ep. 213
This spring, England’s Royal Shakespeare Company has taken up residence at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It's presenting four of Shakespeare’s plays — Richard II ; Henry IV, Parts I and II ; and Henry V — in a package called King and Country: Shakespeare’s Great Cycle of Kings. Our intrepid critic, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times, has traveled far from Broadway to take in approximately 12 hours of the Bard's prose and verse over three days. During that period, he e...
Apr 06, 2016•4 min•Ep. 212
With a book by comedian/actor/author Steve Martin, lyrics by singer/songwriter Edie Brickell and a bluegrass-inflected score by both, Bright Star comes to Broadway music with its creators as the most recognizable names on the marquee. Set in North Carolina, the story jumps back and forth between moments in the life of Alice Murphy; it shows her both as a young rebellious girl in the 1920s and later as a sophisticated woman who runs a literary journal in the 1940s. As Alice, Carmen Cusack impress...
Mar 30, 2016•3 min•Ep. 211
Dry Powder , a new play that just debuted at The Public Theater, is bringing the same discussions about the world of finance to the stage as the film The Big Short brought to the movies. The title refers to cash reserves or highly liquid assets, which are central to playwright Sarah Burgess's plot about an executive facing a PR nightmare after throwing himself a lavish party at the same time his firm is forcing layoffs. The play comes to The Public with a big endorsement as co-recipient of this ...
Mar 23, 2016•3 min•Ep. 210
With its suggestive exclamation point, the title of the new Broadway musical Disaster! hints at the campy, over-the-top qualities it brings to the Nederlander Theatre. Set on a cruise ship precariously moored along the Hudson River, the show spoofs disaster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure and Earthquake that were popular in the 1970s. It also features a number of disco hits and pop songs of the era. Written by Seth Rudetsky and Jack Plotnick, the production has assembled a cast of well-kno...
Mar 16, 2016•3 min•Ep. 209
Zimbabwean-American playwright Dania Gurira is having a moment. Her play Eclipsed has just transferred to Broadway in a production starting Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o at the Golden Theatre, and her work, Familiar, is now running at Playwrights Horizons. New York Times theater crick Charles Isherwood joins us to talk about this notable feat. "For dead white men it's not that unusual," to have two plays simultaneously on stage in New York City, he says, adding, "but for a black women it's quite r...
Mar 09, 2016•4 min•Ep. 208
As the Obama era is about to begin, four brilliant, accomplished people — Harvard types, all of them — consider racism in America in “Smart People” by playwright Lydia R. Diamond. While the hot-button issue is difficult for these intellectuals to articulate, it manifests concretely through the characters' relationships with each other. Kenny Leon directs the production by Second Stage Theatre, featuring a strong cast comprised of Mahershala Ali, Joshua Jackson, Anne Son and Tessa Thompson. New Y...
Feb 17, 2016•3 min•Ep. 207
Actor Len Cariou has enjoyed a long and distinguished career. Among his many appearances, he created the role Sweeney Todd in the eponymous Stephen Sondheim musical. Perhaps less well-known is Cariou’s long résumé of Shakespearean roles. Early in his career, he performed in several of Shakespeare's plays at both the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Now, in his new one-man show, Broadway and the Bard , Cariou presents Shakespeare's soliloquies alongsi...
Feb 10, 2016•3 min•Ep. 206
While on the latest of her many supposed deathbeds, a "tart-tongued" mother, played by Tony-winner Linda Lavin, reveals to her children the details of a tryst from decades past that may resonate in the present in Richard Greenberg's "Our Mother's Brief Affair." The play, directed by Lynne Meadow, also features Kate Arrington, Greg Keller and John Procaccino. Lavin is "an occasion unto herself," says New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood, as he weighs in on the merits of this 11th colla...
Feb 03, 2016•3 min•Ep. 205
To mark last year's centennial of the birth of the writer and theologian Thomas Merton, the Actors Theater of Louisville has produced a play about him called "The Glory of the World." Merton spent much of his life in a Trappist monastery near Louisville. The play, written by Charles Mee and directed by Les Waters, has now blown its way into the Harvey Theater at BAM. The play is by no means a straightforward biographical drama and, in fact, it's unusual enough that we’ll just let New York Times ...
Jan 27, 2016•3 min•Ep. 204
Michael Frayn's frantic 1982 sex farce-within-a-farce "Noises Off" returns to Broadway for a third run this season under the auspices of the Roundabout Theatre Company. This time around the director is Jeremy Herrin, who staged the two-part Tudor drama "Wolf Hall" last season. The starry cast features Andrea Martin and Megan Hilty, among others. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood tells us whether or not it’s worth running to see at the American Airlines Theatre, where it's running t...
Jan 20, 2016•3 min•Ep. 203
Jacobean era dramas are rarely seen on major New York stages, but the enterprising Red Bull Theater company, under the artistic directorship of Jesse Berger, has made a specialty of them. Its latest foray into the period — the time during the reign of James VI of Scotland from 1567–1625 — is a production of "The Changeling," a play from 1622 written by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Rowley. Jacobean dramas are generally noted for their sensational stories of lust and violence and revenge. New York ...
Jan 13, 2016•4 min•Ep. 202
The beloved 1964 musical "Fiddler on the Roof," with its book by Joseph Stein and score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, is back on Broadway this season. Based on writer Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish tales of Tevye the milkman, this new production of "Fiddler" is the show's fifth return to the Great White Way. The role of Tevye was originated by Zero Mostel, played on stage and film by Chaim Topol, and on Broadway by Herschel Bernardi, Theodore Bikel, Leonard Nimoy and Harvey Fierstein, among othe...
Jan 06, 2016•3 min•Ep. 201
Arthur Miller’s "A View from the Bridge" hasn’t exactly been a stranger to Broadway. It has already been revived three times, most recently in 2010 in a production starring Liev Schreiber. But it’s back once more this season in an innovative production from the Dutch director Ivo van Hove. The staging was originally seen at London’s Young Vic Theater and later in the West End. Ivo van Hove is known for his radically stylized productions of classic plays by authors ranging from Ibsen to Moliere t...
Dec 23, 2015•3 min•Ep. 200
The new musical "These Paper Bullets!" at the Atlantic Theater Company bills itself as a "modish ripoff" of Shakespeare’s comedy "Much Ado About Nothing." The new adaptation is by Rolin Jones, who has updated the setting to London during the swinging sixties. The production, directed by Jackson Gay, also features new songs written by Billie Joe Armstrong, the front man for the band Green Day who wrote the Tony Award-winning musical "American Idiot." We are used to seeing Shakespeare plays set in...
Dec 16, 2015•3 min•Ep. 199
One of the world’s most successful musicians returns to his musical roots in his latest Broadway show. Andrew Lloyd Webber, best-known for "Phantom of the Opera," "Evita" and other shows that feature pop music in an operatic vein, has made a musical out of the movie "School of Rock." The 2003 film starred Jack Black as a slacker dude who gets a job as an elementary school teacher. It’s a throwback for Lloyd Webber, whose first successes, "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Jesus ...
Dec 09, 2015•3 min•Ep. 198
A downtown theater playwright, a sensational Broadway actress and a most unusual family are all part of the show called "Hir" (pronounced "here"). Playwright Taylor Mac is probably best known — to those who follow downtown theater, at least — as an androgynous singer and actor who appears in his own shows. But with "Hir," in which he does not appear, he’s advancing his career in a new direction. The family-in-crisis story involves a returning war veteran, an angry spouse and more than a little g...
Dec 02, 2015•3 min•Ep. 197
Actor George Takai is best known as Sulu from "Star Trek," as well as for his LGBT activism and funny posts on Facebook. He and Lea Salonga, the original Kim in “Miss Saigon,” are the headliners in the new Broadway musical "Allegiance," which tackles a tough historical subject. Like many thousands of Japanese-Americans, Takai was interned by the U.S. government in camps during World War II after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood offers his review of "Al...
Nov 25, 2015•4 min•Ep. 196
A Broadway season just wouldn’t be complete without a jukebox musical it sometimes seems. This year’s model comes courtesy of the 1980s pop star Gloria Estefan. “On Your Feet!” charts the story of her rise, alongside her husband and collaborator Emilio Estefan. Sprinkled throughout this bio-musical are familiar hits like “Conga” and “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You.” New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us know what he’s seen and heard in this new production directed by Jerry Mitchell at...
Nov 18, 2015•3 min•Ep. 195
In his 1995 play “Sylvia,” A.R. Gurney threw a couple of curve balls at the theme of a man dealing with a mid-life crisis. Instead of the man threatening his marriage by falling in love with a younger woman, he falls in love with (curve ball No. 1) a dog, who is (curve ball No. 2) played onstage by a woman. The play gets its first Broadway production at the Cort Theatre with a cast that stars Matthew Broderick, Julie White and Annaleigh Ashford. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood sh...
Nov 11, 2015•3 min•Ep. 194
A show most famous for putting Bernadette Peters in the spotlight is getting a bigger spotlight of its own. The musical "Dames at Sea" started in a tiny café Off-Off-Broadway in 1966 and helped launch the career of a show business legend. Now the show itself is most definitely on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theatre in a production choreographed and directed by Randy Skinner. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood takes a look at this new production of an old hit that pays tribute to an ...
Nov 04, 2015•3 min•Ep. 193
The holiday season is approaching ... or looming, you might say, depending on how you feel about holidays and family get-togethers. A middle-class family Thanksgiving in lower Manhattan is the setting for Stephen Karam’s “The Humans,” another play in a long line that finds its springboard in domestic tensions tightened to the breaking point at ritual gatherings. But New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood says Karam’s work has several, mostly good, surprises in store in this "flawless" p...
Oct 28, 2015•4 min•Ep. 192
A new play on a tough topic is part of this season’s Underground season at Roundabout Theatre Company. The play is “Ugly Lies the Bone,” written by Lindsey Ferrentino. The topic is the struggle of U.S. military veterans to return to civilian life while healing from the wounds of their overseas experiences. The play has a perhaps surprising element: Jess, the veteran at the center of the play, is a woman. New York Times critic Charles Isherwood offers a review of this latest production from Round...
Oct 14, 2015•3 min•Ep. 191
Razzle Dazzle is the jazzy title of a new book about the history of Broadway by Michael Riedel, the New York Post theater columnist and co-host of the show "Theater Talk." The book, which was published this past Monday by Simon and Schuster, concentrates on the near death of Broadway in the 1960s and its gradual recovery. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood joins us to talk about what Riedel suggests were the prime factors in the sagging fortunes of the commercial theater during the ...
Oct 07, 2015•3 min•Ep. 190
The Tony-winning musical "Spring Awakening," a coming-of-age musical about teenagers and sex, has returned to Broadway. The original production of the musical by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik closed only in 2009, and thus might seem to be making an unusually quick return. However, the new production on stage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre takes a very novel approach. It’s from the Los Angeles-based company Deaf West Theatre and the cast features a mixture of hearing and deaf actors. Casting deaf...
Sep 30, 2015•4 min•Ep. 189
Playwrights Horizons kicks off its fall season with "The Christians," a play by Lucas Hnath about a schism in an evangelical church. In the production, directed by Les Waters, Andrew Garman portrays a pastor who causes an uproar among his flock when he decides that church policy will no longer recognize the existence of a literal hell. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood offers his review. “The Christians” can be seen through Oct. 11 at Playwrights Horizons.
Sep 23, 2015•3 min•Ep. 188
