The new Off Broadway show "The Legend of Georgia McBride" by Matthew Lopez is a comedy about a young Elvis impersonator named Casey who’s barely making a living performing in a Florida Panhandle bar. With an empty bank account and pregnant wife, during the course of the play Casey makes a rather surprising career switch from struggling Elvis impersonator to successful drag queen. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us know if "The Legend of Georgia McBride" is something to get a...
Sep 16, 2015•3 min•Ep. 187
Labor Day, the semi-official end to the summer, is now in the rearview mirror. Which means that theater-watchers will be eagerly getting ready for the fall season. Broadway already has seen one smash musical open, the hotter-than-hot ticket “Hamilton,” but there’s much more to come, both on Broadway and Off. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood takes a look at the new fall crop of shows and suggests some highlights....
Sep 09, 2015•4 min•Ep. 186
A new Off Broadway play by Sherie Rene Scott and Dick Scanlan tells the semi-autobiographical account of their experiences working with prison inmates. The play's unusual title — "Whorl Inside a Loop" — refers to a particular fingerprint pattern. Scott also stars in the play as a well-regarded actress who agrees to teach six inmates how to tell their stories behind the bars of a men's maximum security prison. Sharing intimate and sometimes hilarious details of their former lives, this unlikely g...
Sep 02, 2015•4 min•Ep. 185
The latest play from the prolific A.R. Gurney comes with a forthright title, "Love & Money." The Signature Theater Company production features Maureen Anderman as the wealthy, elderly Cornelia Cunningham, who has decided to give away her entire fortune to charity, at least until an unexpected visitor arrives. As the work of divesting herself of the money continues —with good intentions — complications arrive in the form of a young man who is — or at least, claims to be — the woman’s grandson...
Aug 26, 2015•3 min•Ep. 184
Annie Baker won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for her play "The Flick," which has been restaged this summer at the Barrow Street Theatre. But Baker also has a new play concurrently on the boards called simply "John," and presented by the Signature Theatre Company. The drama tells the story of a young couple with relationship problems who the week after Thanksgiving pay a visit to a rather odd bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Penn. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us know if "Joh...
Aug 19, 2015•3 min•Ep. 183
The Public Theater’s second free Shakespeare in the Park presentation this summer is the late romance “Cymbeline,” a twisty tale of duplicity and betrayal directed by Daniel Sullivan. The cast features Shakespeare in the Park regulars Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater as young newlyweds separated by the titular king and his conniving queen. The convoluted "Cymbeline" plot involves, among other things, a headless corpse, a beautiful heroine who fools everyone into thinking she’s a boy simply by putt...
Aug 12, 2015•3 min•Ep. 182
The story behind one of the best-known hymns in the English language is the subject of the new Broadway musical "Amazing Grace." The show tells the story of the man who wrote, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” John Newton worked in the English slave trade before changing his ways and becoming a spokesman for abolition in Great Britain — and a hymn writer. The production at the Nederlander Theatre features a score by Christopher Smith, a newcomer to musical theater, a...
Aug 05, 2015•3 min•Ep. 181
The young playwright Joshua Harmon made a splash with his comedy “Bad Jews” in 2012, which was initially presented at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s black-box theater and was later produced at its larger Laura Pels Theatre. The play not only got great reviews, it also received productions at numerous regional theaters around the country. Now Roundabout is mounting another Harmon play, “Significant Other,” a romantic comedy about a gay man in his 20s watching his female friends pair up around h...
Jun 24, 2015•3 min•Ep. 180
Even when everybody knows what’s planned, you can never be sure of what will actually happen when friends get together. In Bruce Norris's new play “The Qualms,” what’s supposed to be a quiet evening of dinner, drinks and what used to be called “swinging” doesn’t go as expected. It’s a barbecue with a side of sexual dallying among four couples. Norris’s comedy, directed by Pam MacKinnon, is running at Playwrights Horizons through July 12. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us in...
Jun 17, 2015•3 min•Ep. 179
The 2015 Tony Awards ceremony was Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall. The new musical "Fun Home" had the most fun, winning awards for Best Musical, Book, Score, Leading Actor and Director. "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" was named Best New Play. As the statuettes were being handed out, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood was keeping track — not only of the winners , but also of the nominees who he thought should have won. Isherwood shares his list, as well as a ...
Jun 10, 2015•4 min•Ep. 178
An awkward sweetness and a laconic wit are qualities the actor Jim Parsons wields with Emmy Award-winning skill in his role as Sheldon Cooper on the television series “The Big Bang Theory.” Those are not, however, characteristics we usually associate with the Creator of the Universe. And yet, there on the Broadway stage is Parsons in the title role of “An Act of God,” a new show written by David Javerbaum and directed by Joe Mantello. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us in on...
Jun 03, 2015•3 min•Ep. 177
A quiet play about a group of people working in a run-down Massachusetts movie theater is getting its second New York City production. Annie Baker’s “The Flick” might be quiet onstage, but it has made noise in the theater world, winning the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was first produced at Playwrights Horizons in 2013. Now the play has been remounted in a Off Broadway production at the Barrow Street Theatre, with the original cast intact and the same director, Sam Gold, at the helm. How ha...
May 27, 2015•4 min•Ep. 176
A show that can take on both Shakespeare and a group of Tony nominees sounds like a wonder and “Something Rotten” appears to be just that. The new musical has racked up an impressive 10 Tony Award nominations recently, including one for best musical. Set in the theater world of Elizabethan England and directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, it’s the story of two brothers, Nick and Nigel Bottom, whose company is in desperate need of a hit to counter the overwhelming success of their chief r...
May 06, 2015•4 min•Ep. 175
Broadway has been going to the movies for so long now that it’s almost surprising that the beloved 1951 movie-musical “An American in Paris” has only now been turned into a stage show. The man who finally undertook the challenge of brining the Gene Kelly-Leslie Caron romance to the stage is the internationally acclaimed ballet choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. He created the dances and directs the new production, which this week earned 12 Tony Award nominations, including best new musical. The...
Apr 29, 2015•4 min•Ep. 174
The 1958 movie musical “Gigi,” about a young woman being groomed for a life as a courtesan, won an impressive nine Oscars, including Best Picture. But a 1973 theatrical production did not enjoy similar success. Now a new lavish stage version has opened on Broadway. Directed by Eric Schaeffer, it stars Vanessa Hudgens, best known for the “High School Musical” franchise. This production features a newly adapted book by Heidi Thomas, which has been revised since its first, brief, appearance on Broa...
Apr 22, 2015•3 min•Ep. 173
Social scientists tell us that relocating and setting up a new home is one of life’s big stresses. So the pressure is really on when a young, upwardly mobile black man moves back to his old Brooklyn neighborhood, bringing his white girlfriend with him. Add a little more tension when the man’s former schoolmate, fresh out of rehab, arrives to crash on the couch for a while. It can push a relationship to the breaking point. Love, fear and privilege are topics explored in playwright Tracey Scott Wi...
Apr 15, 2015•3 min•Ep. 172
Robert Askins’s dark comedy Hand to God has already had two productions Off Broadway, at Ensemble Studio Theatre and MCC Theater. Now it’s making the leap to the big time, opening on Broadway’s Booth Theatre in the thick of the spring season. The show stars Steven Boyer as a troubled, but good-hearted teenage boy whose alter ego, an evil hand puppet named Tyrone, gradually wreaks havoc on his life. It’s pretty unusual for a play to have three separate New York runs. New York Times theater critic...
Apr 08, 2015•3 min•Ep. 171
The spring theater season is traditionally dominated by Broadway openings, as the deadline for Tony awards considerations arrives at the end of April. But Off Broadway doesn’t go into hibernation. Ars Nova, a small theater dedicated to new writing, has a hit on its hands with its latest show, Small Mouth Sounds , written by Bess Wohl and directed by Rachel Chavkin. The play is set at a weeklong silent spiritual retreat — which would seem to pose a dialogue challenge. New York Times theater criti...
Apr 01, 2015•4 min•Ep. 170
The late Wendy Wasserstein hit the playwright’s jackpot in 1989, when The Heidi Chronicles took home the Tony Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Desk and New York Critic’s Circle Awards for best new play. Wasserstein’s tale of a New York City woman looking for love, but ultimately making her life — and even having a child — without a male partner, resonated with many women struggling over their life and career choices at the time. But that was more than a quarter-century ago. Now the play is b...
Mar 25, 2015•3 min•Ep. 169
Larry David was one of the masterminds behind the megahit sitcom “Seinfield,” but since then he’s become better known for playing a version of himself in the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Now he’s on Broadway in Fish in the Dark , which he wrote and stars in, alongside a cast that includes Rita Wilson, Ben Schenkman and Rosie Perez. You might be wondering if the Larry David you know from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is the guy you’re going to see on Broadway. New York Times theater critic Charles...
Mar 18, 2015•3 min•Ep. 168
Helen Mirren won an Oscar for portraying Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 movie “The Queen.” Now she picks up the famous handbag again in the play The Audience , written by Peter Morgan, who also wrote “The Queen,” and directed by Stephen Daldry. The play, originally seen in London's West End, depicts the Queen in her weekly meetings with various prime ministers, including Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and David Cameron. The Audience is on Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Th...
Mar 11, 2015•4 min•Ep. 167
If you’ve been in a dive bar in New York, or anywhere else, just those simple words are enough to conjure the bleak decor, the smell of stale drink and something more. Eugene O’Neill’s 1939 play, The Iceman Cometh , takes place in a dive bar filled with broken people, and their broken dreams, who are the unseen props that fill the stage. The play makes only rare appearances on stage, this is in-part because of its extensive length. The four acts stretch across more than four hours. But the Brook...
Feb 18, 2015•4 min•Ep. 166
A new production from The Civilians, a journalistic theater company, is called Pretty Filthy and is an exploration of the pornography industry centered in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. The Civilians use words of ordinary people — in this case, people who work in porn — so the story is told with less concern for poetry than for verity. And, oh yes, it’s a musical, too. The show, directed by Steve Cosson, features songs by the Civilians’ in-house composer Michael Friedman, and a book ...
Feb 11, 2015•3 min•Ep. 165
Decades before Anton Chekhov’s plays about the struggles of existence among ostensibly successful and wealthy Russians, Ivan Turgenev wrote A Month in the Country , a play that contains many elements of Chekhov’s more famous works. There’s a bored, young wife on a country estate and men who orbit her in varying degrees of attraction and repulsion. The play has been given a rare revival this season by the Classic Stage Company. The production features two stars currently appearing in popular tele...
Feb 04, 2015•4 min•Ep. 164
"Boy meets girl” is a fine start for so many stories, including Let the Right One In , a play adapted by Jack Thorne and based on the Swedish novel and film of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist. But when the boy is an adolescent misfit and the girl is a vampire, the consequences of their encounter are likely to be farther-reaching than those in a human-to-human hookup. No less than three other Broadway musicals have been vampire-based, although all three of them proved to be somewhat less t...
Jan 28, 2015•3 min•Ep. 163
What can happen when two people meet? The possibilities are endless, but every relationship winds up following a single path, better known as “what actually happened.” But what about all of those alternative possibilities, the relationship roads not taken, the places the relationship might have gone? We see some of those alternative realities in Nick Payne’s 2012 play, Constellations , now in its Broadway debut at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory ar...
Jan 21, 2015•4 min•Ep. 162
Courtney Love, a famous rock widow and an actor and rock star in her own right, is making a low-key return to performing in the new musical theater piece Kansas City Choir Boy at HERE Arts Center, as part of the Prototype Festival of new opera and musical theater works. The music and lyrics performed in the show are written by Todd Almond, who plays the other leading role in a story that looks back on a relationship, which is permanently ended. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood giv...
Jan 14, 2015•3 min•Ep. 161
Every Brilliant Thing is a one-man show that features a large supporting cast. The show's other big self-contradictory element is its exploration of the impenetrable sadness of depression through things that uplift us, specifically, a list of things that make life worth living. This mildly immersive show is written by Duncan Macmillan, directed by George Perrin and features a sole performer, Jonny Donahoe. But Donahoe conscripts numerous members of the audience to play minor or sometimes major r...
Jan 07, 2015•4 min•Ep. 160
The New York Times recently sent theater critic Charles Isherwood on a trip to London, where he saw Shakespeare, quasi-Shakespeare and Kristin Scott Thomas onstage. While there, Isherwood took note of the theatrical import-export balance between Broadway and the West End. • Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at the Menier Chocolate Factory. • Shakespeare's Henry IV at the Donmar Warehouse. • Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III at the Wyndham's Theatre. • David Hare's Behind the Beautiful Forevers at the ...
Dec 24, 2014•4 min•Ep. 159
Theatrical magic acts have a long, long tradition in the world of entertainment. With a name that pays homage to earlier forms of stage trickery, The Illusionists: Witness the Impossible is a slickly packaged production of seven professional prestidigitators, all of whom appear – and perhaps occasionally disappear – on the stage of the Marriott Marquis Theater. Without giving away any secrets of this family oriented presentation, New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood lets us know if yo...
Dec 17, 2014•3 min•Ep. 158
