New York

AUDRA’S TURN AS ROSE Six-time Tony Award Winner Audra McDonald returns to Broadway this fall, 2024, taking on what is widely regarded as the greatest role in musical theatre, “Rose” in Gypsy. This upcoming revival will be  directed by the legendary five-time Tony Award-winning Director  George C. Wolfe with choreography by four-time Tony Award nominated Camille A….

SHE’S THE ONLY ONE. HERE SHE COMES AGAIN. THIS TIME ON BROADWAY. Beloved icon Dolly Parton is partnering with ATG Productions  to bring a new musical inspired by her life and trailblazing career titled  Hello, I’m Dolly to Broadway in 2026. The great  Bartlett Sher has been signed to direct. Produced by Parton,  Adam Speers  for ATG Productions, and  Danny Nozell  for…

COME HOME In the lovely Broadway revival of writer Samm-Art Williams’ Tony-nominated play Home, an African-American man named Cephus Miles contemplates life or, more to the point, his life. Sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of his farmhouse, with an expanse of cornfields reaching to the North Carolina sky just behind him,…

LA COMEDIA DE THE COMEDY OF ERRORS Full disclosure, I don’t speak Spanish. Oh, I’ve picked up a few phrases over the years and still remember a bit of what Mr. Sanchez taught us in high school but for all intents and purposes, I am not bilingual. Luckily, that proved to not be much of…

TWAS BRILLIG! YOU’LL GET A HEART-ON IN THIS SEXY HOLE “All in the golden afternoon. / Full leisurely we glide” is part of the opening poem of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before she follows the white rabbit and falls into the hole. When you get out of the Jefferson L subway station in…

SWEENEY NOD By any measure, Irish playwright Brian Friel (who died in 2015) is one of the 20th-century’s great dramatists, whose works are among the lasting treasures of Irish literature. Irish Repertory Theatre is concluding its season of The Friel Project, a retrospective of Friel’s work starting with Translations, Aristocrats and Philadelphia, Here I Come!,…

THE CHOSEN FEW There is an impressive collection of talent on display in The Lonely Few, a rock musical making its New York debut at MCC after a run in Los Angeles at the Geffen Playhouse. Composer Zoe Sarnak has been making a lot of noise. In fact, as The Lonely Few is making its…

A NEW SPECIES OF ACTRESS Maia Novi’s  Invasive Species  is a topsy-turvy meta play that reflects its plot: a moment in the life of a confused young woman infected with the acting bug. Or so it seems at the beginning; very soon we discover that the core of the piece is dedicated to mental illness, a delicate…

JOY JOY JOY JOY JOY JOY JOY Julia Masli’s show Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha has finally arrived at the  SoHo Playhouse after a successful run last year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and it is a riot. Masli is an award-winning clown from Estonia, now based in London; when I went, the house…

A GROUNDBREAKING ACHIEVEMENT INDEED The short take on this play is that Jake Shore — as they say at the website The Rumpus — WRITES LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. He is new to me, but he’s not an unknown quantity. At least one critic has compared his previous work to Beckett. In my case, both Harold…