Writer
Journalist Deirdre Donovan has written for the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, among others. Her theater writing has been published in The Brooklyn Paper, Our Town, West Side Spirit, Curtainup, Theaterscene, and Offoffonline.
The company of Encores! Titanic (Photo: Joan Marcus) Titanic By Deirdre Donovan The Tony award-winning musical Titanic closed out the Encores! 30th anniversary season at New York City Center on a high note. Under the direction of Anne Kauffman, and with Maury Yeston’s brilliant music and lyrics intact, this sung-through concert staging of the original…
Wonder of Wonders: Celebrating Sheldon Harnick closed out the 2023-2024 Lyrics & Lyricists series on a glorious note. Written, directed, and genially hosted by Ted Sperling, it originally was planned to be a 100th birthday celebration for Harnick. But when the lyricist died on June 23, 2023, Sperling was determined to move forward with the…
Directed by Marc Bruni, a musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s landmark novel The Great Gatsby comes to Broadway this season with all the glitz and glamor of the Roaring Twenties. Following its sold-out world premiere at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J. last fall, this musical extravaganza winged into the Big Apple in…
The new Alicia Keys-scored musical Hell’s Kitchen is now heating up the boards at the Shubert Theatre. Inspired by the life of Alicia Keys—global megastar and winner of fifteen Grammy Awards—it focuses on several months in the life of a musically precocious seventeen-year-old girl in New York in the 1990s. Hell’s Kitchen got its stage…
David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, meticulously directed by Daniel Aukin, comes to Broadway with a ton of buzz. Following its sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons last season, it has winged five blocks over to the Golden Theatre, bringing all of its theatrical magic with it. The premise: The year is 1976, and a British-American band on the…
Jeremy Strong (Photo: Emilio Madrid) An Enemy of the People By Deirdre Donovan Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People comes to raw and explosive life at Circle in the Square. Directed by Sam Gold, and in a smart new translation by Amy Herzog (Gold’s real-life wife), this 1882 drama about small town corporate corruption…
Illinoise By Deirdre Donovan 0 The Cast of Illinoise. (Photo: Stephanie Berger) What better time to reimagine the American musical than now? On March 2, Illinoise, the theatrical adaptation of Grammy- and Oscar-nominated Sufjan Stevens’ 2005 concept album Illinois, arrived at the Park Avenue Armory’s capacious Wade Thompson Drill Hall as a new kind…
Merrily We Roll Along By Deirdre Donovan Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe (Photo: Matthew Murphy) The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along, the problem child in the American musical theater, is back on Broadway! This new revival, deftly helmed by Maria Friedman, has Sondheim aficionados smiling. Theatergoers of a certain age…
The company of How to Dance in Ohio (Photo: Curtis Brown) By Deirdre Donovan Of all the musicals opening on the Great White Way this season, How to Dance in Ohio is by far the most groundbreaking. With its seven lead performers identifying as autistic in real-life, this musical brings autism out of the closet…
Patrick Page (Photo: Julieta Cervantes) All the Devils are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain By Deirdre Donovan Those theatergoers who are searching for a show that is both intellectually stimulating and incredibly entertaining need look no further than All the Devils are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain. Written and performed by Broadway…