Writer
Marc Miller has been going to the theater since seeing I Married an Angel with Don Ameche and Margaret Whiting at Shady Grove Music Fair in 1964. When not theatergoing, he bikes, works out, writes songs, and binges on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
There’s a 1940 movie, The Mortal Storm, wherein an average family in the German Alps is divided and undone by the rise of the Third Reich, with tragic results. Since these earnest young Germans are played by James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Robert Young, and Robert Stack, it’s a bit of a challenge to take at…
She was, press agents were fond of asserting, “the most fascinating woman in the world.” Most critics, herself included, thought her not much of an actress, but she embodied a sensuality and glamour that virtually defined the Hollywood culture of the 1950s and the influence it exerted on everyday lives. And she capped that with…
When Jonathan Groff finishes a big number in Just in Time—and there are quite a few—he’s a mess. Bent over, breathing heavily from holding that long last note, wet hair in his face, sweating so profusely that the authors slipped a joke about it into the script, he has given, given, given. And when he’s…
Are there two Kieran Culkins? The one who shows up in the first act of the uneven revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross is, let’s say it, something of a disaster. He’s slower and softer than everyone who has preceded him, throwing Mamet’s galloping but precise rhythms totally off. Intermission passes, and the Culkin…
Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman) Death Becomes Her By Marc Miller “Musical Comedy Revitalized,” goes the subtitle for Death Becomes Her, and by thunder, that’s what it delivers. The new musical at the Lunt-Fontanne, adapted from Robert Zemeckis’ dark 1992 film satire on the pursuit of youth and beauty, is…
The Hills of California, to begin with, isn’t about California, or even hills. The title of Jez Butterworth’s great big Broadway play refers to some mid-20th century Johnny Mercer pop ballad, not a famous one, that receives several renditions here, along with Rodgers and Hart and other American songbook standards. At once a searing look…
If you were in high school in the late ’60s or early ’70s and had a streak of rebellious youth in you, chances are you got around to The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel. Hinton, who was Susan Eloise Hinton but felt it better to use her initials because who wants to read a gang-warfare…