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.
By Marc Miller So: Some New York show-biz sophisticates descend on a Midwestern town and interfere with the locals, in the process unsettling the high school student body and stirring up parent-child issues, while learning a few lessons about themselves. Bye Bye Birdie, right? Yes, and now it’s also The Prom, a new…
Larry Bull, Chris Henry Coffey, Ted Deasy, Roderick Hill, and Janie Brookshire By Marc Miller Lillian Hellman herself wasn’t satisfied with Days to Come. “I wanted to say too much,” she later philosophized, and the Mint Theater Company’s revival of her early labor drama, a one-week flop in 1936, backs her up. As…
Jeremy Beck, Jessie Shelton and Henry Clarke Photos by Todd Cerveris By Marc Miller If you know the name Miles Malleson at all, it’s probably from the sublime 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest. There, in the fast company of such lights as Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, and Margaret Rutherford, Malleson’s…
Bill (Chris), one of New York’s not-so-finest, and Jeff (Michael Cera), a high-rise security guard, don’t see eye-to-eye in “Lobby Hero.” (JOAN MARCUS) By Marc Miller First, the theater. The Helen Hayes has been acquired by Second Stage, somehow lost the Helen, and undergone a needed renovation. The Hayes, at 597 seats Broadway’s…
Rupert Simonian, Ian Brodsky, Jack D.Martin photo Caylena Cahill By Marc Miller Theatre 80 St. Marks has been, over the years, a prominent off-Broadway house (it contained the original You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown), a revival cinema that flourished before VHS-DVD-streaming took over, and a very occasional way station for works-in-progress. Such a…
by Marc Miller Noni Stapleton, and this is meant as a compliment, makes a great cow. As the title character of the one-woman show she wrote, Charolais, a headstrong French heifer on an Irish farm, Stapleton sashays around the barn and pasture, sniffs, moves her head and body in uncannily bovine ways, and cheers…
Sarah Nicole Deaver & A.J. Shively. Photo by Richard Termine. By Marc Miller The Mint Theater Company thinks very highly of Teresa Deevy—“undoubtedly the most brilliant playwright whose work I will ever have the privilege of re-introducing to the world,” writes artistic director Jonathan Bank in his program notes. Maybe, but the brilliance…
Christy Altomare and Derek Klena photos by Matthew Murphy by Marc Miller What Anastasia has, and it’s welcome because it’s lacking to some degree in virtually every other new musical of the past several seasons, is craft. Scan the credits: book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens—the trio…
Photos by Joan Marcus By Marc Miller How au courant, how up-to-the-minute Six Degrees of Separation seemed in 1990. John Guare’s serious comedy, based on a then-recent true incident that happened to two of his friends, served up a tumult of contemporary issues in its 90 tightly packed minutes: race; sex; rich vs….
Johanna Day as Tracey and Michelle Wilson as Cynthia photos by Joan Marcus. By Marc Miller If, like 65 million other Americans, you woke up last November 9 bewildered, aghast, and wondering how, how could this have happened, you are urged to make your way to Studio 54, where Lynn Nottage’s Sweat provides some…