With the opening of Paranormal Activity, horror is alive and well on Broadway, which is saying something, considering the genre usually has a pretty high mortality rate. After its highly praised runs in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and Toronto, Paranormal Activity is attempting to bring its beloved movie franchise to the Great White Way with…
On Broadway, where celebrity casting is often used to sell a show, Celebrity Autobiography turns the concept inside out. This long-running comedy sensation invites a rotating roster of stars from stage, screen, sports, and politics to perform selections from other celebrities’ unintentionally hilarious memoirs, creating an evening where every performance—and every laugh—is a surprise. Inspired…
Superb performances; slice of life storytelling; a bit of something extra: all this and more greet you at the Barrymore Theatre, where August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is getting a handsome revival. Part of the Century Cycle of 10 plays Wilson wrote about the Black experience in America, Joe Turner takes place in…
Director Michael Arden takes a bite out of the 1987 cult classic The Lost Boys, reimagining it as a high-budget, high-gloss stage adaptation, now on Broadway at the Palace Theatre. The Lost Boys: A New Musical is set in the fictional beach town of Santa Carla, California, where the Emerson family relocates from their old…
Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show storms back to Broadway at Studio 54 with a gleeful sense of mischief and theatrical abandon, reminding audiences why this cult classic has endured for more than half a century. Under the exuberant direction of Sam Pinkleton, this revival fizzes with irreverent energy and a game, starry ensemble, delivering…
I saw the title The Balusters and thought OK, this will be about Mr. and Mrs. Baluster. Wrong! Turns out a baluster is “any of the small posts that support the upper rail of a railing, as on a staircase,” as Webster has it. They’re of concern to architectural preservationists and hardly anybody else, and…
Schmigadoon! is a triumph of choreography and the chorus are first-rate singers and dancers. The show, however, is musical lite. The premise: Two Manhattan doctors hope to salvage their troubled relationship at a Catskills retreat. Instead, a hike leads them across a bridge to Schmigadoon, an early 20th-century hamlet that eagerly breaks into song whenever…
Here’s an idea. Let’s take Beaches, an iconic, cult classic movie, replace the award-winning soundtrack, and put it on stage, without its famous stars! After all, it’s a slam dunk, adapting a Broadway show from a film. Oh, that’s right, it’s NOT. Examples? Despite stars Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was…
The tradition dates back at least to Oh, Boy! in 1917, and though it’s since fallen out of favor, it held sway for decades: the notion that an unlikely character getting inebriated was automatically hilarious. Comic drunk scenes were a staple of pre-Code movie comedies, and they populated plenty of plays, too. Fallen Angels, Noel…
Love. Intelligence. Genius, even. Betrayal. Sacrifice. The revival of David Auburn’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Proof, now at the Booth, has all this and more: great structure, superb writing, knockout performances. Proof centers around Catherine (Ayo Edebiri), a slouchy, visibly depressed 25-year-old college dropout, the daughter of Robert, (Don Cheadle) who in his younger days was…