Nicholas J. Ashe, J. Quinton Johnson, Jeremy Pope, Caleb Eberhardt ,John Clay III Photos by Matthew Murphy , By Ron Cohen In 1968, the writings of Lorraine Hansberry were adapted into a posthumous play entitled To Be Young, Gifted and Black. The title, later shaped into a song by Nina Simone, became…
Stephanie J Block in The Cher Show. Photograph: Joan Marcus By Eugene Paul Three Chers for the Cher Show, Hip, Hip Hooray, Hip, Hip Hooray, Hip Hip Hooray! Because that’s how many Chers it takes to play the phenomenon, scculpted, molded, and twenty-five years younger than the seventy-two she is inhabiting. She…
Elaine May photos by Brigitte Lacombe by Deirdre Donovan Kenneth Lonergan’s 1999 play, The Waverly Gallery, is in revival at the John Golden Theatre with a top-notch cast. Starring the legendary Elaine May, and directed by Lila Neugebauer (making her Broadway debut), it is a poignant portrait of an octogenarian suffering from Alzheimer’s disease…
Bryan Cranston. Photo: Jan Versweyveld By Fern Siegel Sometimes, the past is prologue. That’s especially true when it comes to the power of media and technology. It can be a force for good or evil, as Howard Beale, the United Broadcasting System’s TV anchor, makes clear in the riveting drama…
Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones and Bobby Cannavale photo by Jerry Cunningham By Eugene Paul John D’Agata, who had been praised for the concinnity of his work in bringing together the shit and light that is America ran into a stone wall when his essay on the consistently high suicide rate of Las Vegas…
Christiani Pitts stars as Ann Darrow in King Kong, directed by Drew McOnie, at the Broadway Theatre. (© Joan Marcus) By Eugene Paul Though naïveté is hardly a New York Broadway thing, get ready to be naively amazed, enthralled, delighted, and even a bit frightened because King Kong is in town, the way he was supposed…
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…
Photo Joan Marcus By Eugene Paul Not very long ago if Jez Butterworth’s deeply enthralling, sold out hit play were to have arrived on these shores we might have looked at it as a trenchant, troubling example of the sins of hatreds handed down Irish generations, an aching chronicle foreign to this…
By Eugene Paul Several years ago my neighbor called me and asked me if I would accompany her to the police station. It was late, dark, she was alone, a single mom raising her two sons. One of them was in some kind of trouble. Of course I went with her….
Todd Almond (center) and company Photo: Joan Marcus By Fern Siegel For many, Bob Dylan is the poet laureate of American longing. His lyrical expressions of yearning, heartbreak and loss have been recast as a moving new musical — Girl From The North Country — at The Public Theater. Set in 1934 in Duluth,…