Maybe Happy Ending, now on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre, looks great, sounds great, has splendid performances and touches the heart as it explores what it means to be human. Or to love. Or both. It has real songs, that advance the show and reveal the characters’ thoughts. It has fireflies. It has robots in…
Memoirs can be self-serving or enlightening. If the author is funny, rueful and aware of personal ironies, they can be both. That’s the case with Delia Ephron (“You’ve Got Mail”), the Hollywood screenwriter/novelist who penned a best-selling 2022 memoir. She addressed her cancer recovery and the surprise of finding love after her husband’s death. Ephron,…
Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, a new play about artificial intelligence, is likely to please some theatergoers and leave others with deeply furrowed brows. Under the direction of Bartlett Sher, and starring Academy Award-winning actor Robert Downey, Jr., the drama investigates how authors use AI to help them craft their literary works and also save them from…
When you drop a coin into a jukebox, you pays your money and you hardly ever takes your chances. With A Wonderful World, The Louis Armstrong Musical, your chances are really good to hear some great music (arrangements by Branford Marsalis and Daryl Waters), enjoy some splendid choreography (Rickey Tripp) danced by splendid dancers, and…
Thanks to Sam Gold, Generation Z now has an opportunity to get up close and personal with Romeo + Juliet, which recently opened at Circle in the Square. Although some may object to the production’s conspicuous courting of a youthful audience, this 36th Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s early tragedy is bound to score with those…
Kenny Leon, director of the current streamlined revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, brings a fresh new interpretation to the classic. He takes the revered play and makes it into a multicultural theatrical statement that invites everybody to enjoy this hauntingly sublime work. Our Town is an outlier in American…
For fans of Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Sunset Boulevard, the Broadway incarnation may be jolting. It’s not Wilder’s vision, but director Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Blvd., reimagined for the stage. While the piece is based on the 1950 movie — and retains some of its powerful lines — this version is oddly devoid of place. Now at…
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…
Part backstage comedy, part political satire, part based in fact and part pure fiction, David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face is by turns hilarious, touching, and disturbing. It’s been suggested that we might appreciate the gift to see ourselves as other see us. But we might not. Yellow Face pokes hard at identity politics, as it…
It’s beyond unusual to start a show with the stars taking a bow. But Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone wield such theatrical clout that, as they walk onstage in The Roommate at the Booth Theatre, winding through designer Bob Crowley’s suggestive, minimalist stage, they get a round of applause, then walk off. And then the…