Bring your tissues! The Notebook, Nicolas Sparks’ breakout romantic novel, which later became a blockbuster film, is now retold as a Broadway musical. This optimistic tearjerker is true to the book except it uses three pairs of actors portraying the same couple at different stages of their lives. It’s told from the point of view…
Jeremy Strong (Photo: Emilio Madrid) An Enemy of the People By Deirdre Donovan Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People comes to raw and explosive life at Circle in the Square. Directed by Sam Gold, and in a smart new translation by Amy Herzog (Gold’s real-life wife), this 1882 drama about small town corporate corruption…
Liev Schreiber, Amy Ryan (Photo: Joan Marcus) Doubt: A Parable By Julia Polinsky John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable has received a handsome new mounting at the Roundabout’s newly re-named Todd Haimes theater. Directed for maximum impact by Scott Ellis, this first Broadway revival of arguably Shanley’s most famous play doesn’t flinch from tough issues:…
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…
Merrily We Roll Along By Deirdre Donovan Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe (Photo: Matthew Murphy) The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along, the problem child in the American musical theater, is back on Broadway! This new revival, deftly helmed by Maria Friedman, has Sondheim aficionados smiling. Theatergoers of a certain age…
The company of How to Dance in Ohio (Photo: Curtis Brown) By Deirdre Donovan Of all the musicals opening on the Great White Way this season, How to Dance in Ohio is by far the most groundbreaking. With its seven lead performers identifying as autistic in real-life, this musical brings autism out of the closet…
Harmony ensemble: Blake Roman, Steven Telsey, Zal Owen, Danny Kornfeld, Eric Peters and Sean Bell. (Julieta Cervantes) Harmony By Fern Siegel Harmony, the new musical by Barry Manilow (music) and Bruce Sussman (book and lyrics) strikes a beautiful, yet mournful chord. The true story of the famed Comedians Harmonists — and…
Ray Anthony Foster, Danny DeVito, Lucy DeVito (Photo: Joan Marcus) I Need That! By Julia Polinsky A bright and cheerful, three-character, 100-minute/no-intermission play starring a famous tv/movie actor: sounds like a formula for a hit. The audience for the Roundabout Theatre’s new production of I Need That responds as it should, laughing…
Dominique Thorne; Some Kakoma (Photo: Matthew Murphy) Jaja’s African Hair Braiding Reviewed by Julia Polinsky On a hot summer day in 2019, a pre-pandemic time that now feels almost unimaginably remote, a group of women gather in a hair braiding shop in Harlem, a salon as brightly hot-pink and lively as scenic…
Leslie Odom, Jr., Kara Young (Photo: Marc J. Franklin) Purlie Victorious A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch Reviewed by Julia Polinsky Director Kenny Leon and the company of Purlie Victorious have brought to vivid life this in-your-face revival of Ossie Davis’s sixty-year-old play. Written in 1961, a century after the Civil…