Eden Espinosa (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman) Lempicka By Fern Siegel Tamara de Lempicka, the famed Art Deco artist, is a captivating subject for a musical. And Lempicka, the ravishing Broadway musical at the Longacre, brings her art and extraordinary life to a new generation. Lempicka is one of the rare original musicals, not…
Michael Esper, Corey Stoll, Sarah Paulson (Photo: Joan Marcus) Appropriate By Fern Siegel Appropriate opens with the deafening sound of cicadas. It’s an unusual choice, given that male cicadas chirp as a mating call. But there is no connection in this Arkansas plantation home. The Lafayette children have come to auction off their father’s estate…
David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, meticulously directed by Daniel Aukin, comes to Broadway with a ton of buzz. Following its sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons last season, it has winged five blocks over to the Golden Theatre, bringing all of its theatrical magic with it. The premise: The year is 1976, and a British-American band on the…
The Ensemble of Patriots (Photo: Matthew Murphy) Patriots By Marc Miller It’s a constant issue with Peter Morgan: How much are we to believe? The playwright/ screenwriter/ TV writer traffics in dramatizations of 20th and 21st century historic figures and is responsible for, among other works, The Queen, The Crown, Frost/Nixon, and The Audience. So……
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:…
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…
Colin Donnell, Ian Shaw, Alex Brightman (Photo: Matthew Murphy) The Shark Is Broken By Fern Siegel The Shark Is Broken is a literal reference to the mechanical shark in Jaws, directed by a young Steven Spielberg. The play rests on a slim premise — three men in a boat — discussing life, art and…