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…
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…
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….
What the Constitution Means to Me By Ron Cohen It could be described as a civics lesson disguised as a play…or vice versa. Or it could be called a personal family memoir, relating the years of domestic violence and disparagement endured by women, abuse and inequality tacitly supported or ignored by the Constitution….
Ahmed Aly Elsayed, Ethan Hova, Ben Schnetzer photos by Joan Marcus By Ron Cohen You may not be enticed into becoming a snooker fan by The Nap, but you’ll probably enjoy the hubbub that surrounds the game in this British comedy, being given its Broadway premiere by Manhattan Theatre Company. The play is…
By Ron Cohen “No matter how much you loved how beautifully I might play the ingenue, it was always beneath me. It is beneath all women.” So declares the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt, as portrayed by the acclaimed English actress Janet McTeer in Bernhardt/Hamlet by the esteemed American playwright Theresa Rebeck. It’s…
Stephen Payne, Josh Charles, Armie Hammer and Paul Schneider in Straight White Men at the Helen Hayes Theater, New York. Photo: Joan Marcus Straight White Men By Eugene Paul What in hell? Oh. Provocation. Getting us, the audience, off on the wrong foot with that yowling souped up caterwauling. And that curtain? Entirely…
Condola Rashad photos by Joan Marcus by Deirdre Donovan George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan is a comedy, tragedy and romance wrapped into one powerful drama. Over the years, it has been staged in strikingly different ways from the raucous to the subdued. As the Manhattan Theatre Club presents it (at the Samuel J. Friedman…
Jamie Parker and Sam Clemmett photo credit Manuel Harlen by Julia Polinsky Harry Potter. Hardly are those words out before people react. For years, J. K. Rowling’s creation has inspired adoration and fandom on the Olympic scale. But without the depth of a book’s narration, or the tricks and trappings…