Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman) Death Becomes Her By Marc Miller “Musical Comedy Revitalized,” goes the subtitle for Death Becomes Her, and by thunder, that’s what it delivers. The new musical at the Lunt-Fontanne, adapted from Robert Zemeckis’ dark 1992 film satire on the pursuit of youth and beauty, is…
Dominic Weintraub, William Strom, Hugo Williams, and Claire Bird (Photo: Teddy Wolff) Burnout Paradise By Deirdre Donovan The live game show Burnout Paradise, now making its North American debut at St. Ann’s Warehouse, is experimental theater at its best and zaniest. Directed, written, designed, and performed by Australia’s Pony Cam, a collective based in Melbourne,…
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…
Joseph Kloska, Kenneth Branagh (Photo: Marc J. Franklin) King Lear By Deirdre Donovan The legendary theater director Peter Brook compared King Lear to a mountain whose summit has never been reached. Actor-director Kenneth Branagh seems to have taken that observation as an invitation to scale what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. But although Branagh grabs…
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…
The Lyrics & Lyricists concert series at 92NY opened their 2024-2025 season with a tribute to the late, great Oscar Hammerstein II, titled Cockeyed Optimist: Where Hammerstein Found his Hope. Directed by Dick Scanlan, and co-written by Scanlan and Malcolm Gets, the performance was a delicious mélange of song and narration with Scanlan, not only…
Deirdre Lovejoy, Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Photo:Valerie Terranova) In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot By Julia Polinsky Family, climate, love, survival: Sarah Mantell’s In The Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, directed by Sivan Battat and now at Playwrights Horizons, takes on some big subjects. Speculatively set in a not-too-distant future, the play gradually makes it clear that…