Enron, the hit London import that opened last night at the Broadhurst Theatre, is a surprising and remarkable creation: It’s a two-and-a-half-hour lecture on business history, and it’s utterly thrilling.
Credit for this feat of alchemy goes primarily to second-time playwright Lucy Prebble, and her director, Rupert Goold, artistic director of London’s Headlong Theatre, which Read More
Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which has made a very welcome transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, couldn’t be timelier.
Mr. Foote’s gentle, comic parable about self-interest and desperation over the fate of a family estate in the playwright’s imagined small town of Harrison, Texas, first premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in Read More
George Furth, a playwright who co-wrote musicals with Stephen Sondheim including Tony Award-winning Company, died on Monday in California at 75. He was hospitalized for a lung infection, but an exact cause has not been reported. Mr. Furth was a lanky, familiar character in many movies and tv shows including Blazing Saddles, Butch Cassidy and Read More
For all the theatergoers who snub musicals, Jenna Russell, the 40-year-old actress who plays Dot in Sunday in the Park With George on Broadway, assures you that Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics will change your mind. “The more life kind of beats you about a bit, you understand what James [Lapine, the book scribe] and Read More
Hilarity in Park Slope
And so, to the moment the nation has been waiting for! Before announcing the winners of our 2004 Theater Awards, here is Mrs. Kockenlocker, the beloved matriarch of our distinguished firm of accountants, Kockenlocker, Kockenlocker and Kockenlocker, to explain the rules.
“Good evening, everybody. Here are the rules as set out in subsection 2(b), paragraph Read More
My, there’s a lot of drama associated with the first musical about a gay couple, the 1983 La Cage Aux Folles. Now happily back on Broadway like nostalgic kitsch, it was said to be daring in its day, though it was always, essentially, a sweetly old-fashioned show. From its glitzy inception, La Cage (“Time: Summer. Read More
It’s no pleasure to report that the new production of The Frogs , starring Nathan Lane, illustrates why vaudeville died. I’d much rather be telling you about a great night out-a wonderfully silly night out-at the theater on a glorious summer’s night. But as Mr. Lane’s Dionysos puts it despairingly during the show: “Have you Read More
It is always sad when a show closes, and unbearably so when the closure is stunningly unexpected. When the acclaimed revival of Larry Kramer’s 1985 The Normal Heart closed after nine weeks at the Public on June 29, the shock was palpable. For here was a memorable production that was being considered for a Broadway Read More
Reports
of Stephen Sondheim’s latest masterpiece are a little premature. But when was
there ever a time that Saint Sondheim didn’t
write a masterpiece? As surely as day follows night, Assassins , with its book by John Weidman about nine Presidential
assassins, was bound to be acclaimed. That’s the uncritical way with all things
Sonheimean. Read More
