The NBC drama Smash, returning for its second season early next year, offered a backstage look at a fictional Broadway production. Much of the show’s dramatic tension involved the musical’s writers’ effort to tell an honest story in the face of intense market pressure. Read More
Tom Cruise’s last ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, rebounded quickly with an Oscar, but Katie Holmes may have her eye on Tony. She’s to return to Broadway in the Theresa Rebeck play Dead Accounts this fall. The Times reports Ms. Holmes is to play a Midwestern woman living with her parents and trying to “pull together Read More
Despite rave reviews for Alan Rickman and the cast of Theresa Rebeck‘s caustic comedy of literature and sex, Seminar, the Broadway show shuttered last Sunday in a whimper, not a bang. This blow came one month after an almost complete turnover in the cast, with new members Justin Long, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Jeff Goldblum taking over from Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe, and Mr. Rickman, respectively. Read More
I’ve never been a fan of Alan Rickman’s tight-lipped, prissy-mouthed acting style, but sometimes he picks a role that fits like a knee-high nylon sock, in a play that suits his nasal, slanty-eyed mannerisms with the sound of two hands clapping instead of one. The result in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, at the Golden, is a blessing. In fact, the entire cast of five is a marvel of well-oiled introspection, which is certainly a good thing, because without them, the enjoyable but often untidy and uneven play would be nothing more than a lot of clever one-liners. Read More
The lesson of The Understudy, Theresa Rebeck’s very funny if somewhat slight new play, seems to be twofold: First, that life is a Kafkaesque struggle, and we are all mere lonely cogs in an irrationally functioning machine: and also that, if that’s the case, we might as well relax and enjoy it.
Ms. Rebeck’s Read More
Theresa Rebeck’s new play Mauritius has just opened at the Biltmore on Broadway—why?
I lose patience with plays like this. I try not to. The prolific Ms. Rebeck—author of last season’s social satire The Scene, and the post-9/11 farce Ominium Gatherum, a Pulitzer Prize contender she co-wrote with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros—has now written, of all Read More
