Inside a spacious room on Manhattan’s West Side, rehearsal for the latest Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” was full of macho bluster and trash talk. And that was before the actors started running their scene. It was a Friday morning, and the show’s British director, Patrick Marber, …
In 1990, Amelia Rudolph was hiking through Tuolumne Meadows, a stunning mountain pass in Yosemite National Park, when she had an epiphany on a shiny granite bluff: “Could you make a performance here?” she wondered. “Could you dance on a cliff?” Rudolph, a dancer in the Bay Area who trained …
In his Tony-winning musical, “Rent,” Jonathan Larson asked: “How do you measure a year in the life?” The question took on an even heavier weight, with striking resonance, after Larson died unexpectedly at the age of 35 in 1996, hours before the show’s first preview. In the years after, dozens …
The New York stage has some notable nostalgia this year: More than a half-dozen performers in significant roles made their Broadway debuts as children. Some were in hits and some were in flops; they experienced joy and (in one case) trauma. A few have appeared onstage with regularity, while others …
George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke. Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking. “I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the …
The trouble started in August 2017 when the television producer Norman Lear said he was skipping a White House reception for his Kennedy Center Honors award. Another honoree, the dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, pulled out after President Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of …
When “The Threepenny Opera” returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons. For one, it will be a homecoming. Although “Threepenny” was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt …
Broadway OPERATION MINCEMEAT A sneaky compassion lies at the heart of this caper of a show, a deliciously eccentric London import that won the 2024 Olivier Award for best new musical. Starring the original West End cast, it’s a riff on a bizarre true story from World War II, when …
Nobody doubted that Lea Salonga could sing. She had won a Tony Award at the age of 20 for her breakout role as the besotted Vietnamese teen Kim in “Miss Saigon,” and sung her heart out as Éponine, and later Fantine, in Broadway productions of “Les Misérables.” She provided the …
In the decades when he was running the widely influential Off Broadway nonprofit Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford would not have been the one driving to New Jersey to see a man about a tree. But his new theater company, a scrappy, idealistic outfit dedicated to established older playwrights, is a …
