Jesse Green

3 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Jesse Green

"Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp," a new collection of one-acts by the great British playwright, is a cause for celebration, wonderment and grief. Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. NYT Critic's Pick A girl made of glass. A god - or, really, all of them. Ghosts, but of the future. An imp who may be trapped in a bottle. Just another day in Caryl Churchill's world. The arrival of new work by Churchill is like the arrival of a new theorem in a supposedly settled body of knowledge.

4 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Jesse Green

Kimberly Belflower's play, on Broadway starring Sadie Sink, gives high school students a chance to prosecute a #MeToo case against "The Crucible." John Proctor Is the VillainNYT Critic's Pick The first word spoken in " John Proctor Is the Villain," a vital new play in a thrilling production at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is "sex."Defining the word is part of a six-week sex education unit at a rural Georgia high school that doesn't want to teach it.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Jesse Green

Great musical comedies are great mysteries, and not just because they're so rare. They're also mysteries in the way they operate. To succeed, they must keep far ahead of the audience, like thrillers with twists you can't see coming. They are whodunits with songs instead of murders. "Smash," which opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, is more of a who'll-do-it, and when the big song comes, it's a killer. But the effect is the same: It's the great musical comedy no one saw coming.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Jesse Green

Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga lead the festivities in a new Broadway revue of the great musical dramatist's work. Old FriendsNYT Critic's Pick Fast approaching the number of musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote is the number of revues written about him.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Jesse Green

The composer and lyricist of "A New Brain," "Falsettos" and other shows answered the pains of life with jaunty songs. He died this week at 73. When I met William Finn in 2005, at work on "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," he was seated in his office in front of what looked like a trash heap but might have been a desk. On a couch nearby, one of his collaborators sank slowly beneath a rising tide of detritus; when she spoke, Finn kept overwhelming her too.