Laura Collins-Hughes

4 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Laura Collins-Hughes |Elisabeth Vincentelli

Across the country, you'll find Shakespeare in amphitheaters, exciting new works on intimate stages and many regional repertories in bucolic settings. Just off Manhattan, a full-to-bursting open-air season is already underway at Little Island(through Sept. 28), a park in the Hudson River that looks from afar as if it was built atop a giant's stash of stiletto heels.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Laura Collins-Hughes

In Christin Eve Cato's new backstage dramedy, an actress's plan to terminate a pregnancy collides with the rollback of reproductive rights. In a shared dressing room of a theater somewhere in Oklahoma, an actress named Melinda is the first to arrive. It's 90 minutes before the curtain rises, and to the keen-eyed stage manager, Alex, she seems not quite herself. "You look like you've been throwing up," Alex says, getting it right in one guess, not that Melinda is about to admit that she is pregnant.

2 months ago | ourcommunitynow.com | Laura Collins-Hughes

Share A brief scene in the new musical “Real Women Have Curves” is as harrowing as anything in the most serious drama on Broadway: a group of terrified workers in a small Los Angeles dress factory, hiding in the dark as they listen to an immigration raid taking place next door.When the raid is over, the first sounds to break the quiet are soft weeping and breath laden with fear.It’s a jolt of somber realism in a show that opts, ultimately, to lean in a feel-good direction.

2 months ago | nytimes.com | Laura Collins-Hughes

On Broadway, the musical adaptation is a bouncy crowd pleaser about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one's dreams. A brief scene in the new musical " Real Women Have Curves " is as harrowing as anything in the most serious drama on Broadway: a group of terrified workers in a small Los Angeles dress factory, hiding in the dark as they listen to an immigration raid taking place next door.

2 months ago | nytimes.com | Laura Collins-Hughes

Directed by Maria Mileaf, with music by Mustapha Khan, William Kenneth Vaughan and Norman Burns, it is a strange, sprawling, time-hopping work of memory, fiction and adaptation. On a set by Neil Patel, the production juggles moods, tones and theatrical styles, and has some fun with disco dancing and water ballet. (Choreography is by Shura Baryshnikov, lighting by Matthew Richards, costumes by Karen Boyer.) The abundance, however, gets to be unwieldy.