-
2 weeks ago | 
theatermania.com | Tricia Baron |Pete Hempstead
Bernadette Peters, Lea Salonga, and a cast of Broadway and West End stars took the stage at the opening of Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends on April 8 at the Mahattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
-
2 weeks ago | 
whatsonstage.com | Pete Hempstead
We’ve never needed escapist theatre more than we do right now. So far this season, Broadway has done a pretty good job of providing it with musicals like the hilarious Death Becomes Her and the quirky Maybe Happy Ending. I’m happy to say that there’s now another diverting show in New York that let me forget about my 401(k) for two-and-a-half hours and had me boop-oop-a-dooping out the door.
-
2 weeks ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
We’ve never needed escapist theater more than we do right now. So far this season, Broadway has done a pretty good job of providing it with musicals like the hilarious Death Becomes Her and the quirky Maybe Happy Ending. I’m happy to say that there’s now another diverting show in New York that let me forget about my 401(k) for two-and-a-half hours and had me boop-oop-a-dooping out the door.
-
3 weeks ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
An opportunity to fail isn’t something that most of us look for, but it’s a principle that Nietzsche said could lead to a more fully realized life. Philosophy professor Christian (Ryan Spahn) thinks a lot about that idea in Ken Urban’s insightful and intimate Danger and Opportunity, one of the most riveting off-Broadway plays of the season.
-
1 month ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
“They don’t make theater like that anymore.” Maybe not 100 percent true, but that’s what I thought when I walked out of Nayatt School Redux, the Wooster Group’s re-creation of Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte’s 1978 theater piece Nayatt School. Zany, no-holds-barred productions were the rage in the 1960s and ’70s. Not so much today.
-
1 month ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
Romeo and Juliet weren’t the first pair of star-crossed lovers. In the Iranian epic poem Shanameh, written around the year 1000, there’s the story of Manijeh and Bijan, two young people who fall in love and try to bring peace to their warring countries. That’s the subject of Hamid Rahmanian’s truly extraordinary Song of the North, a dazzling show that combines shadow puppetry, animation, and how’d-they-do-that stagecraft.
-
1 month ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
Curse of the Starving Class ranks high among Sam Shepard’s best-known plays, up there with True West and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child. It gets revived often enough; it’s last major New York run was a Signature Theatre production back in 2019. Now the New Group has returned the play to the Pershing Square Signature Center with direction by Scott Elliott and a starry cast led by Calista Flockhart and Christian Slater.
-
1 month ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
Netflix’s recent adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude has reminded us of that enchanting and mysterious literary genre known as magic realism, in which the fantastical exists side by side with the everyday. Julián Mesri has created something of a spoof of the style in his play The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics with the intention of critiquing capitalistic forces that have invaded South America, exploited its resources, and colonized its peoples.
-
2 months ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
The music and life story of Loretta Lynn will be celebrated and depicted in a new stage musical, Coal Miner’s Daughter, starring Tony Award winner Sutton Foster. Sam Gold will direct, with music production by Jeanine Tesori. Gold and Tesori last worked together on the Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home. Loretta Lynn’s manager, producer, and daughter, Patsy Lynn, and longtime adviser, Nancy Russell, will act as consulting producers.
-
2 months ago | 
theatermania.com | Pete Hempstead
The last time Idina Menzel took the stage at the Nederlander, she was making her Broadway debut as Maureen in Rent. Fans are likely to see a kind of full circle in her return to the venue for Redwood, her first Broadway show since If/Then about a decade ago. But they may not come away quite as enthused as they were when she first performed there.
