Trailblazing experimental African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s powerful new play, “He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box”, pieces together an anatomy of interracial young love amidst 1940s Georgia, stewing in the horrific inescapability of history, the tragedy of racism, and contradictions of life in the Jim Crow South. Dense, quick, sentimental, angry, and mysterious, this is one new work from a legend worth checking out.
Tonight, the New York Pops gloriously kicked off Black History month and blew the roof off Carnegie Hall with "Heart and Soul", a joyful concert in tribute to the greatest voices in R&B featuring guest vocalists Capathia Jenkins and James Monroe Iglehart.
Greg Pierce’s new play “Cardinal” is bland and platitudinous, offering a superficial patina of hot-button discussion about economic and social change with little resolution or ideological point of view; too comfortable and vague, it falls back on easy tropes and says little that is new. Skip this one.
New lottery for tickets to "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child"; Shakespeare in the Park season and first two 2018-2019 Manhattan Theatre Club plays announced; "Dave" to play D.C., "Tootsie" to play Chicago, "Ain't Too Proud" to play Los Angeles and Toronto; Grammys recap
Jule Styne, Arthur Laurents, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green's 1968 Tony Winning Best Musical "Hallelujah, Baby!", now largely forgotten, receives an excellent concert production as part of the York Theatre Company's annual "Musicals in Mufti" series, which is dedicated to composer Jule Styne this year.
Thirty years ago tonight, on January 26, 1988, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical "The Phantom of the Opera" opened at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway; on Wednesday night, I attended the special 30th anniversary gala performance.
“The Homecoming Queen” by Ngozi Anyanwu is a mysterious and reconciliatory meditation on buried trauma, family history, and liberation into one’s true self through the story of a novelist returning to her native Nigeria to visit with her ailing father and confront ghosts from her past. Thematically taut but frustrating in its opacity, the play is a confident offering from an emerging playwright worth watching.
"The Phantom of the Opera" turns 30; Bernadette Peters and Victor Garber join "Hello, Dolly!"; Sara Bareilles is back in "Waitress" alongside Jason Mraz; Palace Theatre re-development moves forward; diversity stats on New York stages; John Barton, RSC co-founded, dead at 89
“Mankind” is a new satire from playwright Robert O’Hara (“Bootycandy”) that tackles gender, reproduction, fascism, and organized religion, but its intriguing and brilliant premise—a future in which women are extinct and men procreate—becomes too diffuse with too many targets.
“John Lithgow: Stories By Heart” is actor John Lithgow’s love letter to storytelling in which he performs two short stories by Ring Lardner and P.G. Wodehouse and shares a few of his own. Mr. Lithgow is charming as ever, and gives an impressive performance, but the show itself is disappointing and long-winded. I wanted more Lithgow, and less Lardner and Wodehouse.
On New Year's Eve, the Met Opera premiered a new "Tosca" in a bid for redemption following a controversial 2009 production of this Puccini classic; director Sir David McVicar and designer John Macfarlane deliver beauty and grandeur, and singers Sonya Yoncheva and Vittorio Gregorio are energetic and radiant. This is a must see for the opera fan or those interested in the form.
"Head Over Heels" books the Hudson Theatre" "Thoroughly Modern Millie" and "Ragtime" original casts will reunite for benefit concerts in 2018; report finds Broadway audiences are younger and more-NYC based in '16-'17; columns of note by Peter Marks and Howard Sherman
