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Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You. Credit: Touchstone Pictures/Allstar A year from today, 10 Things I Hate About You , a new musical based on the 1999 film comedy, will begin performances on Broadway. Cast, a theater, and an opening date have not yet been set. The show which set Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew in a modern high school will feature a book by eight-time…
Lily Rabe and Raul Esparza in The Winter's Tale. Credit: Joan Marcus After a radical reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet , the Public Theater’s summer Shakespeare in the Park returns with a traditional and highly engaging production of The Winter’s Tale , one of the Bard’s lesser-known romances. This has always been one of the more difficult Shakespearean plays to bring off because of its…
Dakin Matthews and Mary Beth Peil in An American Daughter. Credit: Joan Marcus Two Broadway veterans and incisive character actors, Dakin Matthews and Mary Beth Peil, deliver fascinating and detailed performances as a conservative Republican senator and his fourth wife, a seemingly flighty but actually canny socialite, in La Femme Theater Productions’ revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s 1997 play An…
John Pankow, Kristine Nielsen, Rachel Nicks and Robert Sella in Turning Off the Morning News at McCarter Theater (2018). Credit: T. Charles Erickson (Borrowed from Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts): Christopher Durang is one of my favorite playwrights. His plays were marked with an insanely dark humor and veered awfully close to comedy sketches. He passed away in 2024 at 75 after…
Julianne Moore will star in Faydra for MTC. Oscar winner Julianne Moore ( The Vertical Hour on Broadway) returns to the New York stage in Faydra , Tony nominee Sarah Ruhl's modern adaptation of the classic Greek tragedy Phedr e, a tale of a woman whose passion for her stepson leads to disaster. Tony nominee Les Waters ( Dana H. ) directs. Manhattan Theater Club presents the play at its…
Julius Rinzel and Ivan Howe in The Saviors . Credit: Ahron R. Foster Bubba Weiler emerges as a major playwriting talent with The Saviors , his second major Off-Broadway production, now at the Atlantic Theater Company. Apart from joining the American company of the Harry Potter play on Broadway, Weiner has appeared on the New York scene as an actor in Rebecca Gilman’s Swing State , portraying an…
(Bought at Time and Space Limited Used Bookstore in Hudson, NY for $7): Charles Busch's wildly entertaining memoir is as funny as his dozens of stage comedies (I've seen 13 of them as well as two musicals for which he wrote the book, his cabaret act and two of his movie screenplays.) He alternates a straightforward narrative of his career from childhood, college and stage and film triumphs with…
(Bought at the Little Red Book Shack in Hudson, NY for $1): Julie Salamon's well-researched biography of Pulitzer and Tony winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein reveals a complicated woman. Wasserstein became the voice of a generation of women who were underrepresented in media, advocating for fulfilling identities outside of male protection and dominance. In her personal life, she gravitated to…
Prince in Purple Rain (1984) A stage version of Prince's Purple Rain film and album will open on Broadway next spring at the Majestic Theater. Previews begin March 12, 2027 prior to an April 12 opening. The opening will coincide with the 42nd anniversary of the film's debut in 1984. A previous version opened at Minnesota's State Theater last year, but this edition will feature some new creative…
Kecia Lewis (center) and cast of The Whoopi Monologues . Credit: Angela Marie Orellana Back in 1984, the comedienne-actress Whoopi Goldberg seemed to come out of nowhere, bursting onto Broadway with an eponymous, self-written one-woman show presenting a quartet of characters rarely seen on what was then universally known as the Great White Way. She presented a sharp-edged, female, African-American…
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