‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Theater Review: Denzel Washington Looks Back and Forward in Anger
With his bravura performance, Denzel Washington shifts the balance of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play, and he shifts it in the right direction
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‘Heathers: The Musical’ Theater Review: Singing and Killing People All the Way to the Prom
Imagine the wound-up, overly fraught Ida Lupino trying to play a distressed teenager, and you have Barrett Wilbert Weed’s Veronica. At age 16, Winona Ryder never went there.
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‘If/Then’ Theater Review: Idina Menzel Lets It Go and Go
The switching back and forth in a film like “Sliding Doors” is easier to follow but it doesn’t have the pleasures on the stage, where the physical space never changes and the lead character goes to bed with one man but wakes up with another
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‘Breathing Time’ Theater Review: Beau Willimon Enters Mamet Territory
Willimon is especially good at having one of his characters drop a little bomb of information that takes the audience completely by surprise
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‘Mothers and Sons’ Theater Review: Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller Slug It Out on Central Park West
Tyne Daly gets some of the evening’s biggest laughs without even saying a word in Terrence McNally’s new play
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‘Aladdin’ Theater Review: Disney’s Animation Team Got It Right the First Time
Disney Theatricals turns the Genie into a big show queen in padded Broadway adaptation of the animated hit
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‘Rocky’ Theater Review: Sylvester Stallone’s Boxer Comes Out Swinging and Singing
The problem with the “Rocky” musical is that Stallone’s script was pretty sodden even back in 1976
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‘All the Way’ Theater Review: Bryan Cranston Brings His Wildly Funny LBJ to Broadway
Since much of what Cranston says onstage is delivered directly to the audience, it sometimes appears as if he’s auditioning to be a stand-up comic
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‘The Bridges of Madison County’ Theater Review: This Broadway Version Is the Charm
The collaboration here is a nearly perfect melding of story, arias, dialogue, recitative and pop tunes. Robert Jason Brown has written arias for Kelli O’Hara, country pop for Steven Pasquale, which is a sly reversal of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza’s historic turns in “South Pacific”
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‘The Tribute Artist’ Theater Review: Aging Drag Queen Gets Role of Lifetime in Charles Busch’s Daring Comedy
How is an aging drag queen who specializes in Bette and Marilyn going to keep working in Vegas when all the Millennials and Gen-Xers want are impersonations of Rihanna and Beyonce? Busch offers one possibility
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‘Bronx Bombers’ Theater Review: Yogi Berra and Reggie Jackson Make Belated Broadway Debut
It’s crisis time in the land of the Yankees. And a sports crisis for playwright-director Eric Simonson is equal to a nuclear meltdown or the onset of male pattern baldness
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How ‘A Clockwork Orange’ Author Anthony Burgess Soured on Stanley Kubrick (Book Excerpt)
In an excerpt from Robert Hofler’s new book “Sexplosion,” we learn how Burgess went from standing in for Kubrick at awards presentations to pillorying him onstage
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‘Outside Mullingar’ Theater Review: John Patrick Shanley Returns to ‘Moonstruck’ Turf Via Ireland
Compared to Debra Messing and Brian F. O’Byrne’s long courtship here, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen’s wait for Godot a few blocks away at the Cort seems comparatively brief in theater time
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‘Machinal’ Theater Review: Rebecca Hall Wins by Losing It in Her Broadway Debut
This dazzling Roundabout Theater production often recalls an urban contradiction that is a hallmark of Edward Hopper’s paintings: loneliness coupled with a total lack of privacy.
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‘Beautiful’ Theater Review: The New Carole King Musical Has the Guts to Play It Nice
Here is arguably the nicest, most normal, least eccentric personality ever to be at the center of a Broadway musical. “Beautiful” is the show for theatergoers who don’t like drama queens. Is there such an animal?
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‘Waiting for Godot’ & ‘No Man’s Land’ Theater Review: Ian McKellen & Patrick Stewart Lighten Up on the Angst
For sheer laughs per minute, these two stars deliver the goods as if they were instead performing a farce by Alan Ayckbourn or Christopher Durang
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‘The Commons of Pensacola’ Theater Review: Blythe Danner Rocks, Sarah Jessica Parker Recyles
Amanda Peet’s “The Commons of Pensacola” belongs to that class of TV pilots that never get picked up and instead take up residence in Hollywood’s tiny store-front theaters
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‘Macbeth’ Theater Review: Ethan Hawke Stars in a Movie-Friendly Staging
Director Jack O’Brien lets us know that this is a very human-scale drama, but later in the play you may wonder who’s that horrible couple everybody’s gossiping about
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‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder’ Theater Review: Broadway’s Tops ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’
Darko Tresnjak directs a compact, wickedly witty new musical. Especially delightful is the cheesy execution of the show’s hysterically funny murders
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‘Domesticated’ Theater Review: Jeff Goldblum Plays the Lowest of the Low
After taking on the racial divide in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Clybourne Park,” Bruce Norris returns to examine the war of the sexes in an equally funny and scathing comedy
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‘Betrayal’ Theater Review: James Bond’s a Loutish Cuckold
It’s a marvel of acting to watch Daniel Craig slowly bring the subtext of raging anger to the fore in scene after scene of this Harold Pinter revival
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‘The Snow Geese’ Theater Review: Mary-Louise Parker Gets Lost in the Weeds
The characters unburden themselves of so much complicated history in the first moments that you might consider retitling it “Autumn: Onondaga County”
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‘The Landing’ Theater Review: The New John Kander Musical’s for People Who Don’t Like Musicals
David Hyde Pierce stars in John Kander’s first musical without longtime collaborator Fred Ebb, and there’s not a showgirl or boy in sight.
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‘A Time to Kill’ Theater Review: John Grisham’s Tale Should Have Settled Out of Court
When you strip Grisham’s panoramic tale of racism and injustice down to a courtroom drama, there really isn’t much of a trial at the heart of it
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‘Big Fish’ Theater Review: It Sings, It Dances, but Wait — Isn’t That ‘The Little Mermaid’?
The Tim Burton movie is now a musical, which is at its best when it thinks small and sticks to Daniel Wallace’s novel.
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‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ Review: Ben Stiller’s Daydreamer Tries Too Hard
Stiller’s “Mitty” tries so hard that his adventures — both real and imagined– are neither intriguing nor amusing
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‘The Glass Menagerie’ Theater Review: Zachary Quinto Goes for the Jugular
“Star Trek” star segues from space to stage in a class-act “Menagerie”
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‘Romeo & Juliet’ Theater Review: Orlando Bloom Debuts, but Wherefore Art Thou Condola Rashad?
In the new modern-dress Broadway revival, the two lovers aren’t so much star-crossed as totally mismatched
