Theatre & Dance
“When you hear the name ‘Chaplin,’ you’re going to think comedy,” says Tom Meehan. “But it’s not really comedy. There’s very little comedy in it. The big trauma of his life was his mother going mad.” Meehan is talking about “Chaplin,” a musical about the legendary silent-film comic, which Meehan wrote with composer Chris Curtis,...
Anton Checkhov’s language is so rooted in the place and time it was written that contemporary productions often walk a treacherous line: They must not be overly reverent, didacticly aping some agreed-upon standard of period Russianness, nor seem so contemporary that characters’ actions and emotions become decontextualized nonsense....
Director Diane Paulus loves a storm. A tempest figures prominently in “Amaluna,” her new Cirque du Soleil show in Montreal. And it is a hurricane which brings an ill wind to Catfish Row in her Broadway revival of “The Gershwins’ 'Porgy and Bess.'” While “Amaluna” (partly based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”) received mixed notices,...
Another ghost story will soon be haunting Broadway. The producers of “Rebecca” have confirmed that the $12 million musical, which had been postponed last month due to a lack of financing, will be opening at the Broadhurst Theatre on Sunday, November 18. The musical is based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel about a beautiful young woman...
In the very early ’80s, dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage started going up to Harlem to judge vogue balls, the ecstatic underground dance competitions held by different “houses.” As she began to incorporate the styles she witnessed into her own works, the culture of voguing was trickling into the mainstream. In 1990, Madonna asked...
Nearly 35 years after its premiere at the Avignon Festival in France, Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” will finally be performed in the country to the north when the curtain rises tonight at London’s Barbican Theatre. Though the opera toured extensively in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the 2012 revival is the first to bring the 20th...
Rick Elice, by his own admission, just couldn’t hold down a regular job. Instead he finds himself, at 55, a co-librettist for the smash hit “Jersey Boys,” and the author of the new Broadway play, “Peter and the Starcatcher,” which has just been nominated for nine Tony Awards, including Best Play. Elice’s stage adaptation of...
As far as historic opera openings go, Milan’s La Scala has had a fair share of premieres: Puccini debuted “Madama Butterfly” there in 1904 and “Turandot” in 1926, while Verdi held the first performance of “Otello” there in 1926. But a reputation for being one of the most storied theaters in the world isn’t enough to guarantee public...
Last Monday, at the jubilant opening night party for Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons,” the playwright hid behind a pillar at Sardi’s Restaurant as a publicist read the New York Times’s rave review of the show to the crowd. Fingering an unlit cigarette, he listened as the encomiums poured forth — for the actors, including Linda Lavin, Dick...
The theater — long enamored of con artists: music guys, rainmakers, shifty producers, lotharios, and flimflam men — now welcomes Jonas Nightingale, the slick televangelist played by Raul Esparza in the new Broadway musical, “Leap of Faith.” With songs by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, the show is based on the 1992 film, which...
