BY EILEEN STUKANE | On the stage where I Need That is in performance, the curtain, playing the part of a canvas, offers a painted aerial view of streets and houses—a grid of suburbia in Anywhere, USA. My Playbill is even more specific: “Place: New Jersey” and “Time: Now.” Spilling from beneath the curtain and […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | A Holocaust musical by Barry Manilow? Relax, it’s actually good. Harmony has been gestating since 1997, when it premiered in San Diego, and now—after playing the Museum of Jewish Heritage last year—it’s finally arrived on Broadway. With music by long-running pop star Manilow and book/lyrics by Bruce Sussman, who’s written film […]
BY CHARLI BATTERSBY | Spooky Season in New York is off to an early start this year. An interactive haunted house has been running just off Times Square since a week before Fall officially began. The premise of Terror Vision is that the audience members are visiting HorrorWood Studios. They are guests of a film […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | Spoiler alert! Yes, the car flies! And it does so much more dexterously than in the lame 2005 Broadway adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In fact, the car is a DeLorean that lights up, turns, zooms, spins, and eventually levitates over the orchestra seats, then turns upside down. With people […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | Who says the nightlife is dead? It’s alive and well and living in the form of a musical about Imelda Marcos. An immersive show about the onetime Filipina First Lady, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (based on their concept album) and additional music by Tom Gandey and J Pardo, Here Lies Love […]
BY SCOTT STIFFLER | There’s something satisfying about the fact that while self-aggrandizing lawmakers in Tennessee and other states were spending 2022/2023 trying to limit, license, discourage, and otherwise disavow drag, Sherry Vine and friends were creating six episodes of variety television that plays such pomposity for laughs, while putting the pursuit of cock where […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | The masses know Laurie Metcalf as the likably neurotic Jackie from Roseanne and The Conners, but insiders have long realized that an in-person, theatrical experience that features Metcalf is generally a capital-E Event. A two-time Tony winner with range and skill, she managed to make the part of the demented Annie […]
TEXT & PHOTOS BY MICHAEL MUSTO | The Drama Desk Awards honor Broadway, Off-Broadway and Off-Off, always putting together a talent-studded event that’s like an award winning production in itself. This time, they wisely opted for gender-nonspecific acting categories, picking two winners per category. The winners were announced on May 31 and this Tuesday, there […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | One-person shows are among my least favorite types of theater because they can verge on glorified lectures instead of real drama. Without various characters popping up to act out scenes as they occur, the one-person show usually resorts to an actor simply looking out at the audience and telling you about […]
BY MICHAEL MUSTO | Anyone craving a straightforward modern interpretation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet should get themselves to a nunnery instead. Fat Ham—James Ijames’ Pulitzer-winning new play, which has come to Broadway after a run produced by the Public Theater and National Black Theatre—is much more ambitious than that. Using the basic plot themes […]