Michael Dale - Page 24

Harold Prince, who has been honored with 21 Tony Awards for his seven decades of achievements as a Broadway producer and director, did not write one word nor compose one note of the 17 musicals represented in the enrapturing new revue that bears his name.

It doesn't take long before Nancy Opel starts tearing your heart out as the title character of the new musical, Curvy Widow.

'If you knew in advance exactly what was going to happen in your life, and how everything was going to turn out, and if you knew you couldn't do anything to change it, would you still want to go on with your life?'

When this reviewer first critiqued Lucas Hnath's clever and intriguing A DOLL'S HOUSE, PART 2, he envisioned much discussion being provoked over the fact that a new Broadway play that debates issues regarding a woman's fight against institutionalized sexism was written and directed by men.

After Florenz Ziegfeld spent the early decades of Broadway's 20th Century 'glorifying the American Girl,' a young composer/lyricist named Jerry Herman spent a good hunk of the second half showcasing extraordinary women.

Red, white and blue bunting is draped across a stage left box at the Belasco Theatre because, as Michael Moore explains at the beginning of his more-or-less solo Broadway performance, THE TERMS OF MY SURRENDER, it is reserved for President Donald Trump to sit in at any performance he chooses.

Given her distinguished career that includes such significant works at PAINTING CHURCHES, COASTAL DISTURBANCES and PRIDE'S CROSSING, a new play by Tina Howe is certainly a noteworthy event.

New York City wasn't exactly the most magical place for a child to grow up in back in 1975. Crime and poverty rates were inhumanely high and when the city begged for federal assistance, the president, at least according to a Daily News headline, replied 'Drop Dead.'

It was fifty years ago that The Summer of Love attracted throngs of lunatics, lovers and poets to New York's Central Park in a free-spirited embrace of life's passions and pleasures. That same spirit is now joyously celebrated in the park's Delacorte Theater, where director Lear deBessonet's luscious, lusty and laugh-out-loud funny production of Shakespeare's fantasy comedy, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM offers an evening of ravishing enchantment.

Connoisseurs of American musical theatre wishing to make a point about the genre's ability to dramatize even the most unlikely of subjects often cite examples like SWEENEY TODD's vengeful barber on a killing spree or THE PAJAMA GAME's labor/management dispute, but bookwriter/lyricist/composer Kirsten Childs may have topped them all in 2000 when Playwrights Horizons premiered THE BUBBLY BLACK GIRL SHEDS HER CHAMELEON SKIN.

Even if you've never heard a note sung by Ella Fitzgerald (and if that's the case, you should stop reading this review immediately and look up some of her recordings on YouTube) Andrea Frierson's duo-bio solo show, ME & ELLA, can be related to by anyone whose life was influenced by a popular artist they've never met.

Though your ticket says you're seated at The Public's Anspacher Theater, don't be surprised if once director Sam Gold's jaunty mounting of Shakespeare's Hamlet shifts into gear, you find yourself wondering if you may have stumbled into some indie production playing in the back room of a hipster bar on the Brooklyn side of the L train.

A folk-singing black man with an optimistic view of America looks back at our nation's history of angry white people finding no better way to cope with their grievances than by firing a gun at the president.

In December of 2015, shortly before her excellent drama SKELETON CREW opened Off-Broadway, playwright Dominique Morisseau essayed an article for American Theatre titled 'Why I Almost Slapped a Fellow Theatre Patron, and What That Says About Our Theatres.'

After PARAMOUR, last season's ambitious but underwritten attempt to incorporate their world-class circus arts performers into a book and score Broadway musical, Cirque du Soleil returns to town doing what they do best.

While it's not unexpected to have the title character of a musical based on Henry Fielding's infamously bawdy 1749 novel "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" be introduced to the audience while enjoying the afterglow of a lusty time with an agreeable lass, what's a bit surprising at first about BASTARD JONES is that while singing of juicy peaches, pulsing blood, bees, flowers and whatnot, their post-coital intimacy includes her helping to strap on his wooden leg.

After thirteen years and eighteen directing credits for major Off-Broadway companies such as Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard, Lincoln Center Theatre and The New York Theatre Workshop, another accomplished New York stage talent, Anne Kauffman, takes her overdue Broadway bow with Roundabout's revival of Scott McPherson's 1990 darkly comic drama MARVIN'S ROOM.

As America's great playwrights go, Horton Foote, who passed on in 2009, just shy of his 93rd birthday, was perhaps the most understated of them all.  In a prolific career that involved golden age television dramas, Academy Award winning screenplays and dozens of stage works, his favorite source of inspiration was the relatives and neighbors he observed growing up in the quiet comfort of East Texas.

The newest offering at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow Theater features a beautiful dreamscape depicting a woman in a small boat being guided through swelling ocean waves by a friendly face painted on the moon. As designed by Brett J. Banakis (set), Montana Levi Blanco (costumes) and Eric Southern (lights), it's a romantic tribute to a style of theatre that made box offices buzz over a hundred years ago.

Ronald Reagan was re-elected president, the first human baby conceived by artificial insemination was born and the Tigers won the World Series, but for much of the world, the public perception of the year 1984 was forever shaped in 1949, with the publishing of George Orwell's dystopian novel, titled 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.'