Broadway Reviews

Review of freestyle love supreme on Broadway

Improvisational theatre and comedy are long-standing New York traditions. I've always held in high esteem artists who create performance sequences, let alone entire shows, with little prepped content. The fiendish difficulty of coming up with material spontaneously is exacerbated by the need for a good show to have some semblance of pace and structure.Now imagine adding not only a musical, but also a hip-hop element to it. That's freestyle love supreme, taking the crown for the most ambitious...

Review of The Height of the Storm, starring Jonathan Pryce & Eileen Atkins, on Broadway

The Height of the Storm, currently celebrating its American premiere at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club, offers no flying broomsticks, no animatronic beasts — no puppets either. Playwright Florian Zeller again writes a family drama with as much unsaid as said, as much ambiguity as clarity; that is, it feels like the real life of a real family at a crisis point. In this case, a long married couple, who more than sniff the end at hand, struggle with that. Their...

Review of Derren Brown: Secret on Broadway

I want you to go see Derren Brown: Secret by Andy Nyman, Derren Brown and Andrew O'Connor, directed by O'Connor and Nyman and now playing at Broadway's Cort Theatre, as soon as possible so that we can talk about it. If I tell you the "Secret" now, it will spoil it for you. And, at the risk of being prescriptive, I declare that you should have this thrill in your life. This show magnifies the basic reason we go to the theatre: To willingly suspend our disbelief in a mysterious alternate universe...

Review of Betrayal, starring Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Cox & Zawe Ashton, on Broadway

Betrayal is a play of extreme intimacy. I think it is intended to be almost unbearable. The story of a marriage and a friendship disintegrating is based on Harold Pinter's own affair with Joan Bakewell. His approach, however, is surgical and logical. He does what we all do when a life event alters our trajectory. We search for the source. "Fifteen years ago I spotted that person with the puppy and stopped to say hello. He turned out to be a doctor. Today I am in Venice sharing a gondola with his...

Review of Sea Wall/A Life, starring Jake Gyllenhaal & Tom Sturridge, on Broadway

I don't know in whose brain the idea originally germinated, but it was, I think, inevitable. Sea Wall by Simon Stephens and A Life by Nick Payne, two British playwrights by the by, were destined, in America, to become Sea Wall/A Life; a singular evening at the theater. And after germinating in a sold out run at The Public Theater, it has now moved to Broadway's Hudson Theatre. Because its movie star cast of Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge didn't bargain for the connection with and reaction...

Review of Moulin Rouge! The Musical on Broadway

In 2002 Baz Luhrmann, the idiosyncratic Australian film and theatre director, brought his stunning 1990 Opera Australia production of Puccini's La Bohème from Sydney Opera House to Broadway, a tale of a consumptive heroine and her bohemian friends living in rooftop Parisian digs. Now 17 years later, we're back in similar territory for this bedazzling stage transition of Luhrmann's 2001 film "Moulin Rouge!," which underlines just how much La Bohème inspired it -- an opera that also provided the...

Reasons to see 'Moulin Rouge! The Musical' on Broadway

Discover why you can-can-can't miss this 10-time Tony Award-winning jukebox musical adaptation of Baz Luhrmann's iconic 2001 film at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre.

Review of King Lear, starring Glenda Jackson, on Broadway

Sam Gold's production of King Lear, currently playing at Broadway's Cort Theatre with Glenda Jackson gender-bending the title role, is not for Shakespeare neophytes. It's barely for those well versed in the Bard's verse without a bit of head scratching. Mr. Gold has enjoyed recent success with well received Off-Broadway productions of Othello and Hamlet in his quest to stage all of Shakespeare's tragedies. His move to Broadway with King Lear does not live up to expectations.Gold is known for his...

Review of Beetlejuice, starring Alex Brightman, on Broadway

The Broadway musical has long come back from the dead — the 1980s doldrums in which the vacuum was filled by British imports, starting with Cats which ran for nearly 18 years at the Winter Garden Theatre. But for Broadway's latest behemoth, the stage of the same theatre is now joyfully populated with the living dead.This is not the first time that this theatre has had a haunting: the original production of Sondheim and Goldman's Follies here in 1971 was full of ghosts of its characters' younger...

Review of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring Jeff Daniels, on Broadway

A regrettably sour note has hung over this new Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Shubert Theatre, when the theatrical rights for an adaptation of Harper Lee's historic novel were assigned to it by Lee and subsequently her estate (who then challenged the version produced by playwright and television writer Aaron Sorkin that led to litigation that was settled in court).But the producer Scott Rudin in turn threatened other planned productions of a previous long-established version...