All stories by Jesse Green on BroadwayStars

Monday, May 1, 2017

5 Must-See Shows if You're in New York This Month by Jesse Green

Offerings include a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks's "Venus," at the Signature Theater, and Robert Schenkkan's "Building the Wall," at New World Stages.

SOURCE: The New York Times Subscription at 02:36PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Theater Review: Bandstand Is a Musical About (and Evocative Of) the Golden Age by Jesse Green

In order to explain what's good about Bandstand, a serious-minded original musical opening on Broadway tonight, it helps to know what's bad about some of its predecessors on the Boulevard of…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]
Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Theater Review: Can Six Degrees of Separation Still Bring Home the Bacon? by Jesse Green

When it debuted in 1990, John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation played like a satire of liberal values after the hugely disruptive confusions of a decade of Reaganism. The married couple at …

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]
Monday, April 24, 2017

Theater Review: Anastasia, Staged in Vain by Jesse Green

Many a Broadway musical adaptation seems like an Ikea product you're supposed to admire just because someone was able to assemble it. Anastasia, opening tonight at the Broadhurst, is that ki…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:28PM[SHARE]
Sunday, April 23, 2017

Theater Review: A Willy Wonka That’s Anything but Sweet by Jesse Green

Though often described as confections, musical comedies have no known recipe. If they did, a show like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which opened on Broadway tonight, ought to have been…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]

Theater Review: Annie Baker’s The Antipodes Is the Opposite of What You’d Expect by Jesse Green

Pre-production publicity for Annie Baker's The Antipodes, which opens tonight at the Signature, revealed only that it is "a play about people telling stories about telling stories." That tur…

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PM[SHARE]
Thursday, April 20, 2017

Theater Review: And the Word On Bette Midler as Dolly Levi Is… by Jesse Green

The show curtain now in use at the Shubert Theatre, where the ecstatic revival of Hello, Dolly! starring Bette Midler opens tonight, may be the reddest red-red I've ever seen. The beaded gow…

SOURCE: Vulture at 08:00PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Theater Review: The Little Foxes With a Switch-’Em Up Twist by Jesse Green

Lillian Hellman's breakneck melodrama The Little Foxes was written in 1939 on the Depression plan. It has one set, no more characters than it can use, and just enough plot to make it go. Yet…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]
Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Theater Review: A Holocaust Meta-History, in Paula Vogel’s Indecent by Jesse Green

One of the reasons Shakespeare's history plays are the greatest examples of their genre is that he took care to write about events no one could possibly remember. (They were set eons before …

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]
Thursday, April 13, 2017

Theater Review: Oslo Crackles With Drama, and Gives Peace a Chance by Jesse Green

Diplomacy is a lovely word, suggesting the idea that with tact and perseverance humans can accommodate one another. Yeah, sure. If that seems unlikely, so does the idea that diplomacy could …

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]
Thursday, April 6, 2017

Theater Review: Scattered Brush Strokes of Beauty in War Paint by Jesse Green

The last half-hour or so of War Paint, the beguiling but frustrating new musical about beauty legends Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, is just about everything you could want from a Br…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Theater Review: Noël Coward’s Present Laughter Is Ever-Modern by Jesse Green

Noël Coward described his 1939 romp Present Laughter as "a series of semiautobiographical pyrotechnics" " merely "semi," presumably, because the main character, Garry Essendine, though …

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:00PM[SHARE]
Monday, April 3, 2017

Theater Review: Amélie and the Limits of Whimsy by Jesse Green

To my knowledge, Zeno's paradox has never been recruited as a plot point and thematic touchstone in a Broadway musical before Amélie, the wistful new show starring Phillipa Soo that o…

SOURCE: Vulture at 08:06PM[SHARE]
Sunday, April 2, 2017

Theater Review: What Goes Right With ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ by Jesse Green

Farce is not an acquired taste; even babies laugh at pratfalls. Rather, farce is the taste you fail to grow out of " and thank God, because sometimes only the stupidest fun will do. If this …

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:46PM[SHARE]
Friday, March 31, 2017

Theater Review: A Definitive Revival of O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape by Jesse Green

There's something about our time that doesn't favor expressionism, especially in mainstream theater. The distortion of perspective and the inflation of emotional state that we may enjoy in p…

SOURCE: Vulture at 11:13PM[SHARE]
Monday, March 27, 2017

Theater Review: John Leguizamo Digs for His Inner Latin Pride by Jesse Green

When a play's title is Latin History for Morons, you may not want to be one of the title characters. Nevertheless, that's what you are in John Leguizamo's new stand-up-act-posing-as-a-theate…

SOURCE: Vulture at 06:04PM[SHARE]

Spring 2017 Theater Preview: Bette Midler, Groundhog Day, and More Must-See Shows by Jesse Green

A spring theater preview mostly means a spring Broadway preview, since April is the month in which many of the year's biggest-ticket shows rush the end zone. (To be eligible for this season'…

SOURCE: Vulture at 12:36PM[SHARE]
Thursday, March 23, 2017

Theater Review: Why Are We In Miss Saigon? by Jesse Green

You probably already know whether you like Miss Saigon, the pop-opera retread of Madama Butterfly set against the collapse of the American experiment in Vietnam. If you do like it, by all me…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:01PM[SHARE]

Theater Review: Encores! Tries to Reanimate a Jazz Age Cartoon by Jesse Green

Don't let the lovely silvery MGM draperies fool you, nor the silky gorgeousness of the orchestrations: The New Yorkers, the latest Encores! reclamation project, is a clumsy, instructive, dis…

SOURCE: Vulture at 04:26PM[SHARE]
Monday, March 20, 2017

Theater Review: Sarah Ruhl Gets Into Polyamory, Maaan by Jesse Green

Typically, Sarah Ruhl's plays sound like your smartest friend stoned. They unfurl in tendrils of dialogue that are both organic and perseverant, fantastic and philosophical. Because the plot…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:03PM[SHARE]
Thursday, March 16, 2017

Theater Review: A Rich Revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price by Jesse Green

We are used to thinking of Arthur Miller as a restless moralist: an American superego salesman with a big territory to cover. But being a playwright, he is also of course a sensualist; his d…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:05PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Theater Review: David Byrne Gives Joan of Arc the Imelda Treatment by Jesse Green

As you head to your seat for the new David Byrne musical Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, at the Public, you may smile upon seeing a painted stage drop bearing the legend "She was warned. She was…

SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PM[SHARE]
Monday, March 13, 2017

Theater Review: The Moors Is a Brontë Mashup Swimming in Whimsy by Jesse Green

The Playwrights Realm enjoyed a major success last year with The Wolves, a marvelous, eye-opening play by Sarah DeLappe that flipped the tropes of the men-in-sports genre to explore the live…

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:30PM[SHARE]
Thursday, March 9, 2017

Theater Review: A Reimagined (and Reinvigorated) Glass Menagerie, With Sally Field by Jesse Green

Surely we have reached the point with Tennessee Williams's great plays " if not, perhaps, his lesser ones " where it is desirable and even necessary to deploy them in new ways. They are, var…

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:20PM[SHARE]
Thursday, March 2, 2017

Theater Review: Significant Other Is Still a Too-Loud, Too-Long Wedding Reception by Jesse Green

What is Jordan Berman's problem? He's 28, adorkably gay, and gainfully employed at an advertising agency. His trio of college besties " Kiki, Vanessa, and Laura " coo over him like a purse p…

SOURCE: Vulture at 11:00PM[SHARE]
Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Theater Review: A Close-Up Sweeney Todd Gets Extra-Demonic by Jesse Green

We do not question, despite their umpteen revivals, whether the theater "needs" another production of Othello or The Cherry Orchard or Waiting for Godot. Nor should we with Sweeney Todd, one…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:11PM[SHARE]
Monday, February 27, 2017

Theater Review: The David Mamet Flameout Is Complete; Will Eno Catches Himself by Jesse Green

Again with the whining! It would take a review longer than this space permits to explore how David Mamet, the great bard of the grifty underclass in early plays like American Buffalo and Gle…

SOURCE: Vulture at 10:25PM[SHARE]
Thursday, February 23, 2017

Theater Review: Jake Gyllenhaal in Sunday in the Park With George by Jesse Green

A 98-year-old woman named Marie sits in a wheelchair surveying the Georges Seurat painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. She …

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PM[SHARE]
Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Theater Review: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Brings a 600-Year-Old Play Up to the Moment With Everybody by Jesse Green

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins " a MacArthur genius, a Pulitzer finalist, and a recipient of Yale's Windham"Campbell Literature Prize " gets my award for most-restless playwright. Five of his works …

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:00PM[SHARE]
Thursday, February 16, 2017

Theater Reviews: Evening at the Talk House and Escaped Alone by Jesse Green

For at least 30 years, Wallace Shawn has been warning theatergoers about totalitarianism: how near it is, how easily we might acquiesce in it. I have to admit I've sometimes found his alarm …

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:47PM[SHARE]
Thursday, February 9, 2017

Theater Review: This Sunset Boulevard Is Facedown in the Pool by Jesse Green

It's easy to see why Stephen Sondheim and the team of Kander and Ebb each took a stab at musicalizing Sunset Boulevard. The still-startling 1950 movie, directed and co-written by Billy Wilde…

SOURCE: Vulture at 09:47PM[SHARE]

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