Monday, July 20, 2026

Female Rage is Center Stage in the Musical "Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo" by Jan Simpson

 Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, the new musical now playing downtown at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, is a patchwork quilt of other musicals: one swatch a revenge plot like the…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 04:10AM[SHARE]
Saturday, July 11, 2026

BONUS: All Kinds of Novels About Theater by Jan Simpson

To celebrate the 20(!) summer reading lists I’ve posted over the years, I’m highlighting what I’ve most enjoyed about putting them together: finding, reading and sharing novels and sho…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:45PM[SHARE]
Friday, July 3, 2026

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2026 by Jan Simpson

Happy Semiquincentennial Weekend!  Or at least I hope it is being so for you. This is a stranger summer than usual for me.  My building has scheduled work to be done on our terraces and so…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:40PM[SHARE]
Saturday, May 30, 2026

Tuning Into "ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll" by Jan Simpson

Maybe it’s because I live with a musician but ll:Girls:ll ll:Chance:ll ll:Music:ll, the new play with music by Eisa Davis that opened this week at the Vineyard Theatre, struck a deeper cho…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 08:15PM[SHARE]
Saturday, May 9, 2026

"The Receptionist" Revival Misses Its Call by Jan Simpson

 Shows get revived for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they were under appreciated in the past. Or they may have something particularly relevant to say about current events. A director may have…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 07:55PM[SHARE]
Saturday, April 11, 2026

Thrilling New Life for "Death of a Salesman" by Jan Simpson

One of the things we theater obsessives love to do is argue about which is the greatest American play. I'm a Tennessee Williams stan and so I always try to get A Streetcar Named Desire into …

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 02:06PM[SHARE]
Saturday, April 4, 2026

Giving a Head Pat to "Dog Day Afternoon" by Jan Simpson

Just about everyone"and here I mean most of the critics"seems to have something bad to say about Dog Day Afternoon, the new Stephen Adly Guirgis adaptation of the 1975 movie about a bank …

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:02PM[SHARE]
Saturday, March 14, 2026

Chilly Thoughts on "Cold War Choir Practice" by Jan Simpson

Most of the reviews for Cold War Choir Practice devote most of their word count to laying out its multi-pronged plot which includes Soviet spies, former Black Panthers, Regan-era conserva…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:24AM[SHARE]
Saturday, February 28, 2026

Real Families Really Matter in "The Reservoir" and "You Got Older" by Jan Simpson

Ever since Sophocles put the fall of the House of Oedipus onstage, the theatrical canon has been chock-a-block with unhappy families. And that makes sense because they make for good drama. B…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:42AM[SHARE]
Saturday, January 17, 2026

The Infectious Qualities of "Bug" by Jan Simpson

Maybe it's the current dystopic state of the world but I had a hard time with Bug, the revival of Tracy Letts' 1996 play that opened this month at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Fried…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 03:06PM[SHARE]
Saturday, January 3, 2026

10 Shows That Meant the Most to Me in 2025 by Jan Simpson

As usual, I'm late with a list of the shows I most enjoyed in 2025 but I'm going to share it anyway and since I am late, I'm also going to cut right to the chase. There were musicals I liked…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:02AM[SHARE]
Thursday, January 1, 2026
Saturday, December 27, 2025

Wishing You All the Merriest Christmas... by Jan Simpson

 ...from me and some of our mutual friends:

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 01:18PM[SHARE]
Saturday, December 13, 2025

Challenging Power Plays in "The Burning Cauldon of Fiery Fire" and "Practice" by Jan Simpson

Getting others to see the world in a certain way and then convincing them to do almost anything to preserve that point of view requires a toolbox of skills that include charisma and a ferven…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 02:36PM[SHARE]
Thursday, November 27, 2025

Thankful Thoughts for This Thanksgiving by Jan Simpson

Happy Thanksgiving!  It's been a crazy month. An avalanche of shows have been opening both on and off Broadway. I've seen 20 of them over the past four weeks"some good, some just OK, a fe…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 02:31PM[SHARE]
Saturday, November 8, 2025

"Kyoto" is a Call to Action on Climate Change by Jan Simpson

The only thing small about Kyoto, the latest import from Britain that opened this week at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse theater, is its one-word title. Everything else is outsized: the …

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 02:48PM[SHARE]
Saturday, November 1, 2025

Going Solo: "The Least Problematic Woman in the World," "Other" and "Did You Eat? by Jan Simpson

One-person shows are popping up everywhere. And it makes sense that they should.  They're comparatively cheap to put on since by definitiion there's only one performer to pay and the cost…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 12:24PM[SHARE]
Saturday, October 4, 2025

Wrestling with the Head Trips of "And Then We Were No More" and "This Much I Know" by Jan Simpson

Every once in a while I see a show that is filled with smart ideas, and that is interestingly directed and well-performed and yet still leaves me cold. Over the past week or so I saw two …

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 02:06PM[SHARE]
Saturday, September 27, 2025

"Mexodus": a Hip Mix of Hip-Hop and History by Jan Simpson

Theater lovers have been celebrating the 10th anniversary of Hamilton this year, and well we should. Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical about the Founding Fathers made seeing musicals cool again, …

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:36AM[SHARE]
Saturday, September 13, 2025

The 4 Shows I Most Want to See in Fall 2025 by Jan Simpson

Once again I seem to be late to the party. Other bloggers, critics and influencers have been putting out lists of the things they most want to see in this new theater season since mid-August…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 01:12PM[SHARE]
Saturday, August 30, 2025

A Labor Day Salute to the Back Office Folks by Jan Simpson

Well, here we are: it's Labor Day Weekend already.  And every year since I started writing here, I've marked this unofficial end of summer"and the real start of the fall theater season"wi…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 03:24PM[SHARE]
Saturday, August 2, 2025

A Highly Subjective List of the (So Far) Best Plays and Musicals of the 21st Century by Jan Simpson

The New York Times recently published a fancy interactive list of what it considers to be "The Best Movies of the 21st Century."  The editors say they assembled the list by asking more th…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:32AM[SHARE]
Monday, July 28, 2025

Why "Ginger Twinsies" Just Isn't for Me by Jan Simpson

It's often said that imitation is the highest form of flattery but sometimes it's just a knock-off of something more original. And I'm afraid the latter seems to be the case with Ginger Twin…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:02PM[SHARE]
Saturday, June 28, 2025

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2025 by Jan Simpson

We've already had our first heat waves of the season"the temperature hit 101° in Central Park this past week!"which is a sure sign that summer is here. But for almost 20 years now, the su…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 10:54AM[SHARE]
Saturday, June 7, 2025

Praise for the Reimagined Myth of "Eurydice" by Jan Simpson

In most tellings of the myth about the ill-fated love story between Orpheus and Eurydice that famously has him going to the underworld to bring her back from the dead, he gets top billing an…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 03:18PM[SHARE]
Sunday, May 25, 2025

Let Down By "Lights Out: Nat 'King' Cole" by Jan Simpson

Several years ago, I reported a piece on the Smithsonian's "American Popular Song" album, which was intended to be a collection of the best rendition of each song in the Great American Songb…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 04:32AM[SHARE]

Why Just About Everyone Loves Kara Young by Jan Simpson

This is a slightly different post than I use write but maybe like me, you have wondered why the nominators for so many different theater awards seem to love the actress Kara Young so much th…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 04:32AM[SHARE]
Saturday, May 10, 2025

The Angry Young Women in "John Proctor is the Villain" and "Five Models in Ruins, 1981" by Jan Simpson

A new genre has been developing over the past few years, one that in tribute to the post-war change in British theater I've been calling "angry young women plays."   These new works mo…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:02AM[SHARE]
Saturday, April 26, 2025

Celebrating the OCC's 75th Anniversary" and Its Nominees for the 2024-2025 Season by Jan Simpson

The 2024-2025 theater season ends on Sunday with the dual openings of the musicals Dead Outlaw and Real Women Have Curves. And I'm exhausted. But it's the kind of good exhaustion that com…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 06:24PM[SHARE]
Saturday, April 19, 2025

It's a Smackdown Between Show and Business in "Irishtown," "I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan" and "minor'ity" by Jan Simpson

  The ever present tension between art and commerce moves centerstage in three recently opened off-Broadway productions"Irishtown at the Irish Repertory Theatre, I'm Assuming You Kn…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 11:42AM[SHARE]
Saturday, April 12, 2025

The Martin Musicals: "Smash" & "Boop!" by Jan Simpson

Bob Martin burst onto the Broadway scene back in 2006 with The Drowsy Chaperone, a loving send-up of Broadway musicals that ran for 674 performances, was nominated for 13 Tony awards and won…

SOURCE: Broadway & Me at 03:12PM[SHARE]

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