Santo Loquasto's set at BAM's Harvey for Henrik Ibsen's undoubtedly most challenging, yet ultimately intriguing, play, The Master Builder, is one of the most stunning in a long career that happens to be distinguished by many stunning sets. Occupying stage center on a turn-table is a tall three-dimensional metal grid...

Call it "interactive." Call it "immersive." Call it whatever contemporary term you will. Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812--the musical now transferred from Ars Nova to the Meatpacking District's three times as large pop-up-like Kazino--can most accurately be categorized as that often derided night-out pastime: dinner theater.
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If you like theater and you like politics, you're going to jump at the chance to see theater about politics, Then get ready, politically-minded theatergoers or lovers of plain old-fashioned theatrics, because here's your chance. It's James Graham's This House, which ends its highly successful run at the National Theatre's...

Perhaps it's this reviewer's imagination, but it seems that more than the usual number of plays set in the workplace are cropping up. Take Mike Bartlett's Bull at 59E59, which is quite clearly a companion piece to last season's Cock, which wasn't about working.
Whereas in the latter 90-minuter,...

The single most spectacular dance number on view at the moment -- and it won't be for long; get there fast -- erupts in the second act of On Your Toes, the current Encores! series entry at City Center. Those who know the show may already have guessed it's the...

Just as William Shakespeare did with his history plays, Friedrich Schiller did with Mary Stuart and others have done since, Richard Nelson has juggled the facts for Nikolai and the Others at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse. The comparisons will stop here, which isn't at all to imply that the...

Harvey Fierstein was wearing kinky running shoes by New Balance because, according to him, "I have fat feet."
Yes, but where was it that he especially needed those multi-colored, kinky New Bals. It was at the annual "Meet the Nominees Press Junket," held today in the Millennium Broadway Hotel...

Diane Paulus has so many tricks up her sleeve it could pass for a cornucopia. She showered them on audiences when she jiggled A Midsummer Night's Dream into The Donkey Show and transferred it from Cambridge to New York City's and West Chelsea's Gogo Nightclub, and when she lifted Karen...

Tuning into the gossip the Divine Miss M spews jubilantly as another Divine Miss M is such fun it hardly matters that five minutes after the romp ends, much of the dirt dished with such five-alarm relish has completely faded in the cool night air.

That's to say, the...

What Nikos Kazantzakis did to de-sanctify Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Colm Toibin has done for the Madonna in The Testament of Mary -- with, predictably, the some outraged response from various Catholic Church officials. Who'd think the reaction could be otherwise when, among other revelations in the...

When Leo Tolstoy wrote "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," he knew he was setting up the world he would describe in Anna Karenina. What he could have no way of foreseeing is that he was also issuing a challenge to American...

If someone grabbed you on the street and yelled in your face for the next two and a half hours, what would you do? To begin with, you wouldn't let it go on for that long. You might even look around for a cop. Well, the cast of the Jekyll...

Plays conjuring Manhattan in the 1930s often take on the look of a live-action Edward Hopper painting. Not a bad thing. Actually, the effect is stunning when the curtain rises on The Nance, and what's revealed is the Hopper-like replica of a Horn & Hardart restaurant with its bank of...

During the second act of Motown: The Musical, Diana Ross (Valisia LeKae), having just finished her first performance as a soloist, remarks to manager-boyfriend Berry Gordy Jr. (Brandon Victor Dixon) that she hopes the audience got its money's worth. He replies, "They did."

He can say that again. There's...

When I reviewed Matilda from London in February 2012, I began my over-the-moon remarks this way: "You read it here first: Although producers are currently wrangling over who will prevail in the campaign to bring Matilda -- the hit British musical at the Cambridge -- to Broadway, whoever...

When the red-baiting scourge was intensifying in the 1950s, rising comic Jack Gilford and his chorine girlfriend-then-wife Madeline Lee Gilford were caught up in it. Madeline, more than Jack, was ferociously busy in various groups the House Un-American Activities Committee and Red Channels were scrutinizing as Communist hotbeds. As a...

If Kinky Boots were judged solely on the merits of its several uproarious numbers and sunspot-bright performances, it would be accounted a runaway hit -- and many happy patrons will do just that. Show-biz truth is that any production boasting both a knock-out first-act and second-act finale can't go wrong,...

Tom Hanks lands on Broadway. The two-time Oscar-winner is headlining Lucky Guy at the Broadhurst. And as anyone who knows about theater behavior nowadays will easily predict, standing-room-only audiences can't wait to give their idol one of those all but obligatory standing ovations.

Of course, they're not only leaping to...

In the introduction to his ultra-comprehensive 586-page memoir The Soundtrack of My Life (Simon & Schuster, $30, illustrations), Clive Davis mentions Fillmore West and Fillmore East impresario Bill Graham, whose motto was "I don't give the public what it wants, I give the public what it should want."

I don't...

Since William Shakespeare's Hamlet is vitally concerned with the forms of respect sons owe fathers and since New Haven native and Yale College and Yale Drama School graduate Paul Giamatti is the son of Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti -- who held the office from 1978 to 1986 and died...