David Finkle

You may not think you know Peggy Pope, but you do. You certainly do if you're a Nine to Five fanatic. She's Margaret Foster, the secret tippler who salutes Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton with a congratulatory "Atta girl" every time they give overbearing boss Dabney Coleman what...

Sheera Ben-David, whom the astute Feinstein's at Loews Regency deciders know enough to book and then book again, doesn't yet appear to have built the large following she deserves. It may be because she -- referring to herself with amusing candor as a "plus-size model" -- tends to prefer giving...

If a reviewer decided to adhere to the old maxim about comparisons being odious in the case of the City Center Encores! series Gentlemen Prefer Blondes concert reading, he'd be obliged to say that Megan Hilty does a solid job as Lorelei Lee.

She gets her laughs on the...

Some marriages are more like collaborations than others. Take Sheldon Harnick and Margery Gray Harnick. He's the renowned show-business figure who wrote the lyrics for, among other musical comedies, Fiorello! and Tenderloin. When she was still a performer, she sang and danced in both. Which could be considered a collaboration...

At the beginning of February, when NBC's doggedly promoted new series Smash was scheduled to hit television viewers over the head with its implied accurate depiction of what's needed to bring a new musical to Broadway, I wrote disparagingly about the enterprise. I'd seen a screener of the pilot and...

When you sit through something as turgid, as ludicrous as In Masks Outrageous and Austere, Tennessee Williams's last play -- or so we're led to believe of a manuscript cobbled together by other peddler-meddlers, supposedly including a computer -- you spend much of the slow-moving time wondering...

Libel is actionable legally, and I wouldn't go so far as to cry "libel," while dismissing with disgust End of the Rainbow, the so-called play about Judy Garland that's just opened at the Belasco. I will say that, while character assassination doesn't usually lead to lawsuits (possibly because difficult to...

It's not difficult to see the appeal John Steinbeck's 1945 novel Cannery Row and 1954 sequel, Sweet Thursday, had for the sometimes folksy Oscar Hammerstein II when he was looking around for potential musical-comedy-izing material.

Set in Monterey, Calif.'s defunct canning section after World War II and featuring any number...

'Tis Pity She's a Whore -- John Ford's 1633 tragedy about a brother and sister who fall in love and voraciously act on it -- isn't often seen and hasn't been presented all that frequently since it first played a London theater. The very reason for its relative obscurity may...

Do most people associate the word "cabaret" with something appealing or with something repellant? Do most people even know what the word "cabaret" means, what it connotes -- that it indicates accomplished singers and musicians showing off their talents and their commitment to new and old quality music in rooms...

What a high-wattage light-bulb idea it was for Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare to adapt Homer's epic poem The Iliad for the stage. It's an obvious choice, since Homer -- whoever he was or they were -- ostensibly recited the mesmerizing tale to innumerable crowds of listeners long before it...

For an authoritative comparison between the 1988 Broadway production of the classic flop Carrie and the smaller-scaled MCC revival (revisal?) at the Lucille Lortel, this isn't the place to look. Sorry to report I'd heard such dire reaction to the previews back in that day, I carefully steered clear of...

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 prevails and whenever the transfer happens, it'll win the best musical Tony for whatever season in which it...

When it comes to Damien Hirst and his 11-city exhibition of "The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011" at the Gagosian Galleries world-wide, I confess to being a piker. I only made it to six -- the three in New York, the two in London and the one in Paris....

Ever since the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth-Harold Prince Merrily We Roll Along opened in 1981, rolling along merrily is one thing it hasn't done. A hodge-podge of notions about lost dreams, eroding romance and the ever-present perils of show business very freely adapted from the unsuccessful 1934 George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart...

When Katharine McPhee was heading towards her number-two finish on the 2006 American Idol season -- and singing "Over the Rainbow" with full-blast passion at least twice -- it was as obvious as her Boston Conservatory past that the incipient diva's true destination was not pop-charts prominence but Broadway. And...

When it comes to contemporary songwriting, the obstreperously sizable squad who complain that "they don't write 'em like they used to" have got it seriously wrong. The bracing truth is that they do write 'em very much as the outstanding pop songwriters of the mid-20th century used to. No...

When the amazing Mark Nadler performs, I never fail to find myself thinking about the talent/luck equation. If x (talent) + y (luck) = Big Star, how are x and y measured? Is x regularly bigger than y? You'd think it would be or should be, but considering the myriad...

Ernest Hemingway was the scribe everyone was reading when I grew up. Yes, after having gone through Sinclair Lewis, they were reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, too, and William Faulkner and John O'Hara -- with a brief detour to J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. But it was the...

There have to be many armchairs full of us readers who have a big jones for both Jane Austen and P. D. James. Given that, it's merely rhetorical to ask who among us wouldn't drop everything we're diligently paging through and everything else we're doing to tuck into Death...