Wanna hear something amusingly ironic about the stateside star system? Just as the Hollywood Powers That Be are being forced to consider the lessening impact of box-office stars, the Broadway Powers That Be are concluding the only box-office sure-things are star names.

Think about, for instance, the...

It's been ten years since Michael Feinstein put his name on the Loews Regency breakfast room so it could be converted at night into a world-class night club by a partial rearrangement of tables and chairs and also by means of two signs hanging from sconces flanking a podium.

As the famous -- not to say infamous -- Blanche DuBois and directed by Liv Ullmann in a harsh Scenes From a Marriage frame of mind, Cate Blanchett pulls out all stops throughout Tennessee Wiliams's supernal tragedy, A Streetcar Named Desire, now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In...

The excellent revival of S. N. Behrman's 1932 drawing-room comedy Biography at Theatre Three at The Mint has me thinking about someone who's fascinated me for years, someone well-known at the time the play debuted but virtually forgotten now: Neysa McMein.

Biography is about Marion Froude, a painter...

Okay, let's talk a minute about my idea of this season's best and the worst television series: Glee. All right, I don't actually think Glee is the absolute best. At the moment the honor goes to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Nor do I think Glee is the worst. Too many others...

And now for some more palaver from your Cheerful Curmudgeon. And remember that curmudgeonhood, by definition, means, among many other things, being habitually late to the figurative party.

So you'll forgive the Cheerful C. if he's only recently learned about the Gross National Happiness Index that Facebook has...

There's been much mention in the press during the last however many months that in some pockets of the country, resistance to Barack Obama and his evolving policies is due to lingering -- not to say rampant -- racist attitudes. What one of those pockets is definitely not, I...

Anyone conversant with what's doing nowadays on Broadway knows the globally-famous and venerated honky-tonk venue is filled -- not to say glutted -- with revivals. There are many arguments to be made for their place along the Great White Way. Some are good -- for one, it's important to...

Okay, here's what I want to know: What's with Philip Roth and Woody Allen?

I only ask after trotting to my local movie palace some months back for Allen's latest astringent 92-minute laffer, Whatever Works, and paging diligently these recent days through Roth's newest probe of a...

The best thing anyone looking around for light New York City entertainment with a hint of shadow can do right now is storm the Café Carlyle where the marrieds John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey are charging the atmosphere with a show called Lost and Found.

Examining the twin...

John Herndon Mercer -- the songwriter-singer and Capitol Records founder popularly known as Johnny Mercer -- was born November 18, 1909. So it's one hundred years since he arrived to write lyrics, music or both to some of the most famous, most lucrative songs of the twentieth century. The...

And now for some notes from the Cheerful Curmudgeon, a figure I instantly became when reading a recent New York Times story about -- heaven help us -- "vooks." Vooks, in case you don't know, are books that come with supplementary videos to liven up dull old printed text.
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Booing -- an honored tradition you might have thought had disappeared at the Metropolitan Opera as finally as the echoes of bravos past -- is back. Luc Bondy's new Tosca reaped sustained hoots when the director joined the opening night cast at the curtain call a few weeks ago. Mary...

Since none of the fiction lovers to whom I mention Mavis Gallant has more than the vaguest notion who she is -- this, despite her being singled out for many awards and honors over the years -- I'm impelled to state that not having read her work represents a sizable...

It's almost always beneficial to see ourselves as others see us. It can be useful whether those giving us the once- or twice-over are wearing rose-tinted glasses or glasses with tints not so rosy. And it's not only as individuals that we reap rewards but as a country. How...

As a man prone to bearing heavy guilt, the last thing I needed as my next trip to London loomed was a New York Times article about a bookseller brouhaha brewing there. It seems that second-hand and used book dealers, particularly one in Salisbury, are exercised about the chain...

Anyone familiar with theater knows the term "site-specific." For those who don't, it refers to an opus presented not in a traditional theater but in an environment relating to the enterprise's subject matter. But that's theater. As far as I know, there's been no such thing as site-specific cabaret.

For decades during the 20th century the legit theater was described with melancholy as "the fabulous invalid." It's a phrase you don't hear these days, because there's lots of theater around and not only in the expected big cities but in more and more regions--much of it luring young...

What's wrong with this picture? Maybe nothing, but there's definitely something unusual about it. Not quite abnormal, but unquestionably deviating from the norm.

What's the picture under discussion? It's an image of Barack Obama signing an autograph for an onlooker at a Martha's Vineyard golf game. The President...

Not long ago a friend told me that after he'd spotted a quarter on the street one day and retrieved it, the woman with whom he'd been walking eyed him aghast and said, "You'd stoop for a quarter?!"

That's something I'd never say. I'm ready and willing to...