Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

While watching Theresa Rebeck's searing and funny play, Seminar, at The Golden Theatre, about an unethical, power-mad, but brilliant celebrity editor, Leonard (Jeff Goldblum) giving a $5,000 a pop seminar to wannabe writers, I was haunted by the memories of a few of the writing instructors I had.

Like...

From Argentina, the same folks who created the long-running show De La Guarda have brought Fuerza Bruta, meaning brute force, an hour-long sensory delight. If you're over forty, you may need your cranial collar because you have to stand up the whole time, craning your neck to see the...

Set in 1960 during a National Convention, two delegates -- William Russell (John Larroquette) and Joe Cantwell (Eric McCormack) go at each other for their party's nomination., each currying the support of the dying ex-president Arthur Hockstader (James Earl Jones.)

Like Adlai Stevenson, whom Russell seems to be based...

We all know them -- the beleaguered corporate assistants who are giving up any hope of personal time, relationships and sanity, all for the overriding ambition to be the next CEO, or at least have a better job title, or maybe, just maybe a raise. In a canny dramatist move,...

In 1990, I had no idea who Madonna was. I was 43 years-old and the last time I had taken an interest in pop music was when I used to watch Dick Clark's American Bandstand and learn the latest songs such as "Earth Angel" and dance crazes like the Slop...

Oh, was I ever looking forward to seeing David Smith's work at the Whitney! I actually loved his early work best. Some of his sculpture looked like oriental calligraphy in metal; others like Paul Klee paintings in steel. I learned about him in college in the 60's and the...

On page four of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's beautiful novel, The Shadow of the Wind, (Penguin, 2005), he writes, "I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day."

What will our...

In Aristophanes' comic play, Lysistrata is a daring woman who tries to persuade the women of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers in order to force them to stop the Peloponnesian War. Fast forward from 411 BC to 2011 AD and meet Lyssie J. (played by...

What could a Broadway show about Bonnie and Clyde possibly have over the shoot-em-up screen romance in the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway? I thought. But the new Bonnie & Clyde at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater is a stunner. You don't have to bite the bullet during...

The first comedy, Ethan Coen's Talking Cure, is about a frustrated psychiatrist who is unable to make a connection with his patient at a mental institution. The patient, who won't even admit he is one, is a mailman who went postal on his job, attacking a worker and even attacking...

Both definitions of Follies -- a musical review and a foolish action -- fit this revival of the Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman musical about former Follies stars who reunite for a last performance at a theater which is about to become a parking lot. Sally Durante Plummer played...

Who expected to be wowed by a performance in a gym? Well, the Transportation Group Theater Company brought the audience along on quite a ride in their production at The Gym at Judson of Michael John LaChiusa's Queen of the Mist based on the story of Anna Edson Taylor (played...

Names have been changed as a long overdue gesture to protect the innocent.

If you could have peeked into the small window in the door of my seventh grade homeroom class, right away, without me telling you, you would have been able to spot the two kids...

The time: April 3rd, 1968. Martin Luther King (played by Samuel Jackson) is alone in room 306 in The Lorraine Motel in Memphis a day after he made his prophetic "I've been to the Mountaintop" speech, the day before he is assassinated. We see him as his private self --...

Motherhood Out Loud, now playing at Primary Stages after 59 E. 59th St, makes you feel as if someone has read your mind or your mother's or your grandmother's, because no one would dare to say outright what the actors are saying on stage. The twenty scenes, united by...

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris reawakened my interest in Anais Nin. She was the flapper who decided to stay La Belle Epoque at the end. (Oops, have I given it away?) I indulged in Noel Riley Fitch's The Erotic Life and Anais Nin.

Anais Nin was up...

You'll never guess what Upton Sinclair was doing besides writing great American novels such as The Jungle and Oil, which was recently made into the Oscar-winning movie, There Will Be Blood. He was doing telepathic experiments with his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, a psychic, whom he affectionately called "Craig."...

I had to resort to Nostradamus for Dummies by Scarlet Ross to learn the meaning of Nostradamus' predictions. Nostradamus was not only writing in a dreamlike state, he also had to be careful around both royalty and the church if he wanted to keep his head firmly attached to...

"Listen, I don't need a whole psychic reading," a guy tells me over the phone. "I just want you to find my Lindeberg Coleman twill trench coat. It's grey stone with a four-button front, buckle detail at the cuffs, and a single back vent."

From the detail he's going...

"How can I get to be psychic like you?" people ask me breathlessly.

I've worked as a psychic for over thirty years and it means more to me each day, but would you really want to have this gift if you actually knew what it was like?"

First off, people...