Jean Smart’s performance is so smooth – even through rough bits – that she appears not to be acting at all. She simply transforms over and over again as she slips into each chapter of Izzy’s story, making what is a complicated feat of magic look easy.
ctors and singers practice their entire lives for a chance to be on a Broadway stage. Hundreds of people involved behind the scenes bring you eight performances a week that are pure joy.
Any day of the year, you can read stories about the rise and fall of Hollywood actors. Alcohol, drugs, and messed-up relationships with lovers and directors are just a sample of the struggles in theatrical life. Don’t forget the internal struggles we all have as humans.
Some evenings in the theater change you. They reach inside your chest and rearrange something fundamental about how you see the world. “A Letter To Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First” is such an evening—a production where technical artistry and human storytelling fuse so seamlessly that you forget you’re witnessing craft and surrender completely to emotional truth. But perhaps most remarkably, Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland have created a theatrical experience that transforms dramatically depending on where you choose to witness it, creating two distinct yet equally powerful journeys through the same devastating story. This isn’t just theater. This is witnessing, elevated by staging choices that make every audience member complicit in different ways.
In this provocative one-woman show, Markell inhabits the controversial filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl with such fierce intelligence and nuanced complexity that she transforms what could have been a simple biographical sketch into a deeply unsettling meditation on art, complicity, and survival.
Manhattan Repertory Theatre has struck theatrical gold with Tim Mulligan’s wickedly entertaining “Point Loma,” a gleefully campy horror spoof that channels the best of 1950s B-movie schlock while delivering genuine scares and belly laughs in equal measure. Under Ken Wolf’s spirited direction, this off-Broadway gem transforms the intimate black box space of the Chain Theatre into a haunted playground where paranormal podcasters meet their match in a sinister San Diego hospice house.
If you are Tina Landau and Adam Guettel, you would know that the premiere of Floyd Collins was presented in 1994 in Philadelphia, and 1996 was the year it premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Its Broadway premiere was a mere 29 years later and has now taken a bow at Lincoln Center. It’s a good thing they waited so long, because Jeremy Jordan (Floyd Collins) clearly needed to grow into a man and be ready to take on the title role.
Hold Me In The Water is a master class in turning a story into magic. A sense of precision runs through this production from the tippity-top where Haddad emerges from out of nowhere to the final graceful denouement where he returns whence he came. In between, Haddad holds us in the palm of his hand. He is a gentle guide, beginning with his description of a “Relaxed Performance.”
It is a situation devoutly to be wished – to be saturated with artistic excellence everywhere you look for over two hours. “Just In Time” – recently opened at Circle In The Square will do that to you. From the moment you enter the theatre, you are surrounded by glowing blue lighting, drapes, and a cocktail table scattered across the orchestra section. This is Bobby Darin’s world, and welcome to it. Your host for the show is the thrilling Jonathan Groff, who makes no bones about NOT being Bobby Darin. He is there to tell the story. Well, SING the story might be more accurate.
The time is the early 1950s. The place is Harlem, specifically 126th Street between Lenox and Seventh. We are in the barbershop of one Russell Parker (Norm Lewis), who, when we meet him, has not been doing much barbering for the past few years. Since his dancing legs gave out, he is a man without a purpose or a desire to find one. He occupies his time sitting in his throne of a barber chair, reading the paper or playing checkers with his best friend William Jenkins (James Foster, Jr.), who has beaten Parker every single time they play.
