New York Theater

“Degenerates,” which begins in literal darkness and seems to work hard throughout its overly long running time to keep me in the dark, is a play about the incel community: Incel, short for “involuntary celibate”; community, meaning lonely men who chat onl…

Almost a decade after we first met the students at the Aburi Girls Boarding School in Jocelyn Bioh’s breakthrough comedy, Paulina, now portrayed by Denée Benton, is as mean as ever, the meanest girl in this school in central Ghana in 1986.

Two more shows have been added to the Broadway season, both light fare meant to delight, while several of the plays I attended this past week were dark, their themes the threat of annihilation, the creep of autocracy – the same themes as in the non-fiction

Addressing the audience as his congregation, Jacob Ming-Trent tells us upfront that the story he is about to relate – how a Black, fat, unloved, homeless high school dropout stumbled onto the Bard and vowed to become a Shakespearean actor — is not autobio…

Like the myth of Pygmalion, the kNOT theater company is bringing visual art to life, weaving together the centuries-old tableau vivant tradition with inventive 21st century approaches to create live theater out of a series of paintings by the 18th century…

When a hand grenade suddenly lands in their apartment, it’s just one more thing for the couple to bicker about in “Delirium,” director Igor Golyak’s explosive adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 absurdist play “Frenzy for Two, or More.”

Journalist Jacob Weisberg’s book presents portraits of eight prominent Americans who initially “recognized the danger Trump posed to American values” but in 2025 nevertheless capitulated to him: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who led the court…

In 1933, the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned Hannah Arendt, a 26-year-old Jewish scholar, on a charge of treason, carrying a possible death sentence.

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which is one of the museums of the Smithsonian targeted for an unprecedented ideological assault by the current administration, here is a sample of the…

Thrilling: 40 buffaloes roaming in Brooklyn!

In one of the most exhilarating and purest works of theater in memory, the herd of forty buffaloes lumbered their way through the narrow streets of the city, snorting, twitching, swinging their massive heads, and patiently pausing at some of the most hist…

The artist Peter Max, who died on Monday at the age of 88, was best known for his psychedelic posters from the 1960s, but he apparently also designed for the theater.

In an extraordinary display of quick-hit characterizations, Sarah Jones cycles through almost twenty Americans, each with distinctly different accents, from widely different ethnic backgrounds, some even from different centuries, but almost all of them se…

“John Proctor Is The Villain,” playwright Kimberly Belflower’s response to “The Crucible,” will be the most-produced work of theater in the United States this season, followed by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Purpose,” according to American Theatre Magazine‘s…

How to describe “Beyond the Stardust”?

Below are photographs from the original Broadway productions of shows that are being revived in the 2026-2027 Broadway season: Awake and Sing (1935) with Stella Adler The Sound of Music (1959) with Mary Martin Evita (1979) with Patti LuPone and Mandy Pati…

Lupita Nyong’o portrays a woman in the weeks and months and possibly years after she is hit by her boyfriend, in Marin Ireland’s play, reopening tonight at Greenwich House Theater after a short run two years ago Off-Off Broadway.

Three new shows were added to the Broadway lineup this past week, for a total of 25 with nailed dates and venues in the Broadway 2026-2027 season — the first Broadway productions of “Downstate” and “Small Mouth Sounds” which were announced together in what

I resurrect my review of Sondheim’s Follies, which opened fifteen years ago today, September 12, 2011.

The opening of the new performing arts center at the World Trade Center site…has done what the rebuilders had hoped it would, at least for me.

Sure I’m excited about the Broadway debuts of both Julia Louis-Dreyfus and “The Fantasticks” (both long overdue); I’m curious whether Raúl Esparza will make “Galileo” worthwhile and how “Here There are Blueberries” and ”Downstate” will play on Broadway.

Below are my two reviews of the original 2011 New York production of “Other Desert Cities,” by Jon Robin Baitz, which I’m resurrecting shortly before the play’s first Broadway revival, set to open October 18, 2026 at the Hudson Theater directed by John Be…

I needed several pieces of paper to watch Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson perform live in “A History of Paper” – a theater ticket, a train ticket, a plane ticket (in reverse order) — at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre in the Scottish Highlands.

The announcement that Bruce Norris’s controversial play “Downstate” would be opening in Fall 2026 on Broadway seems like a good time to resurrect my review of his first and only other play on Broadway, “Clybourne Park” which opened on April 12, 2012, which

“Downstate,” the highly controversial play by Bruce Norris about a group home for men formerly imprisoned for sex crimes against minors, was announced this morning as opening on Broadway in the Fall — at the same time that “Small Mouth Sounds,” the silent…

Labor Day may have taken on extra meaning (check out: Theater in Socialist Mayor Mamdani’s New York), but the holiday still serves as traditional dividing line between summer and the Fall season, which has already begun..

Mayor Mamdani: Who built the Empire State Building?

How well were you paying attention to New York theater this summer?

The posters were everywhere in Edinburgh for “The Bridge,” Alaa Shehada’s solo show, one of the 17 winners of this year’s prestigious Fringe First Awards.

Below is a calendar of theater opening* in September, with some starry and inventive fare, including a herd of life-size buffaloes!