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Poor Robert Redford. Except for an out of focus poster in a Tulsa school room, the Oscar winner is never seen on-screen in HBO's Watchmen. However, Redford's multi-term Presidential shadow is an ominous specter in a sometimes shambolic and yet spectacular show full of shadows, good intentions gone wrong, mad…

Broadway doesn’t really do thrillers anymore. Unless we expand the definition to encompass the wailing banshees of The Ferryman or the occasional Martin McDonough blood drench, the stage has mostly ceded the genre to Hollywood. Yet that scarcity goes only so far in explaining the odd power of Adam Rapp’s The Sound Insi…

Little Shop of Horrors, the once and current Off Broadway marvel, announced in 1982 the arrival of two songwriters – Howard Ashman & Alan Menken – who’d soon expand musical theater boundaries to swallow Hollywood like so much plant food. The musical comes home again (you can’t isn’t in its vocabulary) with Michael…

If Percy Jackson’s bright and lively Broadway adventure tosses a bit of deja vu your way, I’d guess the creeping sense of vague recall has little to do with that gang of Greek gods down the block belting out tunes from Hadestown, and even less to do with Percy’s plodding 2010 film. I’d smell a Squip. Sharing some of…

Imagine you’re invited to some netherworld, Southern Gothic-themed cocktail party peopled with Tennessee Williams heroines. There’s Amanda Wingfield and Blanche DuBois competing for pity with wilted stories of glory days, Maggie the Cat in her slip, stalking waiters, and lusty Maxine walking a leashed iguana and a…

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which debuted today on Netflix. So, tread lightly.  As the title makes clear, Breaking Bad is back today on Netflix and in select theaters with El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie – and that's not a great thing. Unlike the brilliance that was…

Dick Wheeler, the lead character – he’s hardly a “hero” – in Tracy Letts’ Linda Vista, a very funny new play about a very sad, not very likable man, is the type of determined, opinionated loser who has reached middle age with both a decided pride and worn-down boredom with his own contrariness, his mental library of…

One of the first hints – an uneasy moment in a remarkable evening full of them – planted in Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play suggesting that all is not as it seems (and even what it seems isn’t entirely clear) comes shortly into the opening scenario. A black woman, dressed in Antebellum slave garb, and a white man…

The Freestyle Love Supreme I saw on Broadway last week won’t be the Freestyle Love Supreme theatergoers see tonight or tomorrow or any other night in its limited, 16-week run. An energetic, insistently likable mash-up of rap, improvisational comedy, hip hop, R&B crooning and, crucially, audience participation, FLS…

As Robert Schenkkan’s The Great Society begins pulling you back back back to a cultural moment that rivals our own in meanness, division and barrel-scraping crumminess, Brian Cox would seem to have the toughest job on Broadway. Portraying the accidental president who succeeded the martyred one only to land waste deep…

“Haunting” is a word critics overuse, but sometimes nothing else will do. Still, I’ll do my best to avoid it – after this review of The Height of the Storm, the thoughtful and engrossing new play by Florian Zeller, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, opening tonight at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s…

When the best part of your Emmy Awards broadcast tonight is the short sendoffs to series that have finished including Games of Thrones and Veep, you might want to get your gaze out of the rearview mirror before you lose control. Sadly, that's not what the host-free 71st Primetime Emmy Awards chose to do. Which is why…