How well we know John Lithgow’s satisfying face, his agreeable body: The eyes narrowed quizzically above a smile slimmed by secrets (or is it menace?); the frame softly hulking, lacking intimidation. It has been so familiar it deserves landmark cultural status. Who else has a resume as varied as this, from the…

Feed your soul: Go see The Band’s Visit. Now that this exquisite musical has moved uptown to Broadway – it opened tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre – I can make that recommendation with only one caveat, which is to spring for center orchestra seats, but more about that later. The rare film-to-musical adaptation…

The image that greets us as we settle into our seats at the Vivian Beaumont Theater is a wall of numbers, divided into blocks, four over four, a grid with line after line of numbers. It’s the opposite of welcoming. It’s precisely where our minds tend to go when we’re told, It’s a story about finance. MEGO – you know…

Two rarities converge with the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Time and the Conways. The J.B. Priestley drama has not been seen in these precincts since its 1938 U.S. premiere and its star, Elizabeth McGovern (Downton Abbey‘s Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham) has been absent from the Broadway stage since…

The touring production of the Broadway blockbuster known as Hamilton sets up camp at the Hollywood Pantages for a run from August 11 through December 30. And while tickets flying off the shelves and out the computers may not yet match the Times Square premiums reaching $1,000 and beyond,  the hype is real. Lin-Manuel M…

It’s rare enough to experience the shiver of revelation that comes in the first few minutes of a great show; rarer still to be blasted above the ordinary the second time around. That’s something great plays and musicals do: They expand with our consciousness. So it is with Hamilton, which turns two on July 13. The…

It’s entirely possible that producers Scott Rudin and Sonia Friedman – who’ve brought Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s frequently harrowing adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 to Broadway after three years in London and on the road – meant to parody the punitive Big Brother-like tone with the program insert that…

Groundhog Day, the very good new musical from composer-lyricist Tim Minchin (Roald Dahl’s Matilda) and Danny Rubin (who co-wrote the original screenplay for the 1993 film), opened Monday at the August Wilson Theatre after a bit of suspense: Star Andy Karl, who just won the Olivier Award for the role created on film by…

Professional relationships are as disposable in our culture as goods on the shelves at Walmart, and so it is an especially happy occasion to report on the flowering of an artistic pairing, in this case of playwright J.T. Rogers and director Bartlett Sher. Their previous work together produced Blood and Gifts, Rogers'…

It must have seemed an inspired idea: Cast competing divas to play the business titans who created rival women-centered businesses. And could the timing for the Broadway opening have been better? Feud, the FX series starring Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and set around the making of…

Kevin Kline has loomed, larger than life, over Broadway for more than four decades: as the preening, prat-falling Pirate King opposite Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance; the proboscoid panache-flaunting poet Cyrano de Bergerac; the narcissistic hunk Bruce Granit in On The Twentieth Century, among other choice…

Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's good-natured 2001 film, was produced for an estimated $10.7 million and has grossed $132 million to date. That’s not bad for a sentimental fantasy about a painfully shy young woman – the film made an indie star of Audrey Tautou – who is inspired after the death of Princess Diana to spread…