Latest in Broadway Reviews

With a commission from the American Repertory Theater and its artistic director Diane Paulus, Eve Ensler adapted her harrowing, revelatory 2013 memoir In the Body of the World into an equally harrowing, revelatory play. I’d call it an unblinking work, but in truth I doubt anyone will come away from this evening…

Before Bridge of Spies, The BFG and Wolf Hall made him familiar to millions, Oscar winner Mark Rylance was known to theatergoers as an actor who wore the heavy mantle of The Best with considerable grace and wit. In 2008, he accepted his first Tony award with an incomprehensible speech quoting an obscure Minnesota…

The last 40 minutes or so of  Spongebob Squarepants is such mind-rattling, eye-popping, rib-tickling fun that maybe I should just stop right there. Not that this ramshackle contraption drawn from Nickelodeon’s sensationally popular series, about the finicky denizens of Bikini Bottom, is ever short on energy, visual…

A joyful noise thunders through Circle in the Square theater, as Broadway welcomes a smashing revival of Once On This Island. Michael Arden’s exuberant staging of this 1990 musical fairy tale set on a Caribbean island conjures a spell that is devastatingly timely yet affectingly timeless in its evocation of how love…

Beau Willimon has written the story of a D.C. couple whose power grab pitches them against unexpected roadblocks along the Via Dolorosa that is the Beltway, before reaching their destination. That’s of course an apt description of Willimon’s Netflix series House of Cards, but it also works for The Parisian Woman…

Beginning with Mambo Mouth, the 1990 solo show at The American Place Theatre that marked his debut with the quiet subtlety of a cherry bomb in a trash can, John Leguizamo has filled his down-time between movies (the Ice Age franchise; Summer of Sam) with some of the most deceptively funny riffs on matters of…

“Montreal!” the confident co-ed from Sarah Lawrence responded when Michael Moore asked, “What is the capital of Canada?” This was a bit from the Oscar-winning docu-provocateur’s Broadway debut, The Terms of My Surrender, which opened Thursday at the Belasco Theatre. The point of the audience-participation exercise was…

Is there ever a time when heartbreak and loss go out of “style”? Marvin’s Room opened over Christmas in 1991 at Playwrights Horizons in New York (it was originally produced at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago), no one’s idea of a holiday show. The title character is a shadowy image, bedridden behind an upstage wall…

The last show to open on Broadway this season turns out to be the funniest, and the sharpest play of the year, which is a pleasure to report. A Doll’s House, Part 2, which opened tonight at the Golden Theatre, is not so much a sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s proto-feminist groundbreaker of 1879 as it is a heartfelt…

The final musical of the 2016-2017 Broadway season, Bandstand opened tonight at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre with a swinging look back at 1946. It’s about the post-WWII era and the conflicted welcome rolled out for returning veterans (think William Wyler’s The Best Years of Their Lives) and the music that swept…

When Six Degrees of Separation opened off-Broadway, and then on, late in 1990, we thought the genius of John Guare’s excoriating comedy lay in the perfect way it captured a moment in a particular subset of American culture. We were wrong. On the evidence of the spectacular revival that opened tonight at the Ethel…

It’s probably inevitable that Google Maps, or a clever facsimile of Google Maps, would someday star on Broadway. And here it is in Anastasia, a sprawling expansion on the 1997 animated film, that opened tonight following a developmental run at the Hartford Stage. Alexander Dodge’s set is monumental, with towering…