Latest in Broadway Reviews

The producers of the stage musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, led by Warner Bros Theatre Ventures, have pulled a Harvey Weinstein. As Weinstein did with his stage version of Finding Neverland, they tossed most of the original U.K. production and came to Broadway with a fresh remake: Simplified production…

Like mortarboards on graduation day and lizards in Little Orphan Annie, happy critics tend to fling words in the air, leap into paroxysms of ecstasy and throw caution to the wind when something makes us happy. I probably speak for the general critical consortium when I say – duh! – that Bette Midler on Broadway makes…

The nasty, tasty snakepit that is Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes has been irresistible to actors and audiences since Tallulah Bankhead chewed the Southern scenery in the play’s 1939 Broadway premiere and Bette Davis did the same in the 1941 film. Many a star has pumped the bodice of queen bitch Regina Giddins…

It’s humbling, not to say near-impossible, to fully convey the thrumming resonance of Indecent, the evanescent shimmer of a show that arrived on Broadway tonight following its New York debut last spring at the Vineyard Theatre. But I’ll give it my best and hope that you’ll set aside any argument touting its importance…

Sharp and threatening as a box cutter blade, Lynn Nottage’s drama Sweat opened last fall at the Public Theater shortly before the election, an unnervingly prescient reality check even before Donald Trump’s victory. “No play in recent memory has shed more light on the crises and tribulations of America’s great…

It can be a challenge, making the contemporary case for Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s as long as its title warns, for one thing. It’s repetitious and maudlin and dated; attempts to update it only make it a greater slog. I’d seen three of the five previous Broadway productions of the play; each…

Benjamin Walker wears clothes and almost no clothes with equal elan in American Psycho, the blood-spattered, label-obsessed musical that opened on Broadway tonight. Perhaps the star has a thing for blood; it was, after all, his gleefully free-form performance in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that put him on the map…

Steve Martin and Edie Brickell collaborated on two wonderful banjo-and-whimsy fueled albums (the first, Love Has Come For You, won a Grammy in 2013 for best American roots song). Fans of Martin’s wide-ranging gifts as comedian, author, movie star, art collector, playwright  (count me in) have seen his avocation as…