Latest in George C. Wolfe

EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Mac’s Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus opened on Broadway April 21, and to say it divided critics would be to employ an understatement neither Mac nor Gary would tolerate. “Weird,” “tragic” and “bloody awful” said one side (the wrong side, I think: read my review here). “A defiant and beautiful…

Atrocities happen. Shakespearean-level atrocities, dismembered-and-baked-in-a-pie atrocities. Humanity’s responses – tears, mockery, more atrocity – are ludicrously inadequate, but really, aren’t you just glad we have Nathan Lane on our side? And while we’re on the subject of inadequacy, put me down for singling out…

Well before Denzel Washington’s glad-handing salesman Hickey makes his fateful arrival in the dive bar of George C. Wolfe’s strong new Broadway staging of The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill’s collection of pipe-dreaming drunkards arrange themselves across their end-of-the-line cafe as if modeling for Leonardo’s “The…

Casting is complete for director George C. Wolfe‘s Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh, starring current Oscar nominee Denzel Washington as Eugene O’Neill’s pipe-dream busting salesman Theodore Hickman, aka Hickey. It’s a starry bunch who will populate the grim premises of Harry Hope’s Greenwich Village dive. In…

Pier 55, the performance space planned for a floating man-made island in the Hudson River south of Midtown, was declared dead Wednesday by its chief underwriters, IAC chief Barry Diller and his wife, the clothing designer Diane von Furstenberg. Diller pulled the plug on the ambitious project – for which he had…

Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington is set to star as Theodore Hickman, AKA Hickey, in Eugene O’Neill’s acclaimed play The Iceman Cometh on Broadway next spring. Five-time Tony Award winner George C. Wolfe, who staged last season’s Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Fol…

An African-American woman living through the “peak of segregation,” Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, unaware that cells taken from her body would go on to transform modern medicine and history at large. Now known as HeLa cells, Henrietta’s “immortal” cells aided in the development of the polio vaccine…

On the subject of success, George C. Wolfe has always been ambivalent. Wary. ”When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving, so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it,” he told me. “I came to New York to write and direct, and when I got here, a lot of my rage came out.” As it happens, he said that…

UPDATE Friday morning: Eubie Blake was 95 years old when Eubie! opened on Broadway in 1978. Julianne Boyd, who conceived and directed the show, writes: [The show] featured most of the songs from Shuffle Along plus others written by Eubie. We did a birthday party at a Shubert theater (forget which one — they donated…

Queenie Pie was the talk of the town and Duke Ellington was the reason. When the great jazz composer died in 1974, he left behind an unfinished “street opera” that offered resplendent possibilities with its exuberant score, Harlem setting and memorable characters. A little-known writer named George C. Wolfe was…