He’s 24 (today, in fact), from Belfast. She’s 19, was born in a Texas town called Humble and grew up in an Oregon suburb called Happy Valley. This Sunday evening, both will sit in the audience at Radio City Music Hall, hearing their names read as, at least, Tony Award nominees. In their Broadway debuts, Harry Potter an…

Ethan Slater was a sophomore at Vassar when he took the train from Poughkeepsie for a casting call that would change everything, and he was on the train back when he got the word. “Oh, man, I must’ve left my backpack in the room,” he thought. Now 26, Slater, in his Broadway debut as the title invertebrate of SpongeBob…

When Harry Hadden-Paton was informed by his agent that he’d been asked to audition for the Lincoln Center Theater production of My Fair Lady, his first response thought was Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the lovesick young swain smitten with flower girl Eliza Doolittle. Told they were interested in him for the leading – and…

If awards were handed out for acceptance speeches, Noma Dumezweni would probably have another trophy on her shelf. When she won Britain’s Olivier Award last year for her performance as Hermione Granger in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, her powerful speech eloquently linked the shelter of…

In a Broadway spring packed with revivals that invite fresh perspectives on artistic statements of prior decades, few productions make the case for their own reappraisal in quite the audaciously visual, all-there-on-the-stage way of Once On This Island. We carry our post-Stonewall sensibilities with us to The Boys in t…

A few hours after Condola Rashad goes to the stake for the final time in Broadway’s Saint Joan, the Billions actress gets an altogether different toast at Radio City Music Hall: She’ll join Glenda Jackson, Lauren Ridloff and Amy Schumer as Tony Award nominees for Best Leading Actress in a Play. It’s Rashad’s fourth…

The Tony-nominated Broadway revivals of My Fair Lady and Carousel, falling squarely in the midst of the MeToo moment, have given creative teams (and theater-goers) a chance to re-evaluate these classic musicals and what they have to say about gender roles. If Carousel has the tougher road, with its repeated references…

That old Broadway dictum – Never share a stage with fuchsia sea anemones – is blown to smithereens when Gavin Lee taps his way through “I’m Not A Loser,” the gleeful 11 o’clock number of Broadway’s SpongeBob SquarePants musical that all but guaranteed Lee his Tony Award nomination this year for Best Featured Actor in…

The gorgeous, deceptively calming bedroom set that frames Three Tall Women at Broadway’s John Golden Theatre loses none of its beauty with the lights way up and the house empty (save for myself, director Joe Mantello and the occasional crew member fussing with whatever needs fussing hours before Glenda Jackson, Laurie…

Carousel pulled into town this year as two seasons were well underway – the first a Broadway spring crammed with Tony-worthy new plays, musicals and revivals, from the thoroughly modern Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to the polished gem My Fair Lady. But for Carousel and My Fair Lady, another season helped set…

The magic of Broadway’s Harry Potter and The Cursed Child can be as simple as a lightning-quick costume change, as startling as a bolt of fire sent blazing from a wizard’s wand and as spooky as the 100% convincing Dementors that float, wraith-like, over the audience at the Lyric Theatre. None of it would work, of…

Irish actress Denise Gough won her first Olivier Award in 2016 for the starring role as a recovering addict in Duncan Macmillan’s play People, Places and Things, and her second earlier this year for her turn as Harper Pitt in Marianne Elliot’s London revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Last week, Gough…