I saw a terrific college production of Hair this past weekend at Hofstra University on Long Island, innovatively directed by an old friend, Cindy Rosenthal, and energetically and inspirationally performed by its young cast. It is one of many times I've sat through it, going back to 1969 when I first saw it in its original production, about a year into its Broadway run. I was only twelve-years-old back then, but had already memorized the score. Two years after the official "su

Though I never had the chance to see Thomas Mitchell on stage, his more than one hundred film and television credits—some of which include the greatest movies of all time—have always made him one of my favorite actors. I don't think I can pinpoint the first time I saw him in some old black and white film on TV, butchered by editing and littered with commercials, but I do recall being instantly drawn to his abilities in whatever the genre. He could seemingly play anything, and

David Yazbek and Terrence McNally's musical version of the 1996 British film The Full Monty opened on Broadway seventeen years ago tonight. For some reason, that makes me feel older than saying it opened thirty-seven years ago, mainly because I recall seeing it for the first time with the kind of freshness reserved for something new, exciting and as up-to-the-minute as last week. The film, a genuine "sleeper," with a superb screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, was a major financial s

With Hello, Dolly! currently breaking Broadway box offices records every week, I thought it might be fun to write about another Dolly; one who was neither the first (and inevitably far from the last) to essay this superb part for actresses anywhere from twenty-five (Barbra Streisand in the 1969 film musical) to past seventy (you-know-who). About fifteen years ago, I found myself at a party with George Furth, the actor and playwright, who, among his more significant contributi

Try as I do with these columns to divert from the troubling headlines we are forced to confront upon waking up every morning, I felt compelled today to write about something with a connection to Broadway, but really about something else entirely. This past weekend marked the anniversary of an event, that upon closer inspection, offers some eerie parallels to what's going on today. The year was 1969, and the war in Vietnam was literally tearing the country apart. In our presen

Part III of the saga of Mack & Mabel continues with its out of town run, which covered four cities in four months. Rehearsals began in New York City on May 6, 1974 and the show opened in San Diego on June 17th. Reviews there were "good, not great," according to an article on the show published in New York Magazine prior to the Broadway opening. The next stop was Los Angeles, which prompted some sniping from its director Gower Champion: "I'll never open again in California. Wh

Since there was a lot of response on various fronts for the Mack & Mabel column I posted last week, it felt like a few more thoughts on the production history of this diamond in the rough would be welcome. If you didn't read Part I, here's the link: https://www.wix.com/dashboard/a66f49a4-f477-4e38-a12c-286ccf0c7fbc/app/61f33d50-3002-4882-ae86-d319c1a249ab?referralInfo=sidebar Now let's begin at the beginning: what was derivation of the show as a musical and whose idea was it?

October 11, 1967 is a date firmly imprinted on my memory. It was the night I saw my very first Broadway show—and today marks it being exactly fifty years ago. The show was I Do! I Do!, its stars were Mary Martin and Robert Preston, and seeing it changed my life forever. And try as I might, I can't quite get a grip it happened a half-century ago. It wasn't your average-run-of-the-mill first night in the theatre ... but wait. Before going on, for those who have already read my

Once, when pressed to answer what performance Stephen Sondheim had seen in the musical theatre that could be termed his favorite, he answered "Alfred Drake in Kismet." Of course, for all of us born after the late nineteen-fifties (or mid-sixties when he starred in a revival of it at Lincoln Center), we can only imagine what it was like to have seen this actor on stage as Haj, the wily poet of ancient Baghdad. Alfred Drake as Haj in Kismet (1953.) Though there were two excelle

Today marks the opening night of Mack & Mabel on October 6, 1974 at the Majestic Theatre. There have been many musicals that have come and gone over the years, but there is a special place in the hearts of theatre lovers for this one, which closed after only sixty-four performances. First, it contains a monumentally great score by Jerry Herman. Second, it starred Robert Preston, in what would prove his final Broadway musical, and Bernadette Peters in a role tailor-made for he

Over the weekend, and on a whim, I pulled a play anthology off my bookshelf titled Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre, edited by John Gassner, once a noted critic and writer. This was the second in a series of eight volumes of plays chosen at his discretion, all produced between 1939 and 1945. At 774 pages, it includes the full texts of seventeen dramas and comedies, among them: Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie; Kaufman and Hart's The Man Who Came to Dinner; Wi

Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, first graced the stage in 1897 in Paris, France. Based somewhat on a real-life figure, the characterization is fictionalized, yet still makes believable its story of a man who thinks he is unworthy of the love of a great beauty due to his oversized nose. As drama, the play has never lost its contemporariness, for who among us hasn't been convinced at one time or another that some physical defect marked us as undesirable? The plot involves