TDF

Depending how you trace its origins, rock ‘n’ roll is fast approaching retirement age. And if you count Hair as the first rock musical, then stages both on and Off-Broadway have been rocking for four decades now. So should it be any surprise that not only the teenage kids but the fortysomething parents in the […]

“If there’s a playwright he’s like, he’s like Chekhov,” says director Pippin Parker of George Packer, the New Yorker journalist/author whose first play, Betrayed, is in an extended hit run at the Culture Project. That’s pretty high praise for a first-time playwright, but Parker backs it up. “George has this impulse to give everyone their […]

What do a Mississippi clapboard house, a pop concert set, a cavernous theatre backstage, and a pair of gritty-but-magical New York neighborhoods have in common? All sprang from the imagination of Anna Louizos, one of New York’s busiest and most in-demand scenic designers. For the record, those shows are, in order: Crimes of the Heart, […]

Babe Bottrell has a lot to answer for: attempted murder of her husband, furtive affair with a 15-year-old boy, some ear-splitting notes on the saxophone.

Irene Gandy is never shy about speaking her mind, but she’s not sure she wants to see a feature about her. “If I can’t get press on my people, they don’t need to see press on me,” says Gandy, a veteran theatrical press agent, with a husky laugh. Gandy is sitting on a plush couch […]

Faced with real-life horror, do we seek a pleasant escape in the theatre, or do we choose to face it head on, with drama that brings us closer to the horror to better understand it? This is a bit of a false dichotomy; the best theatre doesn’t ask us to choose between diversion and immersion. […]

One of the best things about theatre is that it’s a social activity. For people working in the field as much as for those who attend it regularly, it can be a great way to meet and mingle with new people. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it can also be a great way […]

By now most of us know what a “rock opera” is supposed to sound like: Jesus Christ Superstar, for instance, or The Who’s Tommy. But what’s an “indie rock opera” supposed to sound like? So-called “indie” rocker Mark Mulcahy doesn’t know, either. “It’s just a rock opera,” he says of The Slug-Bearers of Kayrol Island, […]

Laurie Metcalf may have the straightest face in comedy. But she confesses that she and co-star Dylan Baker are pushed to limits of their endurance by star Nathan Lane, who headlines David Mamet’s new political farce November at the Barrymore. “I have cracked up onstage, I must admit,” says Metcalf, best known to TV audiences […]