Broadway

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 […]

Director Leigh Silverman is an expert multi-tasker, a skill that has come in handy in balancing the many agendas involved in directing brand new plays such as David Henry Hwang’s YellowFace, Lisa Kron’s Well and Tanya Barfield’s Blue Door. Multi-tasking has also become a more urgent necessity now that Silverman’s directing career has begun to […]

“We’re at this point because we didn’t think of Broadway,” says Heidi Rodewald, co-composer with single-named pop/rock songsmith Stew of the score for Passing Strange, a new rock musical which starts previews at the Belasco on Feb. 8 and opens there on Feb. 28. “If we had thought we were doing this for Broadway, we […]

“Let me hop off my skateboard,” says Jimmi Simpson, arriving at the Music Box Theatre for a recent performance of The Farnsworth Invention, the epic historical drama by Aaron Sorkin, in which Simpson plays the title character. It’s hard to imagine Philo T. Farnsworth, the farm-boy genius from Idaho who first envisioned the science of […]

By now Broadway audiences are used to seeing popular films adapted for the stage, particularly into musicals. The 39 Steps, which begins performances on Jan. 4 at the American Airlines Theatre, is something completely different: A lithe, funny, four-actor staging of Alfred Hitchcock’s 72-year-old classic film thriller, which involves a chase across the Scottish highlands […]

The “plays only” line at the TKTS Discount Booth has seldom offered so many rich choices for the discerning playgoer. Whether it’s farce or tragedy, classical drama or contemporary realism, British or American you’re looking for, Broadway at the end of 2007 has something for every taste. In the straight-up comedy column, there’s the “new” […]

Norbert Leo Butz grew up a few blocks from the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Mo. “Watching tourist steamboats coming up and down the river was just part of what we saw all the time,” says Butz in his cozy dressing room at the Lyceum, where he stars in the delicious comedy Is He Dead? […]

Among the unforeseen side effects of the recent Local 1 stagehands’ were a few missed exits and entrances: John Lloyd Young, the Tony-winning star of Jersey Boys, didn’t get his scheduled final bow. The 10th anniversary gala performance of The Lion King was not celebrated on the stage of the Minskoff. And Sarah Stiles, all […]

Attentive riders of the D train might occasionally notice a thin, well-dressed, tastefully bespectacled man en route to Bensonhurst, where he disembarks for regular visits to Lafayette High School. These days he’s likely to have some attractive hard-bound books in tow. Clued-in theatre watchers among us might recognize him as Thomas Schumacher (pictured above with […]