Broadway

Acting is a form of interpretation, but interpretation is not acting. Such is one of the key lessons offered by the Interpreting for the Theatre institute, an annual summer intensive held by the Theatre Development Fund at Juilliard School, at which up to 20 interpreters for the deaf and hard-of-hearing from all over the United […]

How many graduation ceremonies have you attended that consisted not of an endless parade of names and mortarboards but a series of original plays, penned by students and performed by professional actors? Or how about a series of insightful, inspiring speeches and discussions among hundreds of budding teenage theatre aficionados? Such were the elements of […]

How does an accomplished actor-singer play a composer who wasn’t a singer? Wait, there’s more: The character in question is German, and he’s singing English lyrics he didn’t write, in a stitched-together anthology show that tells the intertwined story of him and his famous muse. With Kurt Weill, one half of the complicated couple at […]

When London’s Old Vic imported Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten to Broadway in March, it brought with it more than great expectations and its star artistic director, Kevin Spacey, in the lead role. Packed in the steamer trunk alongside the acclaimed, recently Tony-nominated production were the Old Vic’s fresh, exciting education and outreach […]

Teen suicide and violence. Talk radio language wars. A White House coverup amid an unpopular foreign war. The dark side of unwanted pregnancy. Front-line soldiers gritting their teeth through a war of attrition. The rise of a charismatic black politician. A debate over teaching evolution. The stages of grief. Are these today’s headlines, or some […]

For anyone who’s toiled in the trenches of musical theatre, the characters in A Chorus Line aren’t just parts. The struggles of the show’s 17 dancers to get through a trying group audition under the prying gaze of a slightly tyrannical director resonate all too closely with their everyday lives. Of no one is this […]

Burning question of the day: How much does actor John Glover resemble Man in Chair, that human encyclopedia of musical theatre trivia and arcana, who leads audiences into the world of his favorite (fictional) musical, The Drowsy Chaperone? Well, try this: Suggest to the Tony-winning Glover, who takes over the part of Man in Chair […]

The actor Denis O’Hare, who typically appears in a few plays a year and who worked on six films last year, doesn’t just memorize his characters’ lines and blocking. Also in his permanent memory bank is the White House phone number. “It’s a comment line, and they ask for comments,” says O’Hare, who estimates that […]

The phrase “triple threat” sounds so–well, threatening. But Karen Ziemba, one of Broadway’s supreme singer/dancer/actors, is anything but scary, unless you’re intimidated by prodigious talent, a Tony Award, and a resume nearly as long as her killer legs. Indeed, when she talks about her role in the new Kander & Ebb musical Curtains, which opens […]