Building Character

Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles When director Scott Ellis called Alessandro Nivola back in 2012 about playing the part of moralistic Victorian doctor Frederick Treves in a mounting of The Elephant Man at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the actor knew he couldn’t say no. After […]

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By ROB WEINERT-KENDT — Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles It’s clearly been a very bad day. Amir (Hari Dhillon) doesn’t so much enter his dusk-lit apartment as storm it, quickly loosening his tight corporate-lawyer tie and pouring himself a stiff drink. His wife Emily (Gretchen […]

Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles — It’s not every day you sit down with three Jesus Christs. Wait, what’s the plural form of Jesus? Jesi? Jesuses? “Jesees!” says Donald Warfield, one of three actors playing the son of God in 3 Christs, now at Judson […]

In some ways, Bootycandy is a wild fantasy. Robert O’Hara’s latest play, now at Playwrights Horizons, just keeps breaking storytelling conventions, so that every time we think we understand it, it dodges and weaves. For instance, we might start with a sitcom-style scene about a little boy and his mother, but in a just a […]

But Atomic —a new rock musical by Danny Ginges, Gregory Bonsignore, and Philip Foxman that began performances yesterday at Theatre Row—wants to revive those frantic feelings. With a cracked sense of reality that includes gyrating lab technicians, rocking government officials, and even Robert Oppenheimer belting a vampy number to the commission putting him on trial, the show drops the creators

Welcome to Building Character, our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles

Considering all the gunfights and sex and dirty jokes in their show, you wouldn’t think anyone in Clown Bar would base their performance on It’s a Wonderful Life . But that’s one reason this raucous play has become such a downtown hit. It never met a vintage reference it couldn’t use.

Welcome to Building Character , our ongoing look at performers and how they create their roles