Category: Acting
Raúl Esparza Returns to His Stage Roots
By FRANK RIZZO
The lauded actor leads Classic Stage Company's revival of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
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Raúl Esparza's vibrant and diverse characterizations have earned him four Tony nominations in both musicals (Company, Taboo) and dramas (Speed-the-Plow, The Homecoming), while his Off-Broadway work runs the gamut from Jonathan Larson to Shakespeare....
Why 'Daniel's Husband' Resonates More Than Ever
By BRIAN SCOTT LIPTON
Actor Ryan Spahn on why he's starring in this play a third time
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Over the past three years, Ryan Spahn has portrayed the same part in three separate runs of the same play. And yet, due to major political upheavals during that time, each successive mounting of Michael McKeever's emotionally charged Daniel's Husband has felt more urgent. Spahn plays...
It May Not Be True, But It Feels Real
By JUAN MICHAEL PORTER II
Ngozi Anyanwu stars in her new play Good Grief at the Vineyard Theatre
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Media depictions of black folk frequently flatten out their complexity. The relentlessly chipper black neighbor on that sitcom, or the magically wise black teacher in that movie only exist onscreen. In the New York premiere of Good Grief at the Vineyard Theatre, playwright...
Why a Tony-Winning Director Decided to Return to Acting
By JEN GUSHUE
David Cromer on costarring in The Waverly Gallery on Broadway
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How do you follow up winning the 2018 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical? For David Cromer, who snagged that statuette for his work on The Band's Visit, the answer was to book an acting gig. The prolific director -- who launched his career in Chicago before making his name Off-Broadway...
He Doesn't Mind That Some of His Costars Are Animals
By RAVEN SNOOK
Justin Edwards on the necessary realism of The Ferryman on Broadway
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W.C. Fields famously quipped that actors should "never work with children or animals." Yet Justin Edwards is doing both in his Broadway debut in The Ferryman. Jez Butterworth's breathtaking, three-hour-plus epic focuses on an incredibly eventful day for the Carneys, an Irish farming...
Wait, Didn't We Just Watch That Scene?
By ELIZA BENT
Inside David Greenspan's new time- and reality-bending play
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The spark for The Things That Were There was ignited the night David Greenspan agreed to auction off his talents. The five-time Obie winner -- who's as lauded for his performing as his playwriting -- was participating in New Dramatists' signature fundraiser Nocturnal Commissions,...
Why Bill Irwin Is Obsessed with Samuel Beckett
By NED MOORE
The Tony winner mounts a singular tribute to the legendary writer at Irish Rep
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Bill Irwin is not a scholar. He is not a biographer. He is a clown. Whether you know him as Mr. Noodle on Sesame Street, or for playing fools in Shakespeare, or from his neo-vaudeville romps Fool Moon and Old Hats, his Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown...
Why This Tony Nominee Is Doing Shakespeare Badly on Purpose
By RAVEN SNOOK
Dylan Baker tackles three disparate characters in Bernhardt/Hamlet on Broadway
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Character actors often end up with scene-stealing roles on stage. But three plum parts in one Broadway play? That's the hat trick Dylan Baker pulls off in Theresa Rebeck's Bernhardt/Hamlet, in which he portrays celebrated 19th-century theatre actor Benoît-Constant...