Category: Acting
Getting a New Identity for Christmas
By JONATHAN MANDELL
Heather Raffo on writing and starring in the Iraqi immigrant tale Noura at Playwrights Horizons
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Heather Raffo says she grew up as a "sheltered Michigan girl -- a really nice, open, conservative" and blonde American who spoke English with a flat Midwestern accent. Then, at age 20, the Gulf War changed her identity. She became an Iraqi-American...
What's It Like Playing Bob Mackie While Wearing His Costumes?
By RAVEN SNOOK
Tony nominee Michael Berresse returns to Broadway after a 10-year absence in The Cher Show
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Playing a part based on a real-life person is pretty common -- just look at all of the biographical shows running right now. But playing a part based on a real-life person who serves in a key creative position on the production? That's the unusual situation...
Dancing Across the Political Aisle at 'The Prom'
By KELUNDRA SMITH
Two stars of the new Broadway musical comedy talk about its healing properties
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Prom has long been a rite of passage for American teens, a celebration of impending adulthood and, overwhelmingly, heterosexuality. That last part presents a problem for Emma in the new Broadway musical The Prom since she wants to bring her girlfriend. The PTA in her...
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...