In “The Wiz,” the all-Black version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” that debuted on Broadway in the 1970s,  Dorothy never sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” nor wore ruby red slippers,  but we got used to that, and there were compensations, especially  a Tony- and Grammy-winning score featuring gospel, soul, funk and the R&B hits “Ease on Down the Road” and “Home.” The music was just one part of a fresh and welcome nod to African American culture and experience. But the new revival of “The Wiz,” opening at Broadway’s Marquis Theater tonight aft ..read more

Thomas Jefferson was in his forties when he began having sex with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, who was 14.  Had they fallen in love? The question is absurd. But did they eventually fall in love? That’s one of the several intriguing questions that Suzan-Lori Parks explores in “Sally & Tom,” her play about a present-day theater troupe that is putting together an original play about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, which they’ve entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness.” The play-within-the play is led by an interracial couple: Mike (Gabriel Ebert) is the director and portrays Tom; L ..read more

With twelve shows opening on Broadway in the next ten days– and several Off Broadway – it’s a taxing time (yes, a pun) for theater award voters and critics, and a busy one for theater makers. But one theater company sees April as a Month of Rest for theatergoers; Playco is offering free events including a group, a sound path, and a walk in the park.  Today is not going to be a walk in the park for those taxpayers who haven’t filed yet, it seems the right time to look at examples of Taxes in Broadway musicals (and in a couple of plays), from “Casino Girl” in 1910 to “Hamilton” to ..read more

With Tax Day approaching, here are seven times that characters have sung or talked about taxes in Broadway musicals, from “I’ll Put a Tax on That” in Casino Girl 1910 to “My Shot” and “Cabinet Battle # 1” in “Hamilton” in 2015; then two plays in 2017. “I’ll Put A Tax on That” with music by Harry T. MacConnell and lyrics by Harry B. Smith, appeared in “The Casino Girl” (1900), in which a former chorus girl at the Casino Theatre in New York flees to Cairo under an assumed name to escape amorous advances of an admirer. The song is sung by the actor portraying the “Khedive of Egypt.” I ..read more

In the middle of the busiest theater month in memory, the theater company Playco held a group nap today. It was the first of its slate of free events during its  “Month of Rest”   –  including a sound bath, a nature walk through Shakespeare Garden in Central Park, and volunteer gardening in St. John’s Park in Crown Heights, Brooklyn  – “that encourage rest, dreaming, and doing less,” (see schedule below). This one was virtual, on Zoom. “Thank you so much for joining me and Playco on this rainy cloudy ..read more

In “The Outsiders,” opening on Broadway tonight, an exciting cast of gifted young performers, a lovely if little-varied folk and country score, and some thrillingly muscular, almost cinematic choreography are all employed to tell a story that’s been told many times before. Rival teenage gangs? Angsty adolescents? Kids who put grease in their hair?   It’s hard to avoid comparisons to, among others, “West Side Story” and “Grease.” But of course the most unavoidable comparison – which is both boost and burden – is to the two landmark works on which “The Outsiders” is directly base ..read more

Since the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the Jazz Age – on April 10, 1925, 99 years ago today —  “The Great Gatsby” has been turned into an opera, a ballet,  several movies, and a musical that will open on Broadway later this month, with a completely different musical adaptation of the novel also aiming for Broadway. The avant-garde theater company Elevator Repair Service even made its first big splash with “Gatz,” which was a staged verbatim reading of “The Great Gatsby.”  But the first adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was a non ..read more

By the end of “Oh, Mary!,” we have learned that First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln was a homicidally bitter alcoholic and frustrated cabaret singer married to a vicious closet homosexual whose assassination didn’t go down the way we were taught. This is not meant to be historically accurate, of course; that’s beside the point. The point is to make the audience laugh.  So what if you don’t find this alternative history all that funny? Then you’d find yourself apparently out of step with the theatergoers who have turned Cole Escola’s eighty-minute exercise in camp into an Off-Broadway hit, exten ..read more

Nature’s getting dramatic, taking center stage, with the earthquake last week and the eclipse today. (New York City is expected to see a partial solar eclipse, with the moon covering about 90 percent of the sun, peaking at 3:25 p.m. across the five boroughs, lasting no more than a minute. “It’s really exciting to watch as the first bite gets taken out of the sun by the moon,” astrophysicist Jackie Faherty told the Times That is due around 2:10 p.m. in New York City. Wear special solar eclipse glasses!) But that’s not all that’s temporarily pushed aside Broadway. The absence of openin ..read more

Zombie fungi – the same parasites that wipe out civilization in the sci-fi thriller “The Last of Us” —  are real; fruit flies grieve; a group of five towns in 17th century Italy filed a lawsuit against local caterpillars for pilfering from the townsfolks’ gardens. These are among the scientific and historical facts that, mixed with stories from Ancient Greek mythology and scenes from Classic Greek tragedy, are turned into a visually splendid song-and-dance puppet extravaganza. “The Four Lives” is the thirtieth inventive production by Theodora Skipitares, one of th ..read more