After 20-odd years singing, dancing and acting in dinner theatres, summer stocks and the ever-popular audience participation murder mysteries (try improvising with audiences after they?ve had two hours of open bar), Michael Dale segued his theatrical ambitions into playwriting. The buildings which once housed the 5 Off-Off Broadway plays he penned have all been destroyed or turned into a Starbucks, but his name remains the answer to the trivia question, "Who wrote the official play of Babe Ruth's 100th Birthday?" He served as Artistic Director for The Play's The Thing Theatre Company, helping to bring free live theatre to underserved communities, and dabbled a bit in stage managing and in directing cabaret shows before answering the call (it was an email, actually) to become BroadwayWorld.com's first Chief Theatre Critic. While not attending shows Michael can be seen at Citi Field pleading for the Mets to stop imploding. Likes: Strong book musicals and ambitious new works. Dislikes: Unprepared celebrities making their stage acting debuts by starring on Broadway and weak bullpens.
While several of New York's non-profit theatre companies have been pursuing the noble cause of creating more exposure for contemporary women playwrights, the Mint Theatre Company has been cornering the market on the dead ones.
If the Broadway revival of a few years back demonstrated the deadly results that can occur when overthinking and underplaying a quality farce, the new Paper Mill mounting is a fast a furious example of Ken Ludwig's madcap Lend Me A Tenor done right.
Near the end of 'Sure Thing,' one of the sextet of David Ives one-act comedies that make up All In The Timing, a pair of strangers meeting in a café bond over their mutual love for the early films of Woody Allen.
Bertolt Brecht's Baal is pretty much the type of play you'd expect to be written by a 20-year-old student who would eventually become known for using dramatic techniques meant to alienate the audience from any emotional connection to the characters.
I'm writing these words fully aware that there is no opinion I can express in the ensuing paragraphs that will ever have any effect on anyone's decision whether or not to buy tickets for Manilow On Broadway.
Reading about the new Lanford Wilson revival makes me wonder if the weekly grosses for the last Stephen Sondheim Broadway revival were known as Follies' Tally.
In musicals like Fiddler On The Roof, She Loves Me and The Apple Tree, the team Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) once graced Broadway with scores that found poetry and elegance in the lives of everyday people.
There is no truth to the rumor that at tonight's closing performance of Evita, Ann Harada played Peron's Mistress and sang 'Why Would A Fellow Want A Girl Like Her?'
Tracy Morgan was on The View today and said he'd like to play the title role in a Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!, but when asked to sing a bit of the song he said he didn't know it.
With a new production of Annie now previewing on Broadway, it looks like Gwen Verdon may have to relinquish her title as the most famous redhead to have played the Palace.
Next to front row seats for the newest smash hit, few things get theatre fans excited like the Annual Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction, benefitting Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
A little over thirty years ago Gerard Alessandrini was just another struggling young musical theatre actor who enjoyed doing what a lot of struggling young musical theatre actors do in between summer stock and dinner theatre gigs; write parody lyrics of famous showtunes.