Michael Dale News

Back in that age we call golden, Broadway marquees were frequently set ablaze by long-running plays that producers looking to turn a profit lovingly referred to as boulevard comedies. These were typically middlebrow laugh machines expertly crafted by the likes of Mary Chase, Neil Simon or Abe Burrows (Think HARVEY, THE ODD COUPLE or CACTUS FLOWER), involving contemporary everyday characters in realistic situations containing just enough sentiment to make you care about what happens next, while maybe even wrapping up with an uncontroversial, heartwarming message.

A Soldier's Play opens tonight on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre.

When a soldier in the United States Army, just before the final surge of World War II, is found shot to death in the Louisiana town where he's stationed, the immediate assumption is that one or more of the locals committed the murder.

Emojiland has officially opened off-Broadway!

Obviously, it would be foolish to expect anything resembling high art from a musical comedy titled Emojiland, which not only attaches bodies to those expressive emotion-summarizing faces from social media and texting but brings them to singing-and-dancing life. But even shows that aspire to little more than silly junk-food fun should be sprinkled with some degree of cleverness.

After playing downtown's Lucille Lortel Theater last as year as part of Red Bull's season, director Erica Schmidt's psychologically intriguing Shakespeare adaptation titled MAC BETH moves north for a remounting for the Hunter Theater Project.

'Parenting is just guessing. Anyone who says different is lying and their children hate them.'

My Name is Lucy Barton starring Laura Linney opens tonight at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Good drama needn't call attention to itself and certainly a subtle, introspective theatre piece can provide an enormous impact, but if there's anything of intrigue lying beneath the surface of Rona Munroe's stage adaptation of novelist Elizabeth Strout's 2016 best-seller My Name is Lucy Barton (Strout is granted authorship credit), it wasn't apparent to this reviewer.

Plenty of those who weren't nodding their heads in agreement reacted with incredulousness or perhaps a big guffaw three years ago when Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared on 'Meet The Press' to defend White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's statements about the size of the crowd at Donald Trump's inaugural with the phrase 'alternative facts.'

'Europe was pushing against me, so I just kept pushing back,' writes Selina Thompson in her autobiographical solo drama of cultural discovery, salt.

Good morning, BroadwayWorld! Welcome to 2020! We hope you all had a happy holiday season.

To this very frequent theatre-goer, the most exciting and gratifying development on New York stages since 2010 has been the growing number of productions that, before hitting it big on Broadway, graced the stages of the city's non-profit Off-Broadway companies.

Good morning, BroadwayWorld! We hope everyone who celebrates had a great Christmas, full of family, friends, and love.

Born in 1901, Austro-Hungarian playwright and novelist ?-dön von Horváth spent the latter of his 36 years warning against the growing threat of European fascist regimes before being fatally struck by a falling tree branch.

When you consider that the two best-known plays by American authors dealing with the AIDS epidemic, Larry Kramer's THE NORMAL HEART and Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA, are both decades old and set in the 1980s, it's no wonder if playgoers tend to think of the crisis as something of the past which is now primarily under control. Even Matthew Lopez's current, THE INHERITANCE, though set in the 21st Century, focuses on the loss of gay men of that preceding generation.

A world-famous director can suffer a creative block during a midlife crisis, an unsinkable ship can go under on its initial voyage and death can even take a holiday. These are just three examples of how, when penned by composer/lyricist Maury Yeston, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN THE THEATER.

As usual, the family-focused New Victory Theater was packed with kids the afternoon this reviewer took in the charms and delights of Cirque Mechanics' 42FT-A MENAGERIE OF MECHANICAL MARVELS, but you won't need the little ones around to have a great time at their display of strength, acrobatics and humor that's small in size but big on personality.

If you're like this reviewer, you're a sucker for stories about young people loudly and aggressively voicing their rebellions through art. Three years ago, screenwriter/director John Carney's indie hit 'Sing Street' told of a beaten-down 1980s Dublin teenage lad who forms a rock band initially to impress a girl, but then finds it as an outlet to write and perform songs expressing his range towards the adults who are supposed to be his role models. (Oh yeah, and he writes a song to try and make the girl like him, too.)

Since its first publication in 1843, Charles Dickens' holiday classic, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, has been adapted countless times for various stages, screens and pages, but undoubtedly the most authentic presentations of the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts who assist in his transformation into a kind and generous soul were the numerous live readings the author gave during the last 18 years of his life.