"For Paul Newman’s 96th birthday, his lost cinematic masterpiece," part 2
by Allan M. Jalon[This is Part 2 of my reposting of Allan M. Jalon’s article about the film Paul Newman directed and produced based on playwright Anton Chekhov’s short monodrama, On the Harmfulness of...
View Article"For Paul Newman's 96th birthday, his lost cinematic masterpiece," Part 3
by Allan M. Jalon[This is the concluding section of Allan M. Jalon’s article on Paul Newman’s never-released film version of Anton Chekhov’s one-act play On the Harmfulness of Tobacco. If you’ve been...
View ArticleSome Off-Off-Broadway Performances from the Archive
[Back in 1985, when I was a grad student at New York University, I did an internship with one of my teachers, Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, who was planning to start a writers’ theater. The internship ran...
View ArticleTheater for Young Audiences
by Kirk Woodward [Mega-contributor Kirk Woodward’s next topic, following his look at the craft of writing plays, is, as he points out below, what used to be called “children’s theater.” Both Kirk and...
View Article"Unopened": 'Lone Star Love'"
[“Shows stumble and fall on the way to Broadway all the time,” writes Lisa Birnbach, an author of several books who also wrote for the Village Voice and writes for the New York Times and other...
View Article"Unopened": 'Face Value'
[Alexis Soloski’s article about David Henry Hwang’s 1993 comedy Face Value, the second installment in the “Unopened” series, which the paper dubbed “The curious history of shows aimed for Broadway...
View Article"Unopened": 'A Pray by Blecht'
[The third installment in the New York Times“Unopened” series is the paper’s co-chief theater reviewer Jesse Green’s report on the demise of the Broadway plans for a musical with the unlikely title of...
View Article"Unopened": 'Scratch'
[Adam Langer’s examination of Scratch (for “Old Scratch,” a nickname for the Devil), is number four in the Times’ “Unopened” series. It was published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 4...
View Article"Unopened": 'The Baker’s Wife'
[The failed Broadway première of The Baker’s Wife is the subject of New York Times theater and arts journalist Laura Collins-Hughes’s entry in the “Unopened” series. Published on 5 November 2020 in...
View ArticleSome Vintage Reviews from the Archive
[In the late 1980s and early ’90s, I wrote reviews for Stages, a monthly magazine that covered theater all over the country (but principally in New York City) and was distributed free in selected...
View Article'Much Ado About Nothing': A "Recovered" Report
[On 22 December 2020, I posted“Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,”a collection of pre-Rick On Theater performance reports for plays I saw in Washington, D.C., in the ’90s and ’00s. [All but one,...
View Article"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Articles 1 & 2
[Periodically, American Theatremagazine, published monthly by the Theatre Communications Group, runs a special section on an important theater subject, usually one with which most theatergoers aren’t...
View Article"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Articles 3 & 4
[Welcome to the second entry in my republication ofAmerican Theatre’s July/August 2019 series on sound design. The two articles below will discuss the use of background music in “straight” theater...
View Article"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 5
[This is the third installment in my republication of theAmerican Theatreseries on sound design from the July/August 2019 issue of TCG’s monthly magazine. TJ Acena looks at the way theater sound...
View Article"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 6
[You’ve come to the fourth installment of the Rick On Theatrerepublication of American Theatre’s series on sound design. Article 6 is about acoustics, the science of sounds, which writer Naveen Kumar...
View Article"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 7
[Article 7, the fifth entry in theAmerican Theatre sound design series, is the only one whose title is different in the print edition of AT than it is online. On the website...
View Article"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 8
[Below is the final installment in my republication of theAmerican Theatre special section on sound design from the July/August 2019 issue. Jerald Raymond Pierce makes a return to the series to write...
View ArticleStephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics
by Kirk Woodward[First, let me say that I really enjoyed reading "Stephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics." Kirk’s done his customary bang-up job on a topic about which I could never be competent, and he...
View ArticleMore Vintage Reviews from the Archive
[As I reported in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive” (15 March 2021), I wrote reviews for the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published in New York City from 1980 until 1997, in the...
View ArticleLatter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees
[Thursday, 8 April, was Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah. Officially known in Israel, where it’s a national holiday, as Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah (Hebrew: יום הזיכרון לשואה...
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