Behind the Curtain, the Netflix documentary about the making of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, is framed as a story of triumph, chronicling the creative agonies of wresting a hit play from the messy, chaotic process of staging a massive…
Headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “cave captive,” a “prisoner of nature’s dungeon” — dramatic language, but accurate, and the American public was obsessed. In a nail-biting news saga that lasted just over two weeks in the winter…
Fast approaching the number of musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote is the number of revues written about him. The first, to my knowledge, was a 1973 fund-raiser held on the set of the original production of “A Little Night Music.” It…
Denzel Washington called him his “northern star.” Whoopi Goldberg said “getting to see him onstage was heaven.” Some of the most notable names in show business gathered in Times Square on Monday afternoon for a starry, and sometimes emotional, send-off…
“Giant,” a play about Roald Dahl’s antisemitism starring John Lithgow as the truculent children’s author, was one of the big winners at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. The play, which was staged at the Royal Court…
Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65. The cause…
An LED screen more than 16 feet tall. Four smaller ones drifting like clouds. Another that has a kind of walk-on cameo. Five camera operators with their electronic burdens. Nine people dashing every which way with wardrobe, wigs and whatnot.…
In 1943, in wartime England, a homeless person dies in the street after ingesting rat poison. Given a fake postmortem identity by British counterintelligence officers — no effort to find his family is made — he is dressed in a…
The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. Audience members have barely settled into their seats before a group of onstage musicians strikes up the number “El Carretero,” with the rest of the…
If you have already had the good fortune of encountering “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare, you were probably at a wedding. It is not, by most accounts, a sexy poem. It is not exactly a happy one, either. Instead, it…