David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face debuted Off Broadway 17 years ago, spinning a farcical tale about a real-life Broadway controversy that had taken place some 17 years before that. How it manages to be relevant, insightful and very funny as it makes its Broadway debut tonight, all these years later, is…

Slow to grab hold and knotty when it does, Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, opening tonight and starring Robert Downey Jr. in a formidable Broadway debut, is, at its core, a sort of literary parlor game: Let’s take that most mighty of 20th Century book-chat tropes – the macho, aging male superstar novelist who…

Is there a more dependable set-up for family drama than the gathering of long-estranged siblings? Last season’s dark and wonderful Appropriate proved there was plenty of life in Pinter’s old Homecoming trick, and this Broadway season Jez Butterworth does it again with the fine The Hills Of California, a…

Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone make for an appealing and very welcome stage duo in Broadway’s new comedy-drama The Roommate, a pairing that’s selling out the Booth Theatre in an engagement opening tonight. Unfortunately, their third costar – a beige landline telephone that gets an implausibly large role…

Carol Burnett is alive and well and not starring in the latest Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress, the fractured fairy tale musical opening tonight that laid the foundation for the funny lady’s towering comic career way back in ’59. Fortunately for Broadway audiences, the contemporary stage has its…

There’s funny, there’s very funny, and then there’s Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola's riotous new comedy that brings more laughs to Broadway than all the Gutenberg!s, Edelmans and Birbiglias combined. You can throw in Shucked for good measure. Escola, low-key famous these last few years through YouTube…

Certainly one definition of great music might include an ability to meet the present – and the future – head-on and come out unbruised, even triumphant. By that standard and many more, The Who’s Tommy, opening tonight on Broadway, is thrilling proof that the premiere concept album of 1969 is great music…

Editor’s Note: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' play Appropriate, starring Sarah Paulson, Corey Stoll and Michael Esper, re-opens on Broadway tonight in a commercial transfer to the Belasco Theatre. The play, starring Sarah Paulson, Corey Stoll, Michael Esper, will run through June 23. Appropriate originally o…

Water For Elephants, the musical opening tonight at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre, is perhaps best viewed as a redemptive attempt to adapt Sara Gruen’s popular 2006 historical romance novel into something, anything, to block from memory the middling, grim 2011 film starring Robert Pattinson and Reese…

Whether or not the climate activists who interrupted a critics’ preview of Broadway’s An Enemy of the People last week persuasively made their “water’s coming for us all” message isn’t for me to say, but I will note that the disruption spoke very well for this production. Amy Herzog’s adaptation of…

To say The Notebook had a devoted, built-in audience before it sang so much as a note on Broadway would be an understatement this romantic tear-jerker never attempts. Based on Nicholas Sparks’ 1996 bestseller about a young – then older, then much older – couple who survives a lifetime of…

Time has tipped the scales a bit in the did-he-or-didn’t-he question at the heart of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play Doubt: A Parable, opening tonight in a Roundabout Theatre Company revival at the Todd Haimes Theatre. Since the play about a possibly child-molesting priest made its…