TDF Stages Archive

Jeffrey Richards may not have been born in a trunk, but he was certainly born to the theater: His mother, Helen Stern Richards, was a longtime Broadway general manager and press agent. And now her son is one of New York’s preeminent producers and press agents himself, and he’s possibly among the busiest men in […]

Neil Pepe has had an extremely busy year: The artistic director of Atlantic Theater Company, in 2008 Pepe directed one Atlantic main stage show (Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song ) and two Atlantic Stage 2 productions (Ethan Coen’s Almost an Evening and David Pittu’s What’s That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling ). Two of them […]

By MARK BLANKENSHIP By the time it hits the stage, a new play has been tended by many hands. There are playwrights, of course, but also artistic directors, marketing staffs and dozens of others who join forces to make a script successful. This creates a complicated system of new play development and production. Driven by […]

That’s certainly the case with August Wilson’s intimate epic of a play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , now in a brilliant Lincoln Center-produced revival at the Belasco Theatre. As 800 New York City public high school students discovered at a recent matinee performance of Joe Turner (as part of TDF's Stage Doors program), the […]

And they may take for granted that there’s a top-flight magazine, American Theatre , to reflect and encourage that national theatre activity. But neither were ever thus: It was not until the mid-1960s that what would soon be called the “regional theatre movement” began to take root in cities from Costa Mesa, Calif. to Hartford, […]

All appearances to the contrary, Sherie Rene Scott—musical theatre star of Aida , The Little Mermaid and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels —is one of those who act out only when they’re acting. Just ask Dick Scanlan, a co-writer with Scott on her unconventional new musical Everyday Rapture , opening at the Second Stage May 3. The […]

Depending how you trace its origins, rock 'n' roll is fast approaching retirement age. And if you count Hair as the first rock musical, then stages both on and Off-Broadway have been rocking for four decades now. So should it be any surprise that not only the teenage kids but the fortysomething parents in the […]

Actor/director Colman Domingo had seen his share of performance art and solo performance, certainly. But until he was cast as ultra-edgy Berlin performance artist Mr. Venus in the rock-musical sensation Passing Strange , he hadn’t delved much into that world himself. Now, after his immersion in it—capped by his indelible delivery of Mr. Venus’ disturbing […]

This year marks 10 years that director Nicholas Martin has been staging plays by Christopher Durang, starting with the harrowing comedy Betty’s Summer Vacation at Playwrights Horizons in 1999. That play skewered the “tabloid-ization” of American culture, while Durang’s latest, Why Torture Is Wrong and the People Who Love Them , now playing at the […]