TDF Stages Archive

Most Broadway understudies get rushed onstage when the star is sick or off shooting a movie; if they get a rehearsal with the director and most of the cast present, they’re the lucky ones. Very few, though, have the good fortune of Javier Muñoz, who last week took over the lead role of Usnavi in […]

Darrell Dennis has a message for the white man (and woman) who comes to see Tales of an Urban Indian , his new solo show at the Public Theatre: It’s OK to laugh. “I’ve performed this piece all across Canada and the U.S., and the native audiences laugh hysterically,” says Dennis, a young Indian from […]

Does the perennially busy actor/director/writer Austin Pendleton have some secret diet or special pill that keeps him going? This past season alone he directed the intense two-hander Fifty Words for MCC and the wistful drama Lillian Yuralia ; starred in the title role of a musical based on the Chekhov short story The Black Monk […]

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes Itamar Moses’ Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used To It) , now at the Flea’s intimate downstairs theater. Whether or not this collection of short plays about the ups and downs of contemporary romance makes a great date night might depend on your (and your date’s) appetite […]

Seasoned theatregoers know a Donald Margulies play when they see it: smart, contemporary, often bitterly funny, crackling with intertwining conflicts over love, money and/or creative passion. In plays like Sight Unseen , Dinner With Friends and Collected Stories , Margulies has carved a niche as a consummate stage realist. Well, for those who think you […]

In Martin McDonagh’s moving, crackling play The Cripple of Inishmaan (now at the Altantic Theatre Company), the title character—a sensitive young man named Billy, disabled in body but strong of will—returns to his hardscrabble Irish isle after an unlikely brush with Hollywood and reports to his mates, “They decided to hire an actor who could […]

For an actor, genetics can be destiny: Big guys get typecast as heavies and gentle giants, petite women find themselves playing vulnerable damsels ad nauseam. But by its very nature, acting aspires to break the mold and free the imagination, and Richard Kind—whose outsized frame and expressive, laughing face gets him cast as larger-than-life figures […]

Gina Gionfriddo’s searing, hilarious new comedy/drama Becky Shaw is the kind of contemporary behavioral study that sends audiences out arguing about the characters as if they’re real people. Who was in the right? Why would anyone put up with that? Don’t you know people like that—and don’t you hate them? So it’s only fitting that […]

Like many New Yorkers, David Greenspan had seen the portrait at the New York Historical Society: A figure in a sumptuous blue gown and tiara with a pronounced double chin and, well, let’s just be frank, a decidedly masculine look. “I had seen the portrait and thought, ‘That guy’s in a dress!’ ” says Greenspan, […]