TDF Stages Archive

"Let me hop off my skateboard," says Jimmi Simpson, arriving at the Music Box Theatre for a recent performance of The Farnsworth Invention , the epic historical drama by Aaron Sorkin, in which Simpson plays the title character. It's hard to imagine Philo T. Farnsworth, the farm-boy genius from Idaho who first envisioned the science […]

By now Broadway audiences are used to seeing popular films adapted for the stage, particularly into musicals. The 39 Steps , which begins performances on Jan. 4 at the American Airlines Theatre, is something completely different: A lithe, funny, four-actor staging of Alfred Hitchcock's 72-year-old classic film thriller, which involves a chase across the Scottish […]

The "plays only" line at the TKTS Discount Booth has seldom offered so many rich choices for the discerning playgoer. Whether it's farce or tragedy, classical drama or contemporary realism, British or American you're looking for, Broadway at the end of 2007 has something for every taste. In the straight-up comedy column, there's the "new" […]

Norbert Leo Butz grew up a few blocks from the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Mo. "Watching tourist steamboats coming up and down the river was just part of what we saw all the time," says Butz in his cozy dressing room at the Lyceum, where he stars in the delicious comedy Is He Dead? […]

William Finn is not one to rest on his laurels (his Tony for Falsettos , for instance) or indeed to look back much at all. “I never listen to the cast albums of my shows,” says Finn, currently represented on Broadway by the Tony-nominated score for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Off-Broadway […]

J.T. Rogers' acclaimed new play about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, The Overwhelming , has a distinguished pedigree, with the Roundabout Theatre producing it Off-Broadway at the Laura Pels Theatre, following a hit run at London's National Theatre. Behind the play's genesis, though, was an unlikely patron: The Salt Lake Acting Company of Salt Lake […]

Among the unforeseen side effects of the recent Local 1 stagehands' were a few missed exits and entrances: John Lloyd Young, the Tony-winning star of Jersey Boys , didn't get his scheduled final bow. The 10th anniversary gala performance of The Lion King was not celebrated on the stage of the Minskoff. And Sarah Stiles, […]

Attentive riders of the D train might occasionally notice a thin, well-dressed, tastefully bespectacled man en route to Bensonhurst, where he disembarks for regular visits to Lafayette High School. These days he's likely to have some attractive hard-bound books in tow. Clued-in theatre watchers among us might recognize him as Thomas Schumacher (pictured above with […]

The TKTS Discount Booths stayed up and running during the stagehands' strike, of course, but on Thursday the Times Square booth on 46th Street was buzzing with a new excitement again, as New Yorkers and tourists alike clamored for tickets to musicals and plays they hadn't been able to see for 19 days. "We've been […]