Reviewing the Drama: Broadway, Off-Broadway, Ballet, Movies, and TV Reviews

Holiday Inn , the new old-fashioned musical. Though the musical is being touted as the “new Irving Berlin musical,” it borrows heavily from musicals from days of old, like when Mr. Berlin was actually writing new music and musicals. There’s a well-balanced book, by Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge , and score (packed with notable Irving Berlin tunes, as well as new dance arrangements by Sam Davis ), and the show-within-a-show device is used, as it was in the Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire movie upon which this is based. I don’t remember the movie well enough to say exactly what’s the same and what isn’t, but the gist is the same. Jim (Bryce Pinkham) and Tom (Corbin Bleu) are an up-and-coming act on vaudeville/club circuit circa 1946. They are joined by Lila Dixon (Megan Sikora), who, at the top of the show, is also Jim’s girlfriend. Just as they are about to get their shot—a call from Hollywood—Jim decides he wants to give up show business and settle down with Lila. He even buys a farm ...

The late, great Wendy Wasserstein 's seminal work, The Heidi Chronicles , was something of a revelation when it debuted off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989, and once it transferred to Broadway, the play won the Tony Award for Best Play. Through the experiences of Heidi Holland ( Elisabeth Moss ), an art historian coming of age in the 60s, Wasserstein explored one view of the feminist movement, and where its progenitors ended up. (Through a series of vignettes, we see Heidi as an adolescent in 1965, and then check in with her over the years, all the way through 1989.) Seeing how relevant this is—how little has changed—is somewhat disappointing. Maybe it's not fair to say nothing has changed. Maybe a lot has, and what hasn't is simply amplified because of changes in technology. There are still institutional blockades against women, and women are still stigmatized for their choices (when the old, wrinkly men who write laws let...