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

Tony Awards Lots of Tony Awards news. In a long-overdue decision, the Tony Awards Administration Committee  has decided to reinstate the Best Sound Design categories , which had been eliminated after the 2013-2014 season. The categories, as well as a new voting process for that and the Best Orchestrations category, will be effective starting with the upcoming 2017-2018 season. Broadway.com has more. Tony Award nominations for this season will be announced May 2.   Baayork Lee , a member of the original A Chorus Line company, will receive the honorary Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award in recognition of her humanitarian work. Playbill has more.   James Earl Jones ( You Can't Take It With You ) will receive the 2017 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre . Broadway.com has more. Additionally, the final round of eligibility rulings were announced. Unless noted below, eligibility is consistent with opening night credits. That means that actors billed a...

New York City Ballet Season On Sale Individual tickets for New York City Ballet's 2015-2016 season are now on sale. The season includes seven world premiere ballets, including two from the Company's resident choreographer and soloist, Justin Peck ( Everywhere We Go , Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes ). There will also be a new Christopher Wheeldon ( After the Rain , An American in Paris ) ballet, as well as another collaboration between choreographers and fashion designers. (Read this Week in Review from June for more about that.) In addition, the promotional artwork for the season (like the NY Export: Opus Jazz drawing at right) marks a collaboration between NYCB and artist Jamie Lee Reardin. The trailer below shows the art in motion. Visit nycballet.com for more information and to purchase tickets. PBS Fall Arts Festival This fall, PBS will broadcast several recorded shows, concerts and other specials as part of its annual Fall Arts Festival. Highlights include the Oc...

There are violent violins. There is a sexually explicit ballet serving as a prologue. There are yellow shoes. It all adds up to one dark, sexy, gothic romance in Kander and Ebb's The Visit . The titular visit is made by Claire Zachanassian (a commanding and entrancing Chita Rivera ( The Mystery of Edwin Drood )), who is returning to her hometown, this time with money to spare, seeking revenge on her lover from so many years ago, Anton (an understated Roger Rees ( Peter and the Starcatcher , The West Wing )). Claire was scorned by Anton when they were teenagers, and she has never forgotten the sting. Though she's gone on to marry (several times; she widows well, she says) and amass a fortune to make Bill Gates jealous, she still wants to be with her true love. And so she devises a way to gain revenge—not so much on Anton but on the town that ostracized her—and get her man. Claire returns to the town, which is a shambles, and offers to give the town ten billion marks, as...

The play is called The Winslow Bo y, and yet so much of the story is about the Winslow girl. Terence Rattigan’s play, broadly about a father’s fight for justice for his son, is intriguing at times. It even seems relevant, particularly when the papers and gossip rags of the day (the action takes place in Kensington over a two-year period, 1912-1914) start weighing in on the legal drama. But the play falters when it gives equal voice to the A and the B story. Most plays, TV shows and movies have an A story—the main plotline—and the B story—some “sidebar” storyline played out by secondary characters. As it’s the title of the play, it follows that the A story here is about one of the Winslow boys, Ronnie, who, at just 13, is expelled from the Naval academy for alleged theft. (He swears up and down that he is innocent.) His father, Arthur Winslow (a splendid Roger Rees), immediately takes up his case, and the rest of the A story concerns Arthur’s debilitating obsession with cleari...