Xavier Amat

De Portbou a Alcanar, Cataluña está bañada a lo largo de más de 500 quilómetros por el mar. Ya os podéis imaginar que con tanta costa hay espacio para muchas playas y calas magníficas; algunas aisladas y rodeadas de vegetación, otras con un bonito pueblo detrás, algunas rocosas y pequeñas y otras de dimensiones considerables y de arena fina. Si no sabéis a cuál ir, echad un ojo a nuestra selección. NO TE LO PIERDAS: las mejores playas de la Costa Brava

Aunque seáis unos adictos a Barcelona hay muchos sitios para descubrir a solo 30 minutos de la ciudad. Incluso, aunque no tengáis coche, podéis hacer excursiones muy interesantes y divertidas en tren desde cualquiera de las estaciones de Ferrocarriles de la Generalitat. Playas, cuevas marinas, las opciones son casi infinitas para pasar un día magnífico en buena compañía. Pero si queréis cambiar y descubrir sitios nuevos, aquí tenéis 10 escapadas brutales. NO TE LO PIERDAS: Los pueblos más bonitos de Cataluña

New York theater ranges far beyond the 41 large midtown houses that we call Broadway. Many of the city's most innovative and engaging new plays and musicals can be found Off Broadway, in venues that seat between 100 and 499 people. (Those that seat fewer than 100 people usually fall into the Off-Off Broadway category.) These more intimate spaces present work in a wide range of styles, from new pieces by major artists at the Public Theater or Playwrights Horizons to revivals at the Signature Theatre and crowd-pleasing commercial fare at New World Stages. And even the best Off Broadway shows usually cost less than their cousins on the Great White Way—even if you score cheap Broadway tickets. Use our listings to find reviews, prices, ticket links, curtain times and more for current and upcoming Off Broadway shows. RECOMMENDED: Full list of Broadway and Off Broadway musicals in New York

Hay lugares de Cataluña que son de visita obligada. Desde los Pirineos hasta los cientos de kilómetros de costa mediterránea con encantadoras calas. Capitales que conservan grandes monumentos históricos que narran nuestro pasado y rincones que parecen anclados en tiempos medievales. También tenemos parques naturales y Patrimonios de la Humanidad a raudales, así como pequeñas ciudades y pueblos –algunos muy cerca de Barcelona– que merecen una visita independientemente de la época del año. Es tan fácil encontrar el destino ideal para cada ocasión, tanto si queréis hacer una simple escapada de playa durante los meses de verano, o practicar montañismo en los tiempos más fríos. ¿O quizás sois más de descubrir pueblos con encanto? Sea como sea, ¡no os faltarán destinos!  NO TE LO PIERDAS: Los 50 lugares de Barcelona que no te puedes perder. ¿Cuántos habéis visitado ya?

We all need a bit of magic in our lives, and New York offers plenty to choose from beyond Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Some of the city's best magic shows are proudly in the old presentational tradition of men in tuxedos with tricks up their sleeves; others are more like Off Broadway shows or immersive theater experiences. When performed well, they welcome you to suspend disbelief in a special zone where skills honed over the course of years meet the element of surprise. Why not allow yourself a few illusions?

Broadway musicals are the beating heart of New York City. These days, your options are more diverse than ever: cultural game-changers like Hamilton and raucous comedies like The Book of Mormon are just down the street from quirky originals like Kimberly Akimbo, sweeping operettas like The Phantom of the Opera and family classics like The Lion King. Whether you're looking for classic Broadway songs, spectacular sets and costumes, star turns by Broadway divas or dance numbers performed by the hottest chorus boys and girls, there is always plenty to choose from. Here is our list of all the Broadway musicals that are currently running or on their way, followed by a list of those in smaller Off Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues. RECOMMENDED: The best Broadway shows

The best Broadway shows attract millions of people to enjoy the pinnacle of live entertainment in New York City. Every season brings a fresh crop of Broadway musicals, plays and revivals, some of which go on to glory at the Tony Awards. Some are for only limited runs, but others stick around for years. Along with star-driven dramas and family-oriented blockbusters, you can still find the kind of artistically ambitious offerings that are more common to the smaller venues of Off Broadway. Here are our theater critics' top choices among the shows that are currently playing on the Great White Way.  RECOMMENDED: Complete A–Z Listings of All Broadway Shows in NYC

Encara que sigueu addictes a Barcelona hi ha molts espais a descobrir a només trenta minuts de la ciutat. Fins i tot, encara que no tingueu cotxe, podeu optar per fer increïbles excursions en tren des de qualsevol de les estacions de Ferrocarrils. Platges, gorges, les opcions són quasi infinites per passar un dia magnífic en bona companyia. Però si voleu canviar i descobrir llocs nous, aquí teniu 10 escapades brutals per descobrir llocs meravellos que tenim ben a prop. NO T'HO PERDIS: Els pobles més bonics de Catalunya

No hace falta ir muy lejos para disfrutar del aire libre y de la naturaleza. Tenemos parques naturales, cascadas, rutas, actividades para pasárselo bien y para ganar adrenalina y, sobre todo, ¡ganas de descubrirlo todo! Os proponemos 33 de las muchas actividades que se pueden realizar en los espacios naturales de las comarcas de Barcelona. No te lo pierdas: Los pueblos más bonitos de Catalunya

Seeing a show on Broadway can require some planning in advance—and sometimes a leap of faith. You can wait until the shows have opened and try to see only the very best Broadway shows, but at that point, it is often harder to get tickets and good seats. So it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the shows that will be opening on Broadway down the line, be they original musicals, promising new plays or revivals of time-tested classics. This spring, the lineup includes multiple shows that were hits in London, a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, two plays that won acclaim in previous Off Broadway runs (including a Pulitzer Prize) and the highly anticipated revivals of four musical favorites. Here, in order of when they start, are the productions that have been confirmed so far to open on Broadway in 2023. Recommended: Current and Upcoming Off Broadway Shows

The city is just beginning to warm up and thaw out from its winter slumber with some incredible NYC events in March, including St. Patrick's Day and Women’s History Month. For sure, we'll all be heading to the best Irish pubs in the city, but there's more to do from the Museum of Failure's debut to the Orchid Show at NYBG. And finally, we can start fantasizing about packing away that puffy coat and gearing up best things to do in spring. RECOMMENDED: Full NYC events calendar for 2023

Hi ha llocs preciosos de Catalunya que s'han de veure, almenys un cop a la vida! Des dels Pirineus fins als centenars de quilòmetres de costa mediterrània amb cales encantadores. Capitals que conserven grans monuments històrics que narren el nostre passat, i racons que semblen ancorats en temps medievals. També Parcs naturals i Patrimonis de la Humanitat a dojo, així com petites ciutats i pobles –alguns molt a prop de Barcelona– que mereixen una visita independentment de l'època de l'any. És tan fàcil trobar la destinació ideal per a cada ocasió, tant si voleu fer una simple escapada de platja durant els mesos d'estiu, o practicar muntanyisme en els temps més freds. O potser sou més de descobrir pobles amb encant? Sigui com sigui, no us faltaran destinacions! NO T'HO PERDIS: Els pobles més bonics de Catalunya. Quants n’heu visitat ja?

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Some plays offer a slice of life; Life of Pi is a wedge of fantasy. Adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti from Yann Martel’s bestselling 2001 novel, which also inspired a 2012 film by Ang Lee, this British import has been mounted to spectacular effect. Its sea-tossed story—about a shipwrecked Indian teenager named Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) who spends hundreds of days afloat in the Pacific in the company of a Bengal tiger—demands imagination, and director Max Webster provides it in abundance. Animal puppetry, lights, action, music and sound flood the theater, especially in the show’s second half; stage magic crashes out then gently recedes, tugging us into its currents.  The glory of this creation is the tiger, of course, whose comical name, Richard Parker—the result of a bureaucratic mix-up with its hunter—represents one of Life of Pi’s running themes: the thinness of the line between man from beast, especially when survival is at stake. It takes a team of eight human puppeteers, alternating duties, to bring Richard Parker to theatrical life as the great cat prowls, shudders, leaps and purrs. But Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes’s sensitively articulated puppet designs do not end there: The production’s menagerie also includes a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a turtle; for larger groups of animals, swarms of actors wave butterfly poles and fish sticks.  Life of Pi | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman The result is something like childr

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 Sweeney Todd may well be the greatest of all Broadway musicals: an epic combination of disparate ingredients—horror and humor, cynicism and sentiment, melodrama and sophisticated wit—with a central core of grounded, meaty humanity. But while the show’s quality is baked into the writing, portion sizes in recent years have varied. Sweeney Todd’s scope makes it expensive to stage; its 1989 and 2005 Broadway revivals (and the immersive 2017 Off Broadway incarnation) presented the show with greatly reduced casts and orchestrations. Not so for the thrilling version now playing at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail: This production features a 26-piece orchestra and a cast of 25 led by Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. It’s a feast for the ears.  Groban plays the title role: a Victorian barber, né Benjamin Barker, who returns to London after serving 15 years of hard labor for a crime he didn’t commit, hoping to reunite with his beloved wife, Lucy, and their young daughter, Johanna. But as he learns from his practical neighbor Mrs. Lovett (Ashford)—who operates the squalid meat-pie shop below his old tonsorial parlor—Lucy poisoned herself after being assaulted by the same lecherous judge (Jamie Jackson) who sent him away, who is now the guardian of the teenage Johanna (Maria Bilbao). With help from Mrs. Lovett and his friend Anthony (Jordan Fish

Broadway review by Adam Feldman   Musical theater loves a Cinderella story, and in 2023 that affection has been unusually literal. The archetypal rags-to-riches heroine figures prominently in two Broadway fairy-tale mashups, the recent Into the Woods and the upcoming Once Upon a One More Time; last month, Off Broadway’s Hip Hop Cinderella sent her to outer space. And now there is Bad Cinderella, a 2021 Andrew Lloyd Webber bauble that ran for a year in the West End as Cinderella but has tacked the word Bad in front of its title to make its U.S. debut. That’s a minor victory for truth in marketing, at least. As the old expression goes: If the shoe fits… In fairness, this Cinderella is only half-bad, but its virtues are in all the wrong places. Ostensibly, the show presents itself as a critique of superficiality. The script by Emerald Fennell, retouched for Broadway by Alexis Scheer, is set in a monarchic French city-state called Belleville whose fit, brightly attired, Instagram-ready denizens cheerfully sing that “beauty is our duty”; the orphaned Cinderella (Linedy Genao), reduced to household chores by her mean stepfamily, defines herself against the prevailing aesthetic regime. (When we first meet her, she is set upon by a pitchfork-wielding mob for spray-painting BEAUTY SUCKS on a statue of the city’s missing hero, Prince Charming.)  This promising conceit, though, turns out to be in vain. Bad Cinderella is a box of costume jewels: flashy but short on value. Gabriela Tyleso

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Mournful though it be, the revival of Parade is cause for celebration. Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical tragedy, about a grave miscarriage of justice more than a century ago, lasted only a few months in its original 1998 incarnation. But director Michael Arden’s heart-piercing new production, introduced at City Center’s Encores! series last year and now playing a limited run at Broadway’s Jacobs Theatre, makes a masterful case for giving the show a new hearing—and what you hear at this Parade, as sung by a splendid cast led by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond, will echo for a long time to come. Parade revisits a dark and consequential episode in American history. In 1913 Atlanta, Jewish factory supervisor Leo Frank was tried for the murder of child worker Mary Phagan, and subsequently lynched by a posse that abducted him from prison. Outrage at Phagan’s death, expanded into a more general hatred of Jews, helped lead to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; conversely, doubts over Frank’s conviction—historical consensus holds that he was innocent, and he was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986—spurred the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish watchdog group. With antisemitism currently on the rise, the musical’s concerns feel grimly apt. (The revival’s first performance was protested by a clutch of neo-Nazis.) Arden’s staging keeps the real-life basis of the story in continual sight, as literal background: Stately projectio

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Minimalism, as an approach to theater, serves a double duty. On one hand, it is part of an honorable artistic tradition, championed by directorial giants like Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, that aims to prioritize the actors and the text, and to avoid straining for a surface realism that film and television more readily provide. But it has another, more practical advantage as well: a production without lavish sets and costumes (and often with fewer actors) costs a lot less money to mount. The convergence of these two functions helps account for the recent trend toward a less-is-more aesthetic on even the biggest stages. Let’s call it radical cheap. When this strategy doesn’t work, it can leave you unsatisfied, without even the material comforts of an old-fashioned production to enjoy. But in the new Broadway revival of A Doll’s House, it slices clean through you. The superb Jessica Chastain plays Nora Helmer—the seemingly happy young wife and mother of Henrik Ibsen’s protofeminist 1879 social drama, who must learn to stop knitting the wool that gets pulled over her eyes—and Jamie Lloyd’s staging zeroes in on her with relentless focus. Chastain is seated onstage before the play begins, and she spends most of the next two hours, without intermission, facing forward in a plain wooden chair. The stage is completely bare, with no set unless you count a ceiling of lights that descends as Nora’s world closes in on her. The actors wear simple, moder

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Larry Sultan’s photo memoir Pictures From Home, shot over the course of the 1980s and published in 1992, captures his aging parents in saturated color as they putter and bicker through their golden years in a comfortable California tract house. It is also an implicit self-portrait: The images reflect his perceptions of his parents and his relationships to them, and perhaps also his desire to keep them—and, by extension, himself—from changing. “I realize that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures, the demands of my project and my confusion about its meaning, is the wish to take photography literally,” Sultan wrote in describing the project. “To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.” Playwright Sharr White (The Other Place) includes a version of that quote as dialogue in his adaptation of Pictures From Home, whose Broadway premiere has a top-shelf cast: Danny Burstein as Sultan and—as his parents, Irv and Jean—stage eminences Nathan Lane and Zoë Wanamaker. These characters talk amongst themselves, but they also often speak directly to the audience, explaining themselves or commenting on the photographs that are projected onto an entire blank wall behind them, looming larger than the lives they depict. Like Sultan’s photos, many of which were staged, they appear candid without always being so; they are conscious of the images they want to convey. Pictures From Home | Photograph: Julieta Cervantes The gulf between image and r

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Bruce Norris’s Downstate is hard to write about for the same reason it needs to be seen: It gives voice to the unspeakable. The play is set at a shabby group residence in southern Illinois for sex offenders who have been released from prison. All four of the men who live there were convicted of abusing minors, and although the particulars are different, their guilt is not in question. The question is: What happens now? Having done their time, they’re stuck in the period at the end of their sentences, or in a series of periods—an ellipsis that trails off to nowhere. Can any amount of punishment, in the eyes of the culture, be equal to their crimes? Is it possible to see them as anything but monsters? These are questions that seldom get a hearing in public discourse, where there is little reward for getting near them. The motives for this aversion are diverse. Often it is rooted in empathy: Any concern about the lives of abusers may appear to devalue the suffering of their victims. Sometimes it is more cynical, as in recent political messaging about the dangers of LGBT “groomers.” In this context, it is difficult to even talk about what Downstate is doing without adding fuel to the pyre. (Senator Ted Cruz cited a positive review of the play in the Washington Post as proof that “the corporate media is praising pedophilia.”) That is why Norris’s play seems so necessary. It uses the tools of theater—imagination, nuance, empathy, irony—to make space

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Reviewing a 1985 exhibit of 16 paintings created jointly by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, two of the era’s shiniest art stars, the New York Times critic Vivien Raynor dismissed it as a stunt, accusing Warhol of pulling the public’s leg with help from his junior “mascot” and “all too willing accessory” Basquiat. In a nod to the show’s poster, which winkingly depicted the artists in boxing gloves, she concluded her assessment thus: “Warhol, TKO in 16 rounds.'' Both painters would be dead by the end of the decade: Warhol from postsurgical complications in 1987, at the age of 58; Basquiat from a heroin overdose in 1989, at the age of 27. Anthony McCarten’s artsploitation drama The Collaboration throws them back in the ring in a fictionalized dual portrait that finds them alternately sparring and bonding over the course of a shared two-year project.  McCarten is a New Zealander with a penchant for biographical drama; he wrote the screenplays for The Theory of Everything, Bohemian Rhapsody and The Two Popes, as well as the book for current Neil Diamond musical A Beautiful Noise. In The Collaboration, both of his subjects have well-defined personas (or as Warhol might say, brands): Andy is the pale and affectless—not to say artless—weirdo in a white fright wig, surrounding himself with outrageous characters as he placidly sells mass-produced commercial culture back to itself at a markup; Jean is the brash young graffiti artist of Caribbean ex

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Honesty is a suspect policy in Between Riverside and Crazy, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s profanity-laced love letter to New York City seediness. Its characters are so enmeshed in ulterior motives and lies—the ones they tell each other and the ones they tell themselves—that their seeming excess of candor can never quite be trusted. Behind the fronting they present to the world are messes of guilt, regret and greed—but also hope, affection, maybe even love. Like Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning script, which features 35 uses of the s-word and 85 uses of the f-word in 90 pages, they’re all a little full of shit, with more fucks to give than they let on.   This being a play by the author of Our Lady of 121st Street and Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, plenty of conflict is on the horizon. At the eye of the gathering storm is the magnificently human and self-assured Stephen McKinley Henderson as the cuddly-irascible Walter “Pops” Washington, a retired Black cop who lives in an enviably spacious apartment on Riverside Drive. (Walt Spangler’s revolving set lets us see it in all its sprawl.) Mourning the recent death of his wife, he spends his time parked in her old wheelchair, moping and toping around the place—"a rent-controlled Palace ruled by a grieving despot King," per the stage directions—attended by shady younger courtiers: his resentful son, Junior (Common), who has been in and out of prison and now traffics stolen goods; Junior’s airhead girlfriend, Lu

Theater review by Adam Feldman  Merrily We Roll Along is the femme fatale of Stephen Sondheim musicals, beautiful and troubled; people keep thinking they can fix it, rescue it, save it from itself and make it their own. In the decades since its disastrous 1981 premiere on Broadway, where it lasted just two weeks, the show has been revised and revived many times (including by the York in 1994, Encores! in 2012 and Fiasco in 2019). The challenges of Merrily are built into its core in a way that no production can fully overcome. But director Maria Friedman’s revival at New York Theatre Workshop does a superb job—the best I’ve ever seen—of overlooking them, the way one might forgive the foibles of an old friend.   As a showbiz-steeped investigation of the disillusionment that may accompany adulthood, Merrily is a companion piece to Sondheim’s Follies, with which it shares a key line: “Never look back,” an imperative this show pointedly ignores. Adapted by George Furth from a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the musical is structured in reverse. We first meet Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff) in 1976, when he is a former composer now leading a hollow life as a producer of Hollywood schlock; successive scenes move backward through the twisting paths on which he has lost both his ideals and his erstwhile best pals, playwright Charley (Daniel Radcliffe) and writer Mary (Lindsay Mendez). The final scene—chronologically, the first—finds them together on a rooftop in 1957, as ye

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  Some Like It Hot is a well-aimed throwback: a jubilant, oldfangled, crowd-pleasing musical comedy. Like many recent Broadway tuners, it is adapted from a well-loved movie—in this case, Billy Wilder’s classic 1959 sex-and-sax farce about a pair of Prohibition-era musicians, on the run from the mob, who pose as women in an all-girl traveling band. The musical version reheats this story with abundant production values and canny attention to modern sensibilities. If it wobbles a little in its borrowed heels at first, it finishes in the confident stride of a hit.  Directed and choreographed with zest by Casey Nicholaw, Some Like It Hot taps into a classic vein of musical theater, and I do mean taps: This show doesn’t stint on the clickety-clack of shoe against stage. Its central characters, best friends Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), are not just instrumentalists but also perform a side act as the Tip Tap Twins. (Joe is white and Jerry is Black but, as they sing, ”We’re brothers under the skin.”) After witnessing a gangland rubout in Chicago, they are forced to race off in drag; under the noms de plumage Josephine and Daphne, they soon wrangle their way into a jazz ensemble led by Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams) and fronted by a hard-knocked singer named Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks).  As Joe and Jerry bond with Sugar, and recruit her into the expanded Tip Tap Trio, romantic complications ensue. Josephine, as Joe, starts fall

Broadway review by Adam Feldman  In Adrienne Kennedy’s Ohio State Murders, an established Black writer named Suzanne Alexander—the partially autobiographical central figure in several plays that Kennedy wrote in the 1990s—returns to the Columbus college she attended decades earlier to speak about her experiences there. As she delivers her address, or maybe practices it to herself, flashbacks to the late 1940s and early 1950s flesh out her story. As the title promises, it’s a harrowing one. In the play’s original 1992 production and its New York premiere in 2007, two actors of different ages divided the role of Suzanne. In its bracing Broadway debut—which also marks the Broadway debut of Kennedy, now 91—both the old and young versions are played by Audra McDonald, who toggles between the two with the masterful emotional control and variety we have come to expect from her. Ohio State Murders is nearly a 70-minute monologue, written in the cadences of a literary personal essay. Most of the other characters who appear onstage speak little or not at all; the exception is a young English professor named Robert Hampshire (played with foggy glassiness by Bryce Pinkham), who takes a shine to the young Suzanne’s brightness after reading her response to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. ​​Ohio State Murders | Photograph: Courtesy Richard Termine Kennedy’s choice of novel is significant. “Inherent in almost all Hardy’s characters are those natural instincts which become destruct

After a record-smashing 35 years on Broadway, The Phantom of the Opera will give up the ghost for good on April 16. Until now, tickets to its final performance have only been available by invitation. But this week, the production is offering a chance to the show's many Phans to see the final curtain—and the final chandelier—come down.  If you want to attend this historic performance, you'll have to act fast. From today through noon on Friday, March 31, fans of the show can enter a digital lottery to buy seats for the Phantom finale. A lucky few winners will get a chance to buy one or two tickets each in the rear mezzanine of the Majestic Theatre at 5pm on April 16.  To enter the lottery, visit Telecharge's lottery and rush tickets page this week. If you’ve never used the page before, you’ll need to register with a social media account. Then scroll down to the bottom for the box that says “The Phantom of the Opera Final Performance.” You only need to click it to enter the lottery, but you’ll have to stay alert next week: Four rounds of winners will be chosen each day from April 3 through April 6, and winners must buy their tickets within 24 hours of the drawing. The seats cost $99 apiece, including fees. Phantom, of course, is composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's greatest hit of them all: a timeless tale of candlelit romance between a pretty young singer and the masked serial killer who has been stalking her from his subterranean lair beneath a 19th-century Parisian opera house. The

“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Wednesday so you’re hearing from us each week. As you may have heard, Lea Michele is currently starring in Funny Girl on Broadway. A lot of people have, in fact, heard about this. The drama surrounding Funny Girl this year escaped the tightly knit circles to which replacement-casting-in-musicals debates are usually confined. It became that rare modern phenomenon: a Broadway news story that regular people cared about.  In case you somehow missed it, the short version is this. Funny Girl, a biomusical about Ziegfeld Follies comedian Fanny Brice, had never been revived on Broadway since its original 1964 production, which helped propel Barbra Streisand to megastardom. For years, people floated the idea of a production headlined by Glee star Lea Michele—which seemed an obvious fit, since she had already performed many of the show’s songs on Glee and elsewhere. But when Funny Girl did return to Broadway last March, it did not star Lea Michele. Instead, Fanny was played by Beanie Feldstein, the comedically gifted young star of the movies Lady Bird and Booksmart. Alas: Feldstein turned out to be a poor match for her demanding role. The reviews were harsh (including mine), and the production was nearly shut out of the Tony Award nominations; a final curtain seemed imminent. That’s when things g

“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Wednesday so you’re hearing from us each week. As a theater critic, I try not to have expectations when I go into a show that I’ll be reviewing. That's my official position, at least, and to some degree it's true: I do try. Expectations can mess with your judgment. Perfectly good shows are disappointing if they aren’t as great as you hoped they would be, and mediocre ones can benefit from seeming like total disasters in advance.  But critics are human beings—no matter what you may have heard!—and I can’t pretend there aren’t a few upcoming Broadway shows that, for one reason or other, I’m especially eager to see. When the time comes to review them, we’ll all find out if my enthusiasm was misplaced. But meanwhile, it seems fair to tell you which, of all the Broadway productions opening this spring, hold special promise to me this spring.  Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (starts February 26) Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s slash-and-burn horror tale is one of my favorite musicals of all time. Knowing a show too well can make it hard to appreciate new versions, but at this point, I’ve seen so many Sweeneys that I’m no longer protective of the original in my head. I love that this revival will include a large orchestra and chorus to do justice to Sondheim’s masterpiece of a

Yes, awards shows are about honoring excellence and saluting the achievements of top artists in their fields and all the rest of that nice-sounding stuff. But for many fans of the genre, the most memorable award-show moments come when the stars step up to accept their accolades—especially when they veer from the usual dull decorum. The series You Like Me: An Evening of Classic Acceptance Speeches spins these memories into comic gold by inviting some of the city's funniest downtown performers to re-create them live onstage. The show will return to Joe's Pub at the Public Theater this month for one night only, and Time Out has exclusively learned who will be on the lineup for this sometimes savage, always hilarious send-up of Tinseltown glitter. You Like Me is the bratty brainchild of entertainment journalist and Meryl Streep biographer Michael Schulman (The New Yorker) and Smash blogger turned Hollywood show-runner Rachel Shukert (The Baby-Sitters Club). The February 21 performance—the series's first in several years—celebrates the publication of Schulman's latest book: the dishy backstage chronicle Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears.  Among the highlights: alt-comedian and Los Espookys co-creator Julio Torres will take on Angelina Jolie's 2000 Oscar speech for Girl, Interrupted, in which the gothed-out star seemed discomfitingly intimate with her brother; Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) will bite into Fiona Apple's badass "T

More than 25 years after its release, the Disney animated musical Hercules is flexing its muscle once again. Although the Greek-myth movie was only a modest success in 1997, it has built up reserves of affection since. When the Public Theater presented a free stage adaptation of it in 2019, as an addendum to its Shakespeare in the Park season, Hercules showed unexpected strength: Hundreds of thousands of people competed via lottery for the few seats available. Inspired by that response, Disney Theatrical Productions has now committed itself to developing a full-scale stage-musical version of the story, with a Broadway run very possibly in view. This new Hercules will premiere in a monthlong run at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse—within easy traveling distance from New York City—from February 18 through March 19, 2023. The Paper Mill version will feature new songs by Alan Menken and David Zippel alongside the ones they wrote for the film, including “Go the Distance” and “Zero to Hero.” Although it is being directed by the Lear deBessonet (Into the Woods), who also staged the 2019 version, this will be a very different show from the one in Central Park. The 2019 Hercules, with a book by Kristoffer Diaz, was tailored to the Public's civic-minded Public Works wing, which folds hundreds of locals into the cast alongside a core of professional actors. The Paper Mill one has a new script by Robert Horn, who won a Tony for Tootsie, and Kwame Kwei-Armah, the artistic director of Lon

New York City's beloved institution Shakespeare in the Park will return this summer with a new production of Hamlet, the Public Theater announced today. The series has offered free outdoor stagings of Shakespeare plays at Central Park's open-air Delacorte Theater since 1962.  Usually, Shakespeare in the Park presents two productions each summer. Its 61th season contains only one, but it's a doozy: Shakespeare's talky tragedy of revenge deferred, where a ghost and a prince meet and everyone ends in mincemeat. Ato Blankson-Wood (Slave Play) will play the Melancholy Dane in a modern-dress staging directed by Kenny Leon, whose long and distinguished résumé includes Shakespeare in the Park's terrific 2019 version of Much Ado About Nothing. The production is scheduled to run for nine weeks, from June 8 through August 6, with an official press opening on June 28.  “Hamlet is arguably the greatest play in the Western canon, and I am thrilled that Kenny Leon will be helming this summer's production," says the Public's Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis. "Kenny has an expert way of making Shakespeare come alive in a contemporary American context, illuminating these great works while also reimagining them for our times and our country.”   “A 500-year-old play exploring the need for a strong foundation of family, with music and words, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has much to say about humanity and the importance of our connectedness to each other," says Leon. "We set this production in 2021, filled

Here Lies Love is rising again. The dance-club musical, which premiered at the Public Theater back in 2013, explores the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the former Filipino first lady, serial plunderer and notorious footwear enthusiast (who is still alive and kicking at 93). A kind of disco Evita, the sung-through show was a major event in its initial run. And this June, more than a decade later, it will return to New York City in a production that promises to test the boundaries of musical theater on Broadway.  Conceived by David Byrne—the brain-expanding songwriter, musical magpie and erstwhile Talking Head—Here Lies Love features a groovy, rhythm-heavy score by Byrne and big beat pioneer Fatboy Slim. But that's just one of the things that will set this show apart from the usual Broadway fare. In a bold move, director Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!) and choreographer Annie-B Parson aim to re-create the immersive nature of their original staging at the Public, placing much of the audience in the middle of the action.  That would be a challenge even if the show were at Circle in the Square, Broadway's only non-proscenium house. Instead, Here Lies Love will be at the massive Broadway Theatre, which will need to be extensively reconfigured to accommodate the concept. "Here Lies Love’s staging at the Broadway Theatre will transform the venue’s traditional proscenium floor space into a dance club environment, where audiences will stand and move with the actors," the production's pre

The early months of every year are tough on the box offices of even the best Broadway shows. Years ago, to deal with this challenge, the theater industry came up with Broadway Week, a twice-annual half-price sale for tickets to nearly every Broadway production. The name may be a little confusing: The first 2023 edition of Broadway Week actually lasts for four weeks, from January 17 through February 12—and the twofer tickets go on sale today.  This year's list of participating shows is the most comprehensive yet; it includes every Broadway production except The Phantom of the Opera, which is currently set to close in April after 35 years on the Great White Way. If you act fast, you might even be able to snag seats for such perpetual hot tickets as Hamilton, Six and Funny Girl. Go to the Broadway Week website to peruse the list of participating shows and grab the ones you want most.   RECOMMENDED: A full guide to Broadway Week in NYC Bear in mind that the tickets sold through Broadway Week tend to be ones that producers are most eager to sell: in balconies, mezzanines and side areas. But this year, the Broadway Week program offers a new option: If you want to splurge on some of the best seats in the house, you can "upgrade" your ticket order to pay $125 for tickets that would otherwise often cost a good deal more. Here is a full list of all 22 shows that are participating in Broadway Week this month: Aladdin& JulietA Beautiful NoiseBetween Riverside and CrazyThe Book of MormonC

New York theater, both on Broadway and Off, yielded a bumper crop in its first full year since the fallow time of the pandemic shutdown. Creating this top-ten list gave me the chance to look back at the 130 shows I saw this year. Some of the best productions were welcome returns from past seasons (A Strange Loop and Kimberly Akimbo, for instance, were top-tenners in 2019 and 2021), but I was happily surprised at how many really good options there were to choose from—even if that made the selection process tougher.  Here are my choices for the best new theater of 2022. RECOMMENDED: The best Broadway shows right now 1. Downstate (Playwrights Horizons, through January 7)Bruce Norris's provocative, needle-sharp look at a home for sex offenders uses the tools of theater—imagination, nuance, empathy, irony—to make space for a conversation that seems hardly possible anywhere else. 2. Oratorio for Living Things (Ars Nova, closed May 15)Immaculate in its conception and execution, Heather Christian's unique immersive musical creation blended the cosmic and the quotidian, the scientific and the holy, and left you suspended in awe of its mysteries. Photograph: Courtesy Ben AronsOratorio for Living Things 3. Topdog/Underdog (John Golden Theatre, through January 15)The superb Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II give the full three-card monte as dueling brothers and small-time crooks in this deeply absorbing revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2001 two-hander. 4. English (Atlantic Theatre

The long-running Off Broadway percussion show Stomp, which has entertained and mildly deafened audiences at the East Village's Orpheum Theatre since 1994, will come to an end early next year. Producers announced today that the New York production will go out with a final bang on January 8, 2023.  After debuting in Edinburgh in 1991, Stomp moved to London and New York in 1994. A subsequent West End production closed in 2018, after 15 years, but New York's Off Broadway edition has clanged along merrily for nearly three decades. When it closes, it will have played a total of 13 previews and 11,472 regular performances. (Touring versions of the show in Europe and North America will continue, and alumnae of the show can be seen this month at the Joyce Theatre alongside tap dance master Michelle Dorrance.) Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, Stomp combines sound and dance to often comedic effect through the deployment of unusual noisemakers in a punky junkyard spectacle. As the show's publicity puts it: "Synchronized stiff-bristle brooms become a sweeping orchestra, eight Zippo lighters flip open and closed to create a fiery fugue; wooden poles thump and clack in a rhythmic explosion. Stomp uses everything but conventional percussion instruments—dustbins, shopping carts, radiator hoses, boots, hub caps—to fill the stage with a compelling and unique act that is often imitated but never duplicated." Combined with the closing or impending closing of the long-

In theater, history has always been important. Live performance leaves little behind it but memory and lore. So Broadway, in a sense, is always a ghost town; at night, when theaters are dark, electric bulbs set on stands—known as ghost lights—are placed center stage to placate the spirits that are said to haunt its houses. These lights are the conceptual flip side of the ones more often associated with Broadway: The flashing lights of theater marquees, which shine out the message of the new and the now. The ambitious Museum of Broadway, which opened this week, celebrates both kinds of light. Fittingly, it is situated right between Broadway’s oldest venue, the Lyceum Theatre, and one of the district’s newest hotels, the Hyatt Centric Times Square. Its three floors of displays, which take about 90 minutes to navigate, include beautiful costumes, illuminating documents and photographs, and tasty bursts of detail; other parts of it seem aimed at Broadway newcomers and tourists, including tributes to well-known shows and immersive spaces that call out for selfies. (It also includes a space for temporary exhibits, where sketches from decades of work by the peerless Broadway illustrator Al Hirshfeld are currently on view.) If you’re a theater fan, it’s a must-attend: You will love some of it, get annoyed by some of it and argue about some of it with your friends—and that, after all, is a Broadway tradition, too. Here are five things to do when you visit the Broadway Museum. 1. Marve

“Let Me Tell You” is a series of columns from our expert editors about NYC living, including the best things to do, where to eat and drink, and what to see at the theater. They publish each Wednesday so you’re hearing from us each week. When people find out I'm a theater critic, there is one question they ask more than any other: "What should I see?" As Broadway revs up for its fall season, that question is hard to answer this year—not because there's not enough to recommend, but because the next few months are so firmly packed with shows I'm truly excited to see.  For various reasons, I try not to form any judgments in advance about shows I'll be reviewing. Low expectations can make a bad show seem better, and too-high ones can make even a good show feel like a disappointment, which isn't fair to anyone involved. That said, critics are—despite what anyone might tell you—human beings, and it's hard to completely avoid a sneaking suspicion one way or another. Last year, for example, it was hard not to smell a turkey cooking in Diana's kitchen, even before the Netflix version of it dropped with a thud. And Broadway's 2021 comeback fall season featured a significant number of question-mark shows: relatively unknown and untested works. Some of those productions turned out to be great, others did not, but none of them caught much fire with audiences. RECOMMENDED: A complete list of upcoming Broadway shows this fall This fall, Broadway is playing it safer. The slate of plays, in p