Richard Christiansen

When it opened in 1980, "42nd Street" set a top ticket price of $30 for a Broadway musical -- and it was worth every penny. Fitted out with lavish scenery,...

In an admirable initiative of devoting its entire three-play season to the works of American dramatist Romulus Linney, the small, aspiring Eclipse Theatre Company has saved the best for last....

David Mamet has always been a writer confident of his talent, and in 1975, when he had finished the script of "American Buffalo," he boldly predicted to his director, Gregory...

THEATER `2' A provocative character study by Romulus Linney of the Nazis' No. 2 man, Hermann Goering, during his 1945-46 trial for war crimes in Nuremberg, Germany, galvanized by Steven...

For weeks after I first saw "The Night of the Hunter," I was haunted by the sound of Robert Mitchum's voice. Dressed all in black and portraying a serial killer...

George Bernard Shaw called his "Widowers' Houses" an "unpleasant play," but as performed in a staged reading by the actors of ShawChicago, it is anything but. The play is 99...

In November 1998, a month after the torture and beating death of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay student, in Laramie, Wyo., Moises Kaufman, director of the Tectonic Theater Project, posed...

Some years ago, when the writer Martin Gottfried was finishing up work on his beautifully produced history of "Broadway Musicals," he received a gift from Irving Berlin. The composer, then...

"The Visit," a musical with an A-list of talent behind it, closed its premiere engagement at Goodman Theatre Saturday night, an event that naturally prompts the question: Where does it...

Few music theater adaptations have been so inventive and yet so faithful to their source material as "My Fair Lady." For living proof, take a look at George Bernard Shaw's...