Add the late Tallulah Bankhead to the list of middle-aged women throwing themselves into the national political fray this year. Though the celebrated actress — as currently portrayed in the American premiere of Tallulah by movie star Kathleen Turner — has even less bona fide political experience than either Liddy…

“First of all, when you’ve got a gun,” Stephen Sondheim points out in his musical Assassins, “everybody pays attention.” That’s for sure, as audience members experiencing the third-act explosion in a classic drama such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters can attest. But what happens when you have two guns? What if…

She’s the Medea of all stage mothers, the most frightening diva of the American musical theater. That would be Mama Rose, of course, the stardom-fixated monster at the center of Gypsy. Since 1959 audiences have clung to her poisonous apron strings, happily singing along. Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, and Tyne…

When damsels with golden ring curls find themselves tied to railroad trestles by mustachioed villains — or, in the case of Little Mary Sunshine, strapped to a tree by a vicious Indian — most audience members know that the lady in peril will be rescued momentarily, either by the entire…

In the second half of Steve Dietz’s new play, Rocket Man, time moves backward in an enchanting fashion. The elderly are the newest people on Earth. Teenagers, veterans by comparison, choose the parents who will care for them as they grow younger and more dependent. And on one character’s sweet-16…

Gavin MacLeod, erstwhile captain of the Love Boat, sails blithely through Moon Over Buffalo with an erect rubber nose. He’s playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Or rather he’s playing an actor playing Cyrano in Ken Ludwig’s 1995 Broadway hit Moon Over Buffalo, a comedy about a troupe of washed-up actors in…

Of all the repertory programs ever devised, the double bill playing this month at the New Theatre has got to be one of the most delightfully odd. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is bound to pop up somewhere this time of year, of course, but would you expect to find…

Given the vroom-vroom of their current go-round on stage, it’s possible that, even with the theatrical equivalent of a road map, you might not be able to keep track of Kander and Ebb these days. Critically acclaimed revivals of the songwriting team’s biggest hits, Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), are…

When a play’s title is The Adjustment, chances are the playwright will be suggesting a monumental shift in attitude or perspective on the part of one or more characters. In Michael T. Folie’s new work, recently opened at the Florida Stage, tiny adjustments also occur. The play is set in…

If you had a conventional grammar school education and watch a little Nick at Nite, chances are you don’t think of Sebastian Cabot as the discoverer of the New World. According to The Complete History of America (abridged), however, it was this Englishman — and not the Italian explorer with…

From the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Hollywood’s The Fly, classic American ghost stories indulge our fascination with the decay of the body. They’re overrun with maggoty cadavers, telltale hearts, and monsters that stalk us through dark alleys, graphic reflections of our fear of inexorable death. European tales, on…

Nobody knows if Scott Joplin ever knew Irving Berlin. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Mark Saltzman’s well-meaning musical, however, the two composers not only meet cute (Joplin, disguised as a composer’s agent, appears in the office where Berlin works as a sheet-music publisher), they reminisce, play tunes, and dip…

Love may indeed be a fragile thing, but its clumsy male and female protagonists can’t help “endlessly crashing into each other like two bumper cars.” That’s the observation of one character in the musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, an affable if not particularly insightful commentary on…

Nobody who’s seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City’s Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing new production at the Hollywood Playhouse. (That’s a lot of us, given the 15,000 or so performances the show has racked up since it opened on May…

In 1964, when I was five years old, my father told me that Patty Duke didn’t have a twin. Naturally I recognized this information for what it was — a bald-faced lie. Every week on The Patty Duke Show anyone could see there were two teenage girls, not one actress…

Twelve years ago Lily Tomlin opened her mouth and launched a thousand monologues. The 1986 Broadway success of The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe spawned a generation of self-styled storytellers, from the cutthroat visionary portraits of Eric Bogosian and the neurotic ramblings of Spalding Gray to…

Music, as a theater insider once put it, is the food of love. Opera, on the other hand, is a series of naughty sexual escapades, repeatedly slammed doors, and horny bellhops. At least, those are the elements that drive Lend Me a Tenor, Ken Ludwig’s 1989 Tony Award-winning farce about…

Of all the things your mother specifically told you not to do — talk with your mouth full, go out with married men — chances are she didn’t mention the following: Running off into the snow in your wedding dress. But if you did happen to desert your fiance at…

Of all the people you might encounter in a solo drama, John Hinckley is not likely to be anyone’s first choice. Chances are the would-be Reagan assassin won’t be serving tea in the cozy manner of Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, or experiencing high-volume sexual liberation along the…

Creating theater frequently involves assembling miracles in small spaces — extremely small spaces, if you happen to be the Florida Playwrights’ Theater (FPT), which is mounting its Fifth Annual Shakespeare Festival in its postage-stamp Hollywood storefront venue. Getting Hamlet and The Tempest — Shakespeare’s most popular play and his most…

There’s a moose in the guest bedroom in Michael McKeever’s new comedy, 37 Postcards. The animal never makes an appearance on stage (a taxidermist crossed its path long before the play begins), but it does take part in the events that transpire when Avery Sutton, a young man newly returned…