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Returning to Broadway, Harry Connick Jr. chooses his muse wisely and well, taking the stage in an attractively modern, multi-media setting to celebrate that most sophisticated of the American songbook’s founders, Cole Porter. At its frequent best, Harry Connick Jr.: A Celebration of Cole Porter, opening tonight at the…

In Jagged Little Pill, a record album gets its own jukebox musical, though there’s none of the Wikipedia-style rat-a-tat biographical highlights (airbrushed or otherwise) that accompanied Donna Summer, The Temptations and all the other post-Jersey Boys superstars on their trips to the stage. With an earnest, ambitious…

Early on in tonight's fifth Democratic debate, Senator Bernie Sanders proclaimed that for all the incumbent's apparent sins, "we cannot simply be consumed by Donald Trump, because if we are we're going to lose the election." The sage from Vermont and his nine fellow contenders onstage in Atlanta may have wanted to…

Everything and the Game of Thrones sink is what HBO Max aims to be and certainly what the upcoming AT&T-owned streamer unsuccessfully poured into its unwieldy and overloaded presentation today. Or put another way, how many times can a revolving cast of executives mention or reference the Emmy winning blockbuster…

One of rock’s great questions, a rung or two below Are You Experienced? and maybe Which One’s Pink? but still right up there, has got to be Why A Big Suit? David Byrne asked himself that in an early-MTV-era promo for Jonathan Demme’s brilliant Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, posing a query about an image…

Poor Robert Redford. Except for an out of focus poster in a Tulsa school room, the Oscar winner is never seen on-screen in HBO's Watchmen. However, Redford's multi-term Presidential shadow is an ominous specter in a sometimes shambolic and yet spectacular show full of shadows, good intentions gone wrong, mad…

Broadway doesn’t really do thrillers anymore. Unless we expand the definition to encompass the wailing banshees of The Ferryman or the occasional Martin McDonough blood drench, the stage has mostly ceded the genre to Hollywood. Yet that scarcity goes only so far in explaining the odd power of Adam Rapp’s The Sound Insi…

Little Shop of Horrors, the once and current Off Broadway marvel, announced in 1982 the arrival of two songwriters – Howard Ashman & Alan Menken – who’d soon expand musical theater boundaries to swallow Hollywood like so much plant food. The musical comes home again (you can’t isn’t in its vocabulary) with Michael…

If Percy Jackson’s bright and lively Broadway adventure tosses a bit of deja vu your way, I’d guess the creeping sense of vague recall has little to do with that gang of Greek gods down the block belting out tunes from Hadestown, and even less to do with Percy’s plodding 2010 film. I’d smell a Squip. Sharing some of…

Imagine you’re invited to some netherworld, Southern Gothic-themed cocktail party peopled with Tennessee Williams heroines. There’s Amanda Wingfield and Blanche DuBois competing for pity with wilted stories of glory days, Maggie the Cat in her slip, stalking waiters, and lusty Maxine walking a leashed iguana and a…

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which debuted today on Netflix. So, tread lightly.  As the title makes clear, Breaking Bad is back today on Netflix and in select theaters with El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie – and that's not a great thing. Unlike the brilliance that was…

Dick Wheeler, the lead character – he’s hardly a “hero” – in Tracy Letts’ Linda Vista, a very funny new play about a very sad, not very likable man, is the type of determined, opinionated loser who has reached middle age with both a decided pride and worn-down boredom with his own contrariness, his mental library of…