An 88-year-old producer complaining about Broadway ticket prices was the most popular post by far on this blog in 2022 — and that in an odd way speaks to the enthusiasm of New York Theater readers this year for all things Broadway, as evidenced by the rest of the 10 posts from 2022 that attracted the most traffic, most of which are Broadway reviews
Top 10 Posts from 2022
Broadway Producer Emanuel Azenberg: “We’ve chased away an audience.”
Funny Girl Review. Beanie Feldstein in the Streisand role of Fanny Brice
Broadway 2022-2023 Season Guide
Sara Porkalob vs 1776: Is it ok to criticize the show you’re in?
The Music Man Review. Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster and an American con
Into the Woods Broadway Review: 3 reasons to stay home, 18 to attend.
Macbeth Review: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in Sam Gold’s Version
Leopoldstadt Review. Tom Stoppard on the Jews of Vienna
What The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Gets Right About Broadway in Season 4
American Buffalo Broadway Review
5 Best-Read Posts in 2022 from Past Years
Some of the articles that attracted the most traffic in 2022 were posted in previous years. The five most popular:
Hamilton on Broadway 2021. A cast of newcomers and returning favorites. (from 2021)
The 50 Best Plays of The Past 100 Years, (from 2013)
West Side Story: 7 changes in 2021 Steven Spielberg/Tony Kushner movie musical from beloved 1961 version (from 2021)
Romeo and Juliet Off-Broadway Review: Elizabeth Olsen As Juliet At CSC (from 2013)
What is immersive theater? The six elements that define it at its best (from 2019)
10 Good Reads
Most of my posts are theater reviews. But I also cover theater news (I write a weekly summary) and write essays, conduct interviews, and do reported pieces about issues confronting the theater — a kind of running tab on what’s happening. In another post this week, I listed 10 theater stories people were talking about in 2022. Here are 10 posts throughout the year that I consider interesting reads, presented chronologically:
Reynaldo Piniella: Thoughts of a Sudden Broadway Actor on a Year of Triumph and Trauma
I started the year interviewing two consummate theater artists whom I each had met a long time ago, one about the strange year he’d just had, the other about the busy year he was about to have.
Reynaldo Piniella landed in the middle of several major theater stories all at the same time — he made his Broadway debut cast in two of the unprecedented six plays written by African-American playwrights with largely African-American casts to open on Broadway in a newly reopened Broadway. But the ongoing pandemic provided the first opportunity, and took away the second. He was an understudy for “Trouble in Mind” who performed the role after principal cast members tested positive for COVID-19. But then he was cast as a replacement in “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” but never got to perform in it, because it was one of four Broadway shows abruptly shuttered because of the surge of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.
Kevin R. Free appointed artistic director of a SECOND theater. “I’m never not busy”
Broadway Opening Night. What It Means. How It’s Changed. 7 Facts to Clear Up The Confusion and Crystallize the Outrage.
The excuse for this article was the kerfuffle over the opening night of “The Music Man,” but it was a long time coming. Opening night doesn’t mean what it used to
Ukrainian Playwrights Step Up, and the Theater World Attends
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine outrage many throughout the world. “I think there is a rising sense in the artistic community that we need to respond” the Drama League’s artistic director Gabriel Stelian-Shanks told me in March, before the staged reading of two new plays by Ukrainian playwrights, part of an effort by more than fifty theaters in 15 countries to raise funds for Ukraine, and bring attention to Ukrainian theater, which is both flourishing and under attack.
American Connected Theater Awards for Pandemic Year 2
The winners of the second year of ACT A, the American Connected Theater Awards, for theatrical storytelling created and presented online during the year between March 2021 and March 2022. Much has happened since the inaugural awarding 2021 — most notably, of course, that in-person theater returned starting in the last few months of 2021. That makes some of the admirable digital theater this second time around a reflection of an ongoing commitment to redefining what theater can be
Gregg Mozgala Q and A.
Gregg Mozgala made his Broadway debut this year in “Cost of Living”, three decades after the theater first “made me feel like a full human being,”— not always the way somebody is allowed to feel who is born with a disability. I interviewed him on the occasion of the first-ever Forward Festival for the Arts, featuring Deaf and disabled artists.
Alexandria Wailes on Deaf Dancing
Alexandria Wailes performed as the Lady in Purple in the Broadway revival of “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”’ the fifth gig on Broadway for the professional dancer, actor, director, choreographer, director of artistic sign language (DASL) — this last job she also did for the Oscar-winning movie “CODA.”
Watch Little Amal Arrive in New York City
Little Amal, a ten-year-old Syrian refugee and a 12-foot-tall puppet, after traveling 6,000 miles since July 2021, spent 17 days in New York City, performing in 55 events, all free and outdoors. I watched her first day in Queens (then later in Times Square), photographing and videotaping, and was smitten.
Museum of Broadway: 10 things I learned, 11 rooms I liked
“The most elaborate room is without question the one dedicated to “West Side Story,” designed by Anna Louizos, which features a jukebox, a neon drug store sign, a dart board, and an old-fashioned, full stocked drug store countertop, as well as an imitation rooftop (complete with a rooftop view of the San Juan Hill neighborhood) and a video of two performers (Robbie Fairchild and Tanairi Sade Vasquez) dancing in shadow profile against a startling red background.”
Erik Jensen Q and A
Erik Jensen made his Broadway debut as the art dealer that brought Warhol and Basquiat together, in “The Collaboration,” in the same year that he suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm that almost killed him. The two are not unrelated, as he explained in my interview with him. I was most interested in talking to him because of his decades-long career as the creator with his wife Jessica Blank of such acclaimed, influential documentary theater as “The Exonerated”
Ending On A Personal Note
On Her 101st Birthday, My Mother Visits the Whitney Biennial
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