Around Broadway

There’s a new murder mystery in town and it comes with musical comedy included. Murder for Two may be a two-man show, but the characters onstage appear in numbers far greater than that of the performers. Jeff Blumenkrantz and Brett Ryback not only play all the characters, but they are also the musicians, each taking turns at the piano to accompany the other, and even sharing the keyboard on occasion.

Reality television is lampooned a lot  — and loved a little bit, too — in a new musical now running at Second Stage Theatre. Written by the playwright Itamar Moses and the composer and lyricist Gaby Alter, Nobody Loves You follows a philosophy student’s televised pursuit of his girlfriend on a reality show that looks a lot like "The Bachelor." Other contestants, a telegenically smarmy host, and even a Twitter-addicted fan, all make appearances.

Did you know that Barbra Streisand has a shopping mall in the basement of her barn? (You did know she had a barn, didn’t you?) Playwright Jonathan Tolin has taken that surprising thread of superstar trivia and woven it into the one-man show Buyer & Cellar at the Barrow Street Theater.

A Chinese fable told in music and visual spectacle is one of the signature offerings of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival. Monkey: Journey to the West is a collaboration of director Chen Shi-Zeng and musician Damon Albarn, the songwriter and singer of the British band Blur. His collaborator on the virtual band Gorillaz, Jamie Hewlett, designed the costumes and the animation.

Charles Isherwood, theater critic at The New York Times, just got back from a week in London and he spent substantial amounts of it going to the theater.

The task of getting your child into the best possible preschool is a gauntlet run by a particular stratum of Manhattan parent. Daniel Pearle’s new play A Kid Like Jake, examines that famously difficult process with a dramatic twist or two. Directed by Evan Cabnet and starring Carla Gugino and Peter Grosz as Jake’s parents (the child is unseen in the play), A Kid Like Jake closes the season at Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 program, which is dedicated to developing both new artists and new audiences for New York theater. 

You know summertime in New York has arrived when the Delacorte Theater unwraps itself for Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater presents two free Shakespeare works this season: The Comedy of Errors and later in the season, Love’s Labors Lost.

The American Theatre Wing gave out its Tony Awards this past Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall and the big winner of the night was Best Musical Kinky Boots, which also brought home statuettes for Billy Porter as Best Performer by a Leading Actor in a Musical and Cyndi Lauper for Best Original Score. 

Imagine turning Tolstoy’s famously epic novel "War and Peace" into a musical. Actually, hold it. Imagine turning 100 or so pages of "War and Peace" into a musical. That's a more manageable chunk of the novel, for sure, and there are still plenty of relationships and nearly inscrutable Russian names to sort out.

She’s famous as a movie star, a recording artist and a concert performer, but you may not be familiar with Bette Midler as Broadway actress. Well, it has been a while.