Review: The Columnist at the Manhattan Theatre Club

The Columnist

  "Power...influence...changing the course of history.  It's all in a day's work." This is a line stated by the main character of THE COLUMNIST.  I love when theater merges history and fiction to tell a story that I never heard before about a fascinating life. THE COLUMNIST, playing at the Manhattan Theatre Club is one such play.  It's about a real journalist named Joseph Alsop who upon a visit to Moscow in 1957 picked up a young man at a party and brought him back to his hotel.  This is the first scene in the play.  When you're … [Read more...]

The Grand Manner at Lincoln Center Theater

REV-Grand-Manner-2c

The Grand Manner, currently playing at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, is playwright A.R. Gurney's flashback on his real-life meeting with theater's legendary actor Katherine Cornell and her husband & director/producer, Guthrie McClintic. According to Playbill, Cornell was one of the first theater greats, up in the ranks with Helen Hayes, the Lunts and Ethel Merman from the early 1920s through the mid 1950s.   Together with her husband, she established her own producing organization, taking her productions of Shaw, Shakespeare and … [Read more...]