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a Broadway season dominated by a ton of so-so new plays about ripped-from-the-headlines issues, one of the best has already reached retirement age.“Trouble in Mind,” which opened Thursday night at the American Airlines Theatre, was written way back in 1955 by Alice Childress, but never got to Broadway until now. There were plans for it to go to Midtown 66 years ago, however the backstage satire about a cast rehearsing a poorly written black drama was considered too edgy for white audiences at

an internationally ridiculed Netflix special, and making it through three weeks of boozy, expletive-filled previews at the Longacre Theatre, “Diana: The Musical” finally opened Wednesday night on Broadway.And so, royal subjects, this will be my final dispatch on the show, unless of course, fellow Netflix employee Meghan Markle comes to see it.

thought as much 17 years ago, when he wrote that “the result seems unnecessarily pretentious and emotionally chilly” and that the music was “drearily pastiche.” Turns out “Caroline” hasn’t changed that much.And then there are the talking appliances. In the basement in which single mom Caroline does the laundry for a Jewish family, the washing machine (Arica Jackson), dryer (Kevin S.

I found Ben Power’s play pretty dull at the UK’s National Theatre in 2018, and was bored out of my mind for most of its flight-to-the-Bahamas runtime. But back then it was performed in a cavernous space that swallowed it whole. Deadly.

A happy surprise of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which opened Wednesday night on Broadway, is that it’s much more entertaining than its portentous and literary-sounding title would suggest. What you expect to resemble a book from a college syllabus actually gets belly laughs and a tear or two.

all theaters were shut down for what turned into an 18-month eternity. Now “Six” is back and vivacious as ever.That exuberance comes out of left field, considering the first words we hear are “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,” the old history-class trick for remembering the English wives’ fates.

were shut down in March 2020. For those of us who’ve missed Broadway, it feels incredible to be back — even after having to present a vaccination card, photo ID and ticket before walking through a metal detector. 85 minutes, no intermission.

Nobody wants to hear about the pandemic at the theater, right? They’ve come to escape and forget about the news for a few hours. Or, I thought so anyway, until an inspired moment during Shakespeare in the Park’s al fresco “Merry Wives.”“It’s been a hard year,” Johnny Falstaff, played by Jacob Ming-Trent, says in a hilarious speech to the audience.

mocked Zoom meetings in episodes that were filmed from the cast’s apartments. Richard Nelson’s play “What Do We Need To Talk About?” depicted a WASP family’s Zoom call.

Ben Brantley, the influential New York Times theater critic, will leave the job next month. “This pandemic pause in the great, energizing party that is the theater seemed to me like a good moment to slip out the door,” Brantley said in a statement.News of Brantley’s departure was announced on Twitter by the newspaper’s theater reporter, Michael Paulson.Brantley joined the Times as its second-string theater critic in 1993, taking the chief critic job three years later.

coronavirus pandemic.Put on by powerful producer Bill Kenwright, the age-defying Shakespeare show will begin performances at the Theatre Royal Windsor — steps from where Queen Elizabeth II is quarantined — on a date to be announced.“I feel lucky to be working again, thanks to Bill Kenwright’s inspiring optimism and [director] Sean Mathias’ invitation to re-examine ‘Hamlet,’ 50 years on from my first go,” McKellen said in a statement. “So now we will meet again.

It feels pretty . . . different.