NYT > Theater

The problems confronting the sprawling, anxious, compulsively talky Texan clan of 1987 in “Dividing the Estate” will be familiar to many American families at the moment.

The fleet’s in this weekend, at least on 55th Street, where a radiant production of “On the Town” has docked at City Center through Sunday.

Christian Hoff has his first shot at a major leading role with the lead in Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “Pal Joey.”

The Broadway production of “American Buffalo” has posted a provisional closing notice and is likely to end its run on Sunday, a publicist for the show said.

Marianne Weems gives a sleek multimedia look to Harry Sinclair’s drama about the creation of a social-networking site.

The whimsical “Jester of Tonga” is a rare example of puppet theater about bad investments.

“Garden of Earthly Delights” is without doubt one of the most eerily hypnotic spectacles of flesh in motion ever put on a New York stage.

Jon Courie’s play about a family dealing with cancer is sympathetic but undercooked.

As a critic in Britain and later for The New York Times, Mr. Barnes helped bring dance to a broad audience with an exuberant style.

Those in the industry wonder not only about empty theaters, but also about the effect on the stream of creative work.

It’s raining greenbacks in “Road Show,” the latest version of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s long-aborning, ever-evolving and eternally slender musical about curdled American dreams.

Selective listings from theater critics of The New York Times.

“Back Back Back,” a new play by Itamar Moses about baseball’s steroids scandal, could actually use a little juicing itself.

Barbara Eda-Young’s authorial restraint, and taut direction by Austin Pendleton keeps a story about a family on the Lower East Side touching but never saccharine.

Directed and choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, this show is based on the life of the tap dancer Jack Donahue.

With its highly skilled clowning, mime, acrobatics and contortion, “Birdhouse Factory” provides a refreshing reinterpretation of traditional circus.

Robert Falls’s deflated revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” evokes the woeful image of a sports car’s flat tire, built for speed but going nowhere.

Blair Singer’s artful comic drama “The Most Damaging Wound,” at the Manhattan Theater Source, confirms what many women have long feared: that male bonding is all about grown men behaving like little boys.

With “Dawn,” a tale of alcoholism and incest, Thomas Bradshaw is to some extent a victim of his own notoriety.

Ms. Turner has joined the cast of the Off Broadway play “The Third Story” by Charles Busch.

“Waves,” a remarkable, genre-defying multimedia translation of “The Waves,” Virginia Woolf’s most challenging novel, raises the bar for literary adaptations.

Repertorio Español is presenting Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s classic 17th-century drama “La Vida Es Sueño,” or “Life Is a Dream,” at the Gramercy Arts Theater.

The protean Wallace Shawn, an actor, playwright and emissary from the New York intelligentsia, has a recurring role on the prime-time CW soap opera.

The Target Margin Theater will present “Ten Blocks on the Camino Real” from Jan. 14-31 at the Ohio Theater in SoHo.

Modern technology is both the subject of “Continuous City” and an integral part of the way it tells its story.

In his new show, “Taking Over,” Danny Hoch addresses a subject bound to make some New Yorkers more than a little uncomfortable.

Word is getting out about the White Plains Performing Arts Center. Subscriptions and single ticket sales are up.

Echoes of Chekhov resonate in George Bernard Shaw’s dazzling, though sometimes numbing, skewering of the British gentry in the months leading to World War I.

Whoopi Goldberg will produce “Sister Act,” a musical adaptation of her 1992 film of the same title, for the London stage.

Much of the power of “Billy Elliot” as an honest tear-jerker lies in its ability to give equal weight to the sweet dreams of terpsichorean flight and the sourness of a dream-denying reality.

Never content to rest on its laurels, this year’s splendid “Radio City Christmas Spectacular” builds on last year’s reimagined and reinvigorated 75th-anniversary model.

“Sexual Neuroses,” an Electric Pear production directed by Kristjan Thor, is a serious, thematically layered work that should be more interesting than it is.

Mike Birbiglia’s pacing is simply perfect in “Sleepwalk With Me,” his funny, appealing one-man show at the Bleecker Street Theater.

The creators of “Farragut North” are wagering that there are people still in the throes of election fever, hungry for another fix of strategy parsing.

The artistic director of the California Musical Theater resigned on Wednesday in the face of growing outrage over his support for Proposition 8.

With “The Footage,” Joshua Scher has written a play, but you get the sense that he would have preferred it to be a movie.

For all its fights, blood and drunken vomit, “Made in Poland” is a talky, often didactic piece, and its punky rage wears thin,

Joe Calarco’s peculiar yet impassioned revival of “Bury the Dead” for the Transport Group Theater Company turns its attention to modern-day Iraq.

Elizabeth Ireland McCann, the managing producer of the Tony Awards since 2001, and Joey Parnes, a coordinating producer, will no longer be producing the awards show.

For John Lithgow and Patrick Wilson, “All My Sons” echoes back to their acting-school days.

The theater’s heavy reliance on revivals sometimes feels like a steady diet of disillusionment. Not so with the revival of “Streamers.”

The Broadway show “Vanities, A New Musical,” which chronicles the lives of three friends from the 1960s to the 1980s, has announced its theater and opening dates.

The film adaptation of Tracy Letts’s play “August: Osage County,” a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, has been acquired by the Weinstein Company.

The director David Cromer, who is seemingly omnipresent in Chicago, sets his sights on New York City.

A British adaptation turns “The Waves,” Woolf’s 300-page modernist novel, into a commensurate theater piece.

An equine ballet has become one of the most memorable parts of a famous Broadway play.

Amber Kain’s first play, “The Summer House,” ventures into father-daughter territory, but once there it doesn’t do much more.

John Wolfson, a playwright and collector of antiquarian books, has pledged to donate more than 450 works by Shakespeare and other playwrights of his era to the Globe Theater in London.