Profile for sinister teashop

Not a fan. She’s beautiful, she’s elegant, she’s a solid actor but I find her lacking in humor and wit and, yes, a captivating personal style.

quizking101 said:
It appears that, other than me and a scattered few, the audience is primarily between 60 and 6 Feet Under"

Not at the Sunday matinee that I went to, I would say half of the audience were in their 40’s - 50’s and probably Rose Byrne fans. I’m one too now after seeing her comic stage chops.

 

“I Hate Men” from Kiss Me Kate.

”Stepsister’s Lament” from Cinderella

I'm not that surprised at the reviews but I do find it significant that a few reviewers used the NY Times Michael Paulson article, published less than a week before the show opened, about backstage conflict as a support for their negative opinion. 

No matter what you think of the play, I wonder if Paulson and the New York Times will repeat this kind of Sweaty Oracle crap before the opening of other Broadway shows.

What I liked best about the production is that it’s mostly about watching actors give detailed, largely comic performances which is getting to be rare on Broadway where the plays are often portentous revivals that stars want to do and the performances are aiming at Award winning “riveting”. This was less freighted with importance and consistently enjoyable.

I think it’s a fun show, not great but fun and surprisingly goofy, like Neil Simon in some parts. Jessica Hecht is adorable. ATG is selling a lot of booze in single use heavy plastic containers. I don’t think it will get great reviews but I also don’t think it will be panned. It’s light adult entertainment and far less pretentious than the film it’s based on. The audience seemed to be having a good time.

Everyone involved should work for one month at Joe Allens and there might be a chance that the new iteration of the restaurant will actually touch down in New York City, the actual city, sometime in the near future. If it’s just tourists they’re after then proceed as normal.

I read through the entire article and it never answered the question it was teasing throughout in any substantial way. Maybe its main purpose is a prompt for user comments.

FLarnhill said: "Joyce 9 said: "Settled out of court. PH apologized but no admission of wrongdoing. They won’t tie discounts to race again. We don’t know if there was any payout to Kevin Lynch.


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/theater/playwrights-horizons-lawsuit-race-discounts.html"

This is ridiculous. They should have never caved in.

I'm never paying a ticket to see anything from PH ever again.

I don't agree. Playwrights Horizons needs our support more than ever. No one deserves to be in the shooting target of these creeps. 

Joyce 9 said: "Settled out of court. PH apologized but no admission of wrongdoing. They won’t tie discounts to race again. We don’t know if there was any payout to Kevin Lynch.


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/theater/playwrights-horizons-lawsuit-race-discounts.html"

Nauseating. White nationalists with deep pockets using the legal system to bully an arts non-profit into bowing to their racism.

I posted recently (sinister teashop) and it showed my post as belonging to “Claudia Draper” which was the character Bab’s played in “Nuts”. Kind of fabulous but also odd.

I would love to see a transfer of the London production directed by Blanche McIntyre and starring Jennifer Westfeldt of Richard Greenberg’s 2013 “The Assembled Parties”.

Anshel2 said: "I don’t catch the last line of the play after his fiancée says something about a fall wedding. Anyone?"

Here's the West End text, I don't remember it being different on Broadway but it might have been a bit:

Liccy: ... We should get married in the autumn.

Roald: Yes.

Liccy: Winter latest.

Roald: Yes. 

Lights down.

End of play.

Girlfriend’s a mess but what a brilliant quip.

I liked the play very much, particularly the writing by Mark Rosenblatt and the exquisite performance by John Lithgow. I would highly recommend it. 

I reviewed the play in detail in my substack but below are my reservations about the politics of the play itself, which I see as linked but also separate from its excellence as a play and a production:

"The plea that Jews as a diasporic community should be seen as separate from criminals like Netanyahu is an important one as synagogues are targeted in the US and Europe because of Israel and the US’s military actions. It is a plea that I share myself. But what the play elides or is perhaps complicit with in its elision is that the UK and other European governments have attempted to shut down political criticism of Israel by criminalizing it as antisemitism. And in the US, antisemitism has been criminalized as a tool by an authoritarian government to consolidate power. And beyond that, antisemitism is a visceral reaction, based on ancient hatreds and largely unsusceptible to a debate within the safe confines of the theater.

"So after the audience rose to give Lithgow and the ensemble a deserved standing ovation and as soon as the actors had left the stage, I felt the applause switched off almost immediately like a light switch. Broadway, unlike the West End, is situated in a country where the debate over Israel is forcibly shut down long before it gets to the level where Rosenblatt is letting it play out. Only today, Laquaa Kordia, a student at Columbia University was finally released after a year in an ICE prison simply for exercising her first amendment rights by voicing her horror at the genocide in Gaza."

singleticket's substack - review of GIANT