Sometimes a veneer of professionalism is the only thing masking all-out panic. Julie White, in The Understudy, gives us both at once.

Willem Dafoe returns to the stage in Idiot Savant—and it’s a blast. (So what if it doesn’t make sense.)

You think your grandparents were inhibited? Lynn Redgrave's were worse.

The first-ever Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow is one hot plate of crazy. In a good way.

The revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs tries to transcend its tummler underpinnings.

Sienna Miller and Jonny Lee Miller heat up the icy After Miss Julie. Plus: The Memphis blues.

Bye Bye Birdie is as bubbly and sweet as it could possibly be—yet somehow, all its elements never quite rise into the perfect soufflé.

In Oleanna, Julia Stiles transcends David Mamet's agitprop script; in The Royal Family, Rosemary Harris is just transcendent. Plus: Ann Landers, a woman who really knew her audience.

The season’s October boomlet, from Hamlet to Princess Leia.

A Steady Rain is your standard TV police drama. Plus, Tracy Letts’s white-boomer manifesto, Superior Donuts.