By Myra Chanin   You wouldn’t believe what’s going on at the going-on-101-years-young National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene! Partnering with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park has given them a permanent home for the first time in 40 years! Not just a home, but a...

  By Myra Chanin   The Seeing Place is an actor built, driven and managed theatrical company designed to be a creative, supportive, artistic home base for performers who want to grow and hone their craft. The company, led by Founding Artistic Director Brandon Walker and Managing...

    By Myra Chanin   Tim Connell is a real charmer who tells (and sings) the story of his life as it was and is in a welcoming, honest and heartwarming manner. He’s an accomplished triple-threat performer whose resume includes Broadway (Nick and Nora); Off and Off-Off Broadway...

        By Myra Chanin   At the age of 40-something, Daniel Cainer was a British citizen of the world who had just finalized an amicable divorce from his non-Jewish wife after two children and 20 years of marriage. His sexual orientation? He was a heterosexual serial...

    By Myra Chanin   It’s not easy to write about Amanda McBroom. Words can’t do justice to such a World Class person, poet and performer. All I can do is to tell everybody who reads this to go to her webpage, see where she’s performing next – it just so happens to be a hop...

        By Myra Chanin   The Great Sophie Tucker may have gone to her reward 50 years ago but she was certainly alive and kickin’ at Don’t Tell Mama where the Red Hot Mama was portrayed by Cheryl Ann Allen a few nights ago. Ms. Allen looked like Sophie’s grandly...

      By Myra Chanin   Jason Danieley is a bold, audacious, fun-loving, inventive, trim, unpretentious very, very talented charmer with a great haircut – a swashbuckling singing Errol Flynn minus the sword but including the 1940’s Hollywood leading man mustache which...

  By Myra Chanin   Isle of Klezbos is a dynamic, all-gal, powerhouse Klezmer sextet who’s more or less played together since 1998. Their music contains enough soul, neshama or anam (that’s how you say “soul” in Gaelic out of respect for their vocalist Melissa Fogarty) for a band...

      By Myra Chanin   I was absolutely enchanted by Josh Grisetti when I stumbled on him playing the young Carl Reiner in York Theater Company’s Enter Laughing. Such get-up-and-go! Such style! Such sweetness! And I enjoyed him also in It Shoulda Been You, even though I...

    By Myra Chanin   Julie Budd, unlike all the others who are commemorating The Chairman of the Board’s 100th Birthday, has real memories of Sinatra. She actually worked with him for two weeks at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas when she was going on seventeen, but Mr. Sinatra was...

      By Myra Chanin     Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not Ricky Ritzel’s mother, Bubby or press agent. I’m just someone who can’t stop kvelling over his monthly commentaries on Broadway’s musicals especially when Ricky includes terrific songs from flops...

    By Myra Chanin   Linda Lavin’s latest Cabaret Show at 54Below is called Starting Over. It’s actually the story of her life in story but mostly in song. According to Wikipedia, she’s old enough to have “started over” several times, but even close-up, she looks like...

    By Myra Chanin   Rita Rudner was the first entertainer I envied. Not because she was funny. I was funny too. But she was funny and beautiful and innocent and sweet and @#$%^@! worst of all, she had the torso of a ballerina. Becoming a ballerina was her original aim in...

      By  Myra Chanin   The somewhat spruced up Clarion Theater has become the cultural Valhalla of Middle East Side aka Kips Bay. The Clarion is an intimate hundred seat space with audience member no further than six rows away from the stage. I recently raved about four...

                by: Myra Chanin   About 17 seconds after Tony Danza sang the first bars of his opening number, As Long as I’m Singing, at the Café Carlyle on Tuesday night, I turned into a Nonna – an Italian Grandmother. I wanted to run home to my...

                    Review by Myra Chanin I spent Memorial Day weekend 2015 following playwright Steven Carl McCasland through the 20th century. Our excursion began with cocktails at Gertrude Stein’s with a hostile handful of literary bitches,...

                    by Myra Chanin   Don’t believe lightning doesn’t strike twice. I was struck by theatrical lightning, two times during the same week and at the same location by the boundless emotional intelligence and infinite talent...

      By Myra Chanin       Don’t Tell Mama is celebrating Fleet Week 2015 with Anchors Away, a show created and performed by US Navy Veteran, Kim Sutton, a very bright teenage girl of limited means who was dying to get out of the small Pennsylvania town in which...

    By Myra Chanin       I love Chet Baker’s music. Regardless of whether he’s playing the trumpet or singing, to me, his music was, is and always will call to mind the muted agony wrenched from the soul of someone being crucified. I first heard him live when he was...

            By  Myra Chanin   As you may have noticed, I dote on Off-and-Off-Off-Broadway productions because that’s where I find the magic is found. It’s easy enough to dazzle a big-ticket audience with an exorbitantly costly replica of Chicago’s 1929 Union...

  By Myra Chanin   Richard Holbrook reminds me of Dennis Day, the Irish Tenor on the old Jack Benny Radio Show of the 1940’s. That should give you a clue as to how old I am. Dennis Day had the smile and the voice of an angel, a desire and an ability to please and no major or minor...

  By Myra Chanin   God Bless the Brooklyn Diocese, God Bless Father Ed Doran, and God Bless David Fuller and Judith Jarosz, the Producing Artistic Directors of Theatre 2020 for allowing worshippers of every faith and creed to venerate Euterpe, Thalia and Terpsichore, the respective...

                By Myra Chanin   I can’t think of a more perfect Valentine gift than spending 90 delicious minutes watching and listening to Billy Stritch and Marilyn Maye spread musical love, as they’re doing this entire week at Birdland....

      By Myra Chanin       In my opinion Richard Frankel has the biggest cojones in Manhattan. When he opened a sumptuous supper club in a 54th street basement skeptics gave him mixed reviews — good and crazy, but they’re now eating Crow a la King while...

        by: Myra Chanin   Wanna see a magnum opus? Then get your ass over to the Laurie Beechman Theatre tonight or Monday night at 7 pm. If any two people on earth were meant to work together, it’s Eric Michael Gillett and Amanda McBroom. Many of us know Eric Michael...